Anith Gopal

A Mac laptop question I’ve been getting asked over the past few months is which 13-inch MacBook is the better value — the posh aluminum unibody model, or the $300 cheaper carryover white polycarbonate unit, which, after two substantial updates in 2009, had been upgraded to pretty closely match the more expensive machine performance-wise, and had the bonus of a FireWire port, which the unibody didn’t.

Last week Apple quietly upgraded the entry-level white MacBook’s Core 2 Duo processor clock speed from 2.0 GHz to 2.13 GHz, added an additional 40GB of standard hard disk capacity, and upgraded its RAM specification to 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM. Obviously, additional speed and capacity is a plus, but as The Mac Observer’s Ted Landau questions , why upgrade this long-in-the-tooth laptop at all? Significant Value-Added To recap recent developments in the MacBook world, the unibody aluminum machines, released October 2008, mostly replaced the preceding white-and-black polycarbonate models, with the entry-level unibody model featuring a 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor, which remains the current spec at this writing ( although reportedly there has been an unheralded upgrade of display quality )