Thursday, January 22, 2009

New Things Come To Those That Wait...

... and wait and wait.

It seems my white MacBook is not destined to be the last of it's kind. Apple have quietly refreshed the white MacBook by giving it a slightly slower CPU (2.0GHz vs. 2.1GHz), an extra 1GB of RAM (2GB vs. 1GB), a faster bus (1066MHz vs. 800MHz) and posher GPU (NVIDIA GeForce 9400M vs. Intel GMA X3100). FireWire 400 is still there.

They've bumped up the price from £704 to £719, but it's still £210 cheaper than the cheapest aluminium MacBook. Which seems like quite a premium to pay for glass trackpad, a metal box and a funky new video port (and the removal of FireWire, of course). Oh, and the LED backlight (which means better battery life). But maybe the aluminium MacBooks will be seeing their own update to justify the price difference before too long.

The MacBook page on the UK Apple Store currently has the new specs (and price), but they don't seem to have made it to the main MacBook page (on the UK site) yet.

Slightly miffed that after waiting a year, if I'd waited a few more months I could have had almost the same machine with a newer GPU (which will presumably cope better with future OS X upgrades) and a copy of iLife '09 (I'd quite like to see the geo-tagging in iPhoto), but I guess I'll have to be happy with my faster CPU (2.4GHz) and ability to output composite video (although having bought a TV with DVI input, this is now less of an issue for me).

But it's good to see that Apple still think there is a market for reasonably priced laptops.

1 comment:

Caroline said...

Maybe this is the one I should get - shame its white.