The new CoreDuo MacBooks from Apple look cool. I’ll probably get one whenever my current 2002-era TiBook dies, though hopefully that won’t be soon. There are a couple of things I wonder about though.
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The first is the weight. The MacBook weighs 5.2 pounds, only .4 pounds lighter than the much larger MacBook Pro, and still at least a pound heavier than I want to lug around. Whatever happened to the ideal of a real notebook computer? Maybe one without an internal optical drive?<\/p>\n
Side note: why do all laptop manufacturers, Apple included, hide the weight on all but perhaps their lightest models? It’s one of the first things anyone wants to know about a laptop. It’s far more important to me than the CPU speed or hard disk capacity. I start shopping by looking for the lightest models I can find, and then try to cram in the most features for the weight I can manage; not the other way around. I shouldn’t have to read three columns across the technical specs to find out what it weighs.<\/p>\n
Second, these models introduce some new mini-DVI connector. Hooking them up to a a regular VGA or DVI monitor requires an extra, $19 adapter. Why is this necessary? Why couldn’t they use a standard connector? I’d really prefer a VGA connector standard since I use my laptop primarily for presentation rather than as a desktop replacement. However, the older models at least had a real DVI connector, and bundled a DVI-to-VGA adapter at no extra charge. Non-standard connectors are painful and evil. You can never find one when you need it. Just last week I had to make an extra round trip on the subway because I’d forgotten to bring my DVI-VGA pigtail to school. And I can’t count the number of times someone at a conference has borrowed my adapter because they’ve forgotten theirs. Adding yet another weird plug is only going to make it more difficult to find the plug you need.<\/p>\n
That said, these are minor quibbles, and it really does look like a nice computer at a decent price. If only it was a pound lighter. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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