Apple Thoughts - News & Reviews on all things Apple

"The latest entry-level MacBook rolled out by Apple a week ago offers more than just an improvement on the white laptop it replaces in Apple's notebook line. According to Macworld Lab tests, this new system outperforms the 2GHz aluminum unibody MacBook that costs $300 more."

That's pretty insane, if you ask me, although understandable. The Aluminum models haven't gotten a spec bump since they came out while the Whitebook just got one. Newer usually means faster. Yet again this proves what most of us have been saying and already know: the Whitebook is a great value, a good workhorse, and a powerful machine.

Chew on that, laptop hunters.

"While I was benchmarking third-party RAM with a MacBook Pro this week, I noticed that the computer was taking a huge hit in performance when it wasn't running on Apple-supplied memory. A minor decrease in performance might be unlikely, but a 37 percent plunge in processing power seemed impossible. After some backtracking, I realized that I had been running the benchmarks without the battery installed after I'd swapped out the stock RAM for third-party memory."

Seeing as Apple has documented this issue, it is apparently known and designed. That being said, it just seems odd and everyone discussing it right now seems almost completely baffled by it. The explanation, in theory, makes sense. They don't want to overdraw power that the power supply can't handle by itself, but if that's the case how come we haven't heard of this same issue with other manufacturers? I personally think the MacBook is an alien device that we've yet to fully grasp the function of and at some point we'll all be sequestered in a room and debriefed as we're handed new notebooks, but that's me. What's your theory?

"We already knew that the latest iPod touch featured the fastest processing of its siblings (a 532MHz-clocked processor vs 412MHz on the original iPhone, the original iPod touch and even the new iPhone 3G). But we were surprised to hear from software developers that the latest iPod touch can render character models with nearly double the polygons of the original iPhone, a trend that's impacting game development now and probably more so moving forward."

So much for expecting the same performance on identical hardware. Now the true question is going to be finding out exactly what it is that accounts for such a difference in performance between the new Touch and the older one. This should be very interesting and we'll probably end up learning a lot about the hardware differences between the two.