Apple MacBook Review

The MacBook hosts a glorious 13.3-inch glossy widescreen with LED-backlighting for a display of brilliance helping to bring your photos, films and presentations alive with luminous full-screen colour and brightness. The widescreen resolution of 1280 by 800 pixels gives you more than enough room to multitask, yet it’s still compact enough to take anywhere at a measly 2.13kg and 1.08” inches thick.

Apple MacBook: LED-backlit glossy widescreen display

It features a breakthrough unibody design featuring a seamless, durable enclosure with rounded contours that make it easy to pick up and slide in and out of any bag wherever you may be. It’s even made out of a rugged polycarbonate that can withstand the rough and tumble of everyday life whether that be at school, at work or whilst travelling and since the bottom of the MacBook is covered in a non-slip material it will stay right where you put it whether it’s on a desk, table or seat.

Unlike traditional laptops the Macbook trackpad is something of a evolution. The Multi-Touch has no button – it is the button. This means that there’s plenty of room to move your fingers around and get to grips with the MacBook. The trackpad being the button you can click anywhere – left, right, up, down and anywhere else you feel the urge. The trackpad features a silky smooth glass surface that feels great to the fingertips and can still be used to perform the familiar functions such as right-clicking as well as other Multi-Touch gestures, featured on the iPad and iPhone such as pinching to zoom in, rotate your fingers to reorient photos, swipe to navigate through web pages, and more.

Unlike some laptops MacBook portability doesn’t come at the expense of key features, especially the keyboard. The MacBook hosts a full size keyboard with keys that are curved to contain your fingers and are highly responsive to your touch. However, this may become a little annoying when these “highly responsive” keys re-act when you’re simply travelling to press a neighbouring key. However, the keyboard does feature one-touch access to music and video controls and Mac OS X features such as Dashboard and Expose.

The Apple MacBook

Another great innovation is the magnetic latch, instead of the common kensington lock Apple have removed the parts that snag, jam or break such as the latches on the kensington lock and replaced it with a magnetic latch so even opening and closing your MacBook is a pleasure and sometimes quite addictive. Similarly, the power cord is held in place magnetically so even if you do snag it or catch it as you’re walking past your MacBook won’t follow suit and smash into a million fragments for you to clutch and weep over, instead the cord disconnects harmlessly and your MacBook safely stays put.

The Nvidia GeForce 320M is an integrated chipset graphics card for Core 2 Duo based laptops, or in this case MacBooks, and is the successor of the GeForce 9400M. It does not feature dedicated graphics memory but uses the systems main memory instead and as a result you may, particularly if you’re a gamer or graphic designer, wish to upgrade to the extra RAM even if it costs you the extra buck. As a result the performance is not as good as similar cards with dedicated graphics RAM. The similarly named GeForce GT 320M is a dedicated graphics card but only performers slightly faster than the GeForce 320M. The gaming performance of the GeForce 320M is comparable to the GeForce 310M and even better. Therefore, the older and less demanding games should run perfectly in high details. However, modern and demanding games like Crysis should run adequately in medium to low detail settings.

The MacBook hosts a plethora of ports but instead of having them scattered on all of the sides of the MacBook they are all on the same side of the notebook these include a MagSafe power, Gigabit Ethernet, Mini DisplayPort, USB and audio in/out so your cables are neatly organized and connecting your devices is easy and convenient. However, it does not feature a FireWire port, a method of transferring information between digital devices, particuarlly audio and video equipment, which maybe a pain for MacBook users especially considering the stunning graphics and LED backlit screen that comes with it.

The basic, entry-level, MacBook at a price of £849, with free shipping, features a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB memory, 250GB hard drive, 8x double-layer SuperDrive, Nvidia GeForce 320M graphics and a huge 10 hour battery life.

Apple MacBook: More Ports Please