Runt of Apple's Laptop Litter Gets a Makeove

When Apple's MacBook Pro lineup received an upgrade last month, the company's line of ordinary MacBooks had to watch from the sidelines. Now, however, Cupertino's little white laptops get their own day in the sun with upgraded processors, hard drives and video cards. The refresh closely follows an apparent leak courtesy of a Vietnamese Web site.

Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) on Tuesday beefed up its plain vanilla MacBook with a tweaked CPU, more storage and longer battery life, among other things.

However, it retained the device's US$999 price point.
The upgrade comes one month after Cupertino refreshed its MacBook Pro line and just weeks before its World Wide Developers Conference, to be held in San Francisco.

New MacBook Tech Specs

For the upgrade, Apple tweaked the MacBook's Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) Core 2 Duo processor to deliver a clock speed of 2.4 GHz instead of 2.26 GHz as before.
The new MacBook uses the Nvidia (Nasdaq: NVDA) GeForce 320M instead of the GeForce 9400M. Both have 256 MB of video ram, or VRAM. However, the 9400M has only 16 CUDA processing cores while the 320M has 72.
CUDA is an acronym for Compute Unified Device Architecture. This is a parallel computing architecture developed by Nvidia.
The extra CUDA processing cores will accelerate multimedia applications, enabling faster video editing and easier photo management.
The new MacBook can come with up to 500 GB of hard drive space, unlike its predecessor, introduced in October 2009, which had a 250 GB hard drive only.
Battery life has been extended from seven hours to 10, depending on usage, according to Apple.

Catching Up to the 13-Inch MacBook Pro

The improvements bring the new MacBook's specs closer to those of the 13-inch MacBook Pro, which retails at $1,199.
The two now have the same CPU, same hard drive and same graphics processor. The only differences are that the MacBook Pro has 2 GB more of RAM (it starts with 4 GB instead of 2 GB), a unibody aluminum chassis and an SD card slot.
"Apple's rationalizing their product line and, as they become more mature, they're pushing things like the video card and the longer-life battery into the lower end of their product line," explained Carl Howe, director of anywhere consumer research at the Yankee Group.

Catching Up With the Leaks?

The MacBook upgrade came on the heels of an apparent weekend leak on Vietnamese Web site Tinthe which disclosed the device's specs.
The site had videos of the new MacBook and predicted the price would remain unchanged.
It's not yet clear how the site operator managed to get the information.

Much Ado About What?

Apple's upgrades to the MacBook are relatively minor, the Yankee Group's Howe told MacNewsWorld.
However, the timing of the refresh raises questions. Why didn't Apple issue the MacBook upgrade in April together with its MacBook line upgrade? Wouldn't that have been simpler, especially for a minor upgrade?
"Apple has a tendency to have their own reasons, which they don't share with other people," Richard Shim, a research manager at IDC, told MacNewsWorld. However, it's likely that Cupertino wants to tap into upcoming back-to-school sales, he said.

Money Can't Buy You Apple Love

Despite the upgrades, the MacBook remains at the lowest end of Apple's laptop line, but even there it's undercut on price, sometimes by several hundred dollars, by many Windows PCs.
"The MacBook's already a fairly expensive entry-level laptop. But Apple's always fixed the selling price then produced devices for that price point. It doesn't play the price competition game," Howe said.
"Apple have plenty of momentum going into the market," IDC's Shim pointed out. "It seems to be working -- they haven't made a lot of fundamental changes, but consumers seem to like their products despite the price point."
Will students be willing to pay a premium for the MacBook, especially when many PCs, netbooks and -- soon enough -- tablets can be had for less?
"Consumers who want a more robust product that they can keep around for a long time, unlike your $350 netbook, will definitely get MacBooks," Howe said.