“The first thing that startled me about the MacBooks were not their glossy white or matte black finishes, nor the fact that they had Intel dual-core processors rather than lower-powered single-core ones. I had expected all that. What surprised me was the price: they start at $1,099, even lower if you are a student,” Wilson Rothman writes for Time Magazine. “The MacBook has most of what its pricier sibling the MacBook Pro offers: a built-in iSight camera, the Apple Remote so that you can access music and videos from across the room, the break-away magnetic power cable, even wireless Bluetooth support for cell phones, cameras and certain types of mouse. It can even support an external monitor in addition to its own screen. It is, of course, missing some of the features of the Pro, such as the light-up keyboard, a light-sensitive display, a dedicated graphics card and an ExpressCard/34 expansion slot for cellular modems, card readers and other devices mostly not yet built.”
“The MacBook gave me an excellent opportunity to try out Boot Camp — that’s the installation of Windows XP as a second operating system, in case you hadn’t heard. On startup, I can choose the Mac OS or Windows, and everything I tried in the latter environment worked as well as it could have. I even tested out MTV’s Urge service with — Jobs forgive me — an iriver clix music player. It all worked together even more smoothly than it had done on my high-powered Dell desktop,” Rothman writes. “The MacBook is a powerful and affordable option, especially for people who are uncertain about their Windows future. The next version, Vista, might be a success, but with a MacBook you can hedge your bet. You get a computer that runs both Mac OS X and Windows XP today, and even appears to meet the minimum requirements for Vista once it gets here. Dell and HP should be very worried indeed.”
Full article here.
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