Before the first cup o joe, Apple dropped the word on fresh Macbooks. The major improvement come in the form of Core 2 Duo chips clocked at the same 1.87 and 2.0 GHz speeds as the old Core Duo CPUs. They claim they're 25% faster than the old Macbook's chips, but lets see...When the Macbook Pros were said to be 39% faster after the upgrade from Core Duo to Core 2 Duo, they turned out to only be 10% faster. So, I am expecting these chips to be little more than the typical speedbump-like refreshes that PC laptops go through. My guestimate? In overall performance, we see less than 5% in speed jump.

The other upgrades: Larger allotments of RAM in the standard configs, up to 200 GB of HD, and a dual layer DVD-burning Superdrive. That's it.

I will declare it: The golden age of mind blowing Apple computer hardware announcements are dead...until the next keynote. –Brian Lam

Macbooks get Core 2 Duo [Apple]

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