Walt has been fondling the new aluminum MacBook for days. He "likes it a lot." The slippery glass trackpad befuddled him for a while, but now he's used to it. He's annoyed that Apple removed the FireWire port and still refuses to add a memory-card slot. It's also too damn expensive. Other than that, it's cool.
I've been testing the base model of the new MacBook for the past five days, and I like it a lot, despite a few downsides. I found this new MacBook to be speedy, solid, innovative, and comfortable to use, with very good battery life.
The new model sports a sturdy aluminum case, instead of the old plastic one, and looks gorgeous. And it even seemed to run cooler than earlier Apple aluminum laptops. It's 10% lighter, at 4.5 pounds, and 12% thinner, at 0.95 inch, than its predecessor, and continues to include a built-in DVD drive. Its processor is slower, yet it has good performance because of much faster graphics, and it also offers a far brighter screen in the same 13.3-inch size. But it still gets strong battery life -- slightly better in fact than the older model, in my tests.
Plus, the new MacBook includes a huge, innovative glass track pad that functions as a combination of a traditional track pad and the multitouch screen of an iPhone. This track pad allows all sorts of fingertip gestures you can use to navigate Web pages, manipulate photos, and switch among programs.
In another radical step, Apple eliminated the button below the track pad. When you want to perform a mouse click, you just depress the entire track pad. The whole thing is a big button, which can act as either the left or right button on a traditional mouse, and which allows easy, smooth scrolling.
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