Apple’s white plastic MacBook now has the same graphics horsepower of more expensive aluminum MacBooks, reports said Wednesday.
The upgrade, made without any official fanfare, provides buyers of the low-end notebook NVIDIA’s 9400 graphics engine, the same system already available to owners of pricier aluminum MacBooks.
Cupertino also added some oomph to the white plastic notebook’s main processor, upgrading the MacBook to a 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and doubling memory to 2GB.
However, the white plastic MacBook’s beefier DD2 memory has a clock speed of 667 MHz rather than the speedier 1.06MHz available with DD3 memory for aluminum MacBooks.
Likewise, Apple still limits white plastic MacBooks to a 20-inch Cinema Display upgrade and retains a Mini DVI graphics output rather than a Mini DisplayPort.
In October, Apple lowered the price of its entry-level white plastic MacBook to $999 from $1,099.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
