A Review of the Apple MacBook MB404LL/A 13.3" Laptop

It's No Air, but Does it Still Make a Great Mobile?

While it is not the Apple MacBook Air at 13.3" this is one of Apple's more portable notebooks. It uses the Intel's new Penryn, and is primarily designed just for portability. I have my hands on one and I'm going to let you know what it's loaded with as well as who will get the most out of this little notebook. Let me start with the basics.

Hardware:

2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 3 MB shared L2 Cache (Penryn)

RAM: 2GB (SDRAM DDR2)

Storage: 250GB Hard drive

Optical Drive: CD R/RW with integrated DVD +/- Dual layer Drive

Video Card: Integrated Intel X3100 graphics card (using 144MB of system RAM as video memory)

As I mentioned this MacBook was designed for portability and it is very compact. It is very light and it gets great battery life at around 4 hours on a charge. I attribute this largely to the utilization of the "penryn" processor. While it isn't as strong it does offer great battery life. It also stays fairly cool, so you'll be able to drop it down into sleep mode and keep it in your bag without being concerned with overheating.

The screen on this MacBook is average. It runs at a resolution of 1280 x 800 which is pretty standard for a laptop. If you used to Apple's "above and beyond" displays then you might be a little disappointed. The screen also tends to wash out in direct sunlight a little quicker than I would like. Other than that it does fine. I like the 2GB of RAM especially since it has to share with the integrated video card.

Connectivity:

Bluetooth (to sync with other Bluetooth compatible devices)

1 FireWire (to be used to transfer video from your digital camcorder for example)

2 USB 2.0 ports (these can be used to connect things like your printer, iPod, or digital camera)

1 DVI output (to connect to some TV's or Monitors)

1 VGA output (to connect to your standard monitor)

1 S-video output (you can use this to connect to some TV's but it will be used for projectors for the most part)

1 composite video output (requires adapters, sold separately)