Black MacBook Review by Digidesign

How would you rate the Black MacBook? (On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest)

8.5 to a 9. I'll try and explain my reasoning with the next question.

What are your likes and dislikes?

Likes:

Core 2 Duo, 2.0Ghz. I put it through its paces with FCP5 and it performed flawlessly. World of Warcraft runs fine on it too, under medium settings.
Size & portability
Black case (a little more rugged than MBP, imho)
Battery life. I was able to watch a near 3 hour movie while on a flight, which is more than my old PBG4 could handle.
runs Windows XP just fine, performance wise.
Does everything I need it to do, without crashing.
Quiet. I almost never hear the hard drive, only the whooshing fan when I run intensive programs. The fan is never a bother for me.
Wifi works well. Was able to grab a signal from a far neighbor's house while on travelling.
Glossy screen. Personal preference here, but I like it a lot.

Dislikes:

The keys are very flat and smooth, so they take a bit of getting used to, versus the curved + textured keys of the MBP that is easier to type on.
Smudges easily
In Windows, there is no support for right-click off Bootcamp. You have to get third-party software to do it.
In Windows, two-finger scrolling is spotty and not smooth and consistent like in OS X.
When you switch between OS X and Windows, the clock will often go haywire and need to be reset/resynced.
The speakers have a slight pop every now and then, even when sound is muted.
Superdrive is sensitive. It does not like all CDs and has issues ripping tracks even when CDs are flawless.
GPU bottleneck. Does everything I need it to do, but if they had a nicer card, I could run more games on it.

Have you upgraded your MacBook? If you have, was it worth it?

YES. I upgraded the ram to 2GB and it was worth every penny.

Have you had any problems with your MacBook?

No problems at all.

Go Back - or - Leave a Comment

On bootcamp right clik is: two fingers in the trackpad click. In fact the new version of the beta bootcamp is nicer, and solved some details that made me happy :P. And you should still take in account that is a free beta version. Leopard is supposedly going to have the final version of bootcamp on it, too bad we have to wait until october 2007 (official date of releasing). Remember also you have the option of parallels; I do this: if I dont need to much power compilation and ram, I emulate windows in parallels. If I need all the power and ram the macbook handles I boot into windows.

Posted by TVX45 on April 24th, 2007

right click: two fingers click right click: two fingers plus click (in case the plus sign is not displayed again) PS: my las post didn't show the plus sign.

Posted by TVX45 on April 24th, 2007

totally enjoy my macbook,surpasses my expectations, having swapped over from pc. 2Meg of ram really makes all apps run smoother without the lag initially found with 1Meg. Civ IV runs great at full animation and screen res., even though it always boots with warning saying it won\'t run on this machine. hear is where the low mem of the video comes into play, and the message doesn\'t change even with lowest vid settings. Often civ IV crashed for the first fifty rounds, but fixed itself and now I have no problems with it.

All around a great machine, really appreciate the built in wifi, and bluetooth, i highly recommend a bluetooth mouse , love the right click and wheel scroll, look at the logitech V270 works great and gets rid of obsructive usb rf adapter for other cordless mouse models, why do that when bluetooth is built in?

Posted by Maxtcc on October 1st, 2007

Just bought a black macbook, and from the reviews and from my expirience with them, it\'s gonna be pretty sweet! Leopard with 2.2 D2C with 250 Gig HD, with a free printer and 500 gig external HD.

Posted by Wes on November 30th, 2007

hi...
id like to buy one black macbook but i really need to know if with the time the trackpad gets dirty...
thnks a lot...
one more questions:
if you could buy, would you buy macbook air? why, why not...
thnks again...

Posted by fernando on February 20th, 2008

Macbook air looks pretty neat... but i wouldn\'t go out right now and buy one myself. It has no Disk drive which would annoy me if i wanted to watch a movie or install something on a disk or even burn a CD.. the new Macbook is well worth the money. with faster speeds- so thats my 2 cents.. its like apple have now set a bar for the rest of the crappy laptops out there they know they can go smaller with more stuff packed into it.. lets see if they follow...!

Posted by GAVIN on March 12th, 2008

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