Apple plays Core 2 Duo card with MacBook

Stan Beer
Thursday, 09 November 2006 02:17

Your IT - Home IT

Would be MacBook owners who have been waiting for Apple to bring the processor specs for its MacBook range into line with its big brother the MacBook Pro can relax. Apple has announced that MacBooks now feature the dual-core Intel Core 2 Duo processor and the upgraded notebooks are already shipping.

According to Apple, the new Core 2 Duo chips will provide the MacBook with a performance boost of 25% for some applications over its predecessor the Core Duo and the MacBook will now be six times as fast as Apple's previous generation pre-Intel notebook, the iBook.

Other than the upgrade of the socket compatible Intel processors, little has changed in the MacBook model. Prices still start at US$1099; there are still three models - 2 white notebooks running at 1.83MHz and 2.0MHz and a black notebook running at 2.0MHz.

However, the base specs have been upgraded for the RAM and hard drive of the higher priced MacBooks. The US$1299 and US$1499 models running at 2.0MHz will both ship with 1GB of RAM instead of 512MB for the white 1.83MHz version which has a 60 GB hard drive and 2MB of L2 cache. In addition, both higher priced models will sport 4MB of L2 cache, with the white US$1299 MacBook featuring an 80GB hard drive and the black US$1499 MacBook equipped with a 120GB drive.

Making the choice of going for the slightly pricier models even more difficult to resist is the fact that instead of the combo burn CD and read DVD drive in the entry level model, they have a superdrive that can read and burn DVDs.

Upgrades to hard drives of 160GB and 200GB are also available.

Some MacBook owners of the previous Core Duo models have advised that buyers wishing to take advantage of the notebook's capability to run Microsoft Windows in either dual boot mode or a virtual window should consider getting at least 1GB of RAM and preferably the maximum configuration of 2GB. This no doubt goes double for those who intend to run memory hungry Windows Vista.