Apple did amazingly well with its laptop sales last year, and much of that success was down to this little beauty. The MacBook is Apple's excellent consumer laptop and it's just seen its first upgrade. There are three types to choose from. You can customise them slightly when you buy, but all come with quality mobile technologies as standard.
Each has wireless connectivity including Bluetooth, a built-in iSight webcam, an elegant two- finger scroll pad and ports for hooking up FireWire and USB peripheral devices. Battery life averages over three hours under heavy use and each one comes with an Apple Remote for flipping through Apple's Front Row media centre.
The entry-level MacBook is the white 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo machine (£749). It has a 60GB hard drive, a Combo drive for playing and burning CDs and playing DVDs, 512MB RAM and 2MB L2 cache. Next up is the white 2.0GHz machine (£879).
It's a tangibly faster machine with double the RAM, 4MB L2 cache, a bigger 80GB drive, a 6x SuperDrive for burning and playing CDs and DVDs, plus its RAM allocation has been raised to 1GB. These SuperDrives are now double- layer drives, so they can burn information to two layers of one double-layer blank disc, thereby doubling the amount of storage.
This 2.0GHz chip is also available in a third MacBook; the 'cool' black one (£999). This MacBook is identical to the white 2.0GHz MacBook, except the hard drive is bigger - 120GB, it's got a matt black finish and costs £120 more. We weren't keen on the black finish in the first batch of MacBooks, and we still don't like it. It picks up palm and thumb prints really easily and we're always cleaning it.
Core blimey!
The biggest change across the line - except for the larger hard drives - is the move to Intel Core 2 Duo chips. These are architecturally identical to the Core 2 Duos powering Apple's desktop line and the other Mac laptop, the MacBook Pro. That said, the chips run slower in laptops as they have less electricity channelled into them.
