Hands-On with the New MacBook and MacBook Pro

“Where is the touchpad button?” That’s the question I asked myself as I fondled the all-new, all-glass touchpad on the beautiful new MacBook. The good news is that when you press down on the touchpad it actually feels like a button. Plus, you can go into the settings and set an area of the touchpad to serve as a right-click with a single tap. The ability to use four fingers for activating Expose to see all open apps is neat.

The weight of the MacBook (4.5 pounds) is impressive given the sturdy design. The overall casing is strong, and the edge-to-edge glass 13.3-inch screen really wows. In some ways, I think the new MacBook is going to seriously undercut the MacBook Air ($949.00). Sure, you have to carry a little more weight around, but you get fully accessible USB ports and a removable battery and The storage device that holds your OS, programs, and data.
Learn Morehard drive for $1,299 versus $1,999 for the Air.

Along the left side you’ll find the two USB ports and new mini DisplayPort adapter, along with an Ethernet connection and audio in and out. There’s also a clever new button that activates an LED battery meter that tells you how much juice you have left without having to turn on the system or open the screen.

The right side of the new MacBook is where you’ll find the slot-loading DVD burner. (Sorry, no Blu-ray here are on the MacBook Pro.) If you want the backlit keyboard on the MacBook, you’ll have to jump up to the $1,599 version. For that cash you get a faster processor (2.4 GHz vs. 2.0 GHz), and more hard drive space (250GB hard drive vs. 160GB). But you’ll need to spend more to go from 2GB to 4GB of RAM.

The MacBook Pro looks very much like the MacBook but with a larger 15-inch display. It’s a pound heavier at 5.5 pounds, which means it’s certainly light enough to take with you. But this system is more about the guts, sporting Nvidia’s new 9600M graphics. This GPU augments the 9400GM graphics onboard, which means you’ll get serious horsepower when doing graphics work or crunching video. We can’t wait to run our full tests. Clock speed starts at 2.4 GHz but goes up to 2.8 GHz as an option. The ports are basically the same.

Starting price of $1,999 seems steep in this economy but power users will likely be more than willing to step up to the MacBook Pro. However, we would have liked to see integrated mobile broadband and a Blu-ray option. USB solutions are not all that elegant for EV-DO or HSDPA, and while iTunes has HD downloads, some might prefer the old optical-disc route. Stay tuned for more hands-on impressions.