Apple today unveiled their new Apple Macbook notebook computer. The Macbook sits at the bottom of Apple's notebook line, and while the Macbook Pro models have all been recently refreshed to sport the company's new unibody enclosure design, the Macbook has sat mostly untouched, until now. Today, Apple unveiled the plastic, unibody Apple Macbook, and it gets some of the benefits of the new unibody design, with some of the drawbacks of Apple's standard notebook options. Most important will be the new battery, a lithium polymer battery built right into the enclosure. Apple says you'll get up to 7 hours on a single charge, and even though the battery isn't removable, you'll manage to charge the battery 1,000 times before it dies the long death.
In addition to the new, improved battery, the Apple Macbook will also get a graphical boost from an NVIDIA GeForce Mobility 9400M chipset, the same used in the smallest Macbook Pro 13-inch model. That graphics power will drive a new LED-backlit, 13.3-inch display, running at a 1280 by 800 pixel resolution, which should be great for watching HD movies at 720p or better. The new screen is all glossy, and sits flush with the glass bezel on the top lid of the notebook, just like on the new Macbook Pro models.
Unlike the Macbook Pros, the new Apple Macbook will be built with a polycarbonate plastic shell. Apple is offering some non-slip resistance for their new plastic design, to help the laptop stick to airline trays and laps. The trackpad will be similar to the new Macbook Pro pads. The new Apple Macbook gets a glass trackpad with no buttons.. The entire pad clicks. The new trackpad also brings multi-touch to the Macbook line, which means that, combined with the new Magic Mouse shipping with new desktop Macs, all Apple Macintosh computers are now multi-touch enabled in some way. Hopefully app developers will start making better use of this trend, now that it's so ubiquitous.
The new Apple Macbook is only 1.08-inches thin and weighs 4.7 pounds. The notebook uses an Intel Core 2 Duo processor running at 2.26 GHz. The standard configuration ships with 2GB or DDR3 RAM and a 250GB hard disk drive, but you can bump both of those to 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive.
In addition to these internal specs, the Apple Macbook also gets a fairly anemic selection of ports on the outside. Honestly, we've seen $300 netbooks with better port selection. You get 2 USB 2.0 ports, an Audio In/Out port, Gigabit Ethernet and a mini DisplayPort. First of all, we'd like to see more USB ports, or perhaps even an eSATA combo, which isn't an unreasonable request for a $1000 machine. Second, mini DisplayPort is a cruel choice for what is essentially the bargain Mac laptop. DisplayPort monitors are rare, and adapters can be expensive. We'd have preferred to see a VGA output on this laptop, or perhaps something in the more compatible DVI or HDMI families.
The Apple Macbook is available now from Apple for $1000 in its base configuration. Fully loaded, the Apple Macbook will cost you $1,250, with more RAM and HDD storage.
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