Product Details

• Brand: Apple

Customer Reviews

Its worth it
This is my first Mac computer as well, after many years of using Windows PC at home and at work. I'm very impressed with both Macbook and OS X. Macbook, performance is awesome with just 1g of ram memory.

From the first time Mac user, I'm very pleased with Apple hardware and software, it just works. And I'm impressed with how it all works together.

As for this specific version of the macbook, I have found no problems at all, works beautifully as advertised. The only thing I found is that mabook's screen needs to be calibrated or adjusted. Don't settle for default screen profile, pictures will appear washed out. Calibrate screens settings; you should be able to get it pretty close to what it should be with just what macbook has in OS X.

I also recommend buying this model, since it has a bigger harddrive, its worth it. This laptop is very fast and reliable!

Fantastic laptop
This is a great laptop. First, let me say, I'm a software developer, so I'm very particular about my computers. I was in the market for a new laptop. After a lot of shopping around, I went with a laptop from HP for around $700. It was my first PC with Vista, and it was frustratingly slow. Here's an example... Put your laptop into sleep mode. Come out of sleep mode, and how long does it take to connect to your WiFi network? The HP laptop would take about 45 seconds while the macbook takes less than 5 seconds. It's a small detail, but it's the tip of the iceberg.

So, after I purchased my HP laptop, my wife bought a macbook. I was so impressed, I took mine back and got my own macbook. The battery is great. I haven't timed it yet, but it's easily over three hours. The LCD is great. You don't get all that bloatware that comes with a new PC (like antivirus software that you can't seem to delete) that fills up your new hard disk. And, there's no need to even worry about antivirus software since 99.9% of viruses are designed for Windows.

As for performance, these macbooks are plenty zippy. And, yes dual core does make a difference. If you like to multitask (browse the web while playing mp3 music), then you'll notice the difference. The user interface is more responsive during heavy loading. Just for fun, I took a program I wrote for work and ran it on my new macbook. (I won't bore you with the details of what it does, but it's CPU intensive.) On the HP laptop, the program took about 13 minutes to run. On the macbook, it took 3 min, 30 seconds. Just for fun, I ran the same program on a fully loaded Dell 820 ($3000), and it finished in about 3 minutes. So, I'm very pleased with the performance of this macbook.

And, there are great open source (free) applications you can get for Mac OS X now. So, I quickly installed Firefox, Thunderbird (email), NeoOffice (MS Office replacement), Chicken of the Sea (VNC client), XAMPP (Apache/PHP/MySQL), Transmission (BitTorrent), Burn (CD/DVD burner), and Eclipse (Java development).

The only way they could improve this macbook would be to bundle the DVD writer in the entry-level model instead of a combo drive (CD writer, DVD reader). It's not an issue with me since I have many other DVD writers on my LAN, but others may want to purchase the next model up that comes with the DVD writer.

Fast and Zippy
I will try to give a unbiased and responsible review of this MacBook. As a college student I struggled with the decision between purchasing a Windows laptop or a MacBook, but due to all the horror stories out there about Vista imcompatibility and my previous Windows nightmares, I decided to give Mac a try. I don't regret it. The screen is glossy and beautiful, albeit the 13.3" screen can make the font in programs (especially in instant messaging programs) a bit small. You can adjust the font to larger size in, say, AIM, but then that would render the person you are talking to to receive ridiculously large font sizes from you as well. And, if you are new to MAC OSX, there is definitely a learning curve and an experimental phase, so you should be patient; fortunately, there are alot of MAC OSX tutorial sites on the web and resources as well. I love the fast fast FAST boot time (around 20 seconds!!!) from off to on. BRAVO!! And the 2.0 ghz processor is more than enough for me. The MacBook is also very very silent. One thing I don't like though is the mouse track pad. Even on the fastest sensitivity setting, it just doesn't keep up with my fingers. A bit annoying, but a problem that can be solved with an external USB mouse. Let's see how my MacBook holds up in the next four years.