When you open the lid of the new Macbook from Apple, and watch the keyboard light up, exquisitely lit by the dozens of LED lights underneath each of the keys, the first instinct is to take your old laptop to the wall and put down a payment for this golden wonder. The new Macbook from Apple is beautiful in all ramifications. The entire frame is done with aluminum and it is gold! But the question on the minds of many Apple connoisseurs is if the laptop performs as well as it looks, and at the price it goes for, is it really that special?
Looks
If the new Macbook were a celebrity, it would be royal. The gold color is done in a perfect shade that delivers a sense of wonder to anyone looking at it. Apple outdoes themselves with a brilliant light display with the keyboard that makes you the envy of everyone else at the coffee shop. The fully aluminum frame conveys a solidity to the frame that is also clearly visible to the eye.
Size and weight
The new Macbook is lighter than the 13 inch Macbook Air by a whole pound and wait for it, thinner than the original iPad! According to Christina Warren in the Mashable review http://mashable.com/2015/04/09/apple-new-macbook-review/ the size is reminiscent of an iPad with a built in keyboard rather than an average laptop, but this is what the future of laptops is, she also says.
Keyboard
The keyboard seems to be the central focus of the new Macbook, and most of the features are built around it. The keys are basically flat, with very little give between the top of the keys and the frame itself, thus most of the time it feels as though you are typing on glass or a touch screen display. However, probably because of the small distance between the keys and the frame, typing may be a bit of a chore than with a traditional keyboard and result in frequent wrist aches – at least, till you get used to it. Also, the keys on this Macbook are generally about 17% larger than that of the standard Macbook.
Performance
While responsive, this Macbook is not exactly the computer Batman would use. It debuts the Intel Core M processor to give the first Apple fanless laptop. The different models stretch from a 1.1 GHz processor with a Turbo boost up to 2.4GHz to a1.3GHz dual-core Core M with a Turbo boost to 2.9GHz. 8GB RAM and PCI-e flash storage. According to Apple, you can get 9 hours battery life while browsing the internet and 10 hours when playing movies from iTunes.
So, what’s special about the golden Macbook?
Apart from the golden color, this Macbook has the pioneer trackpad Apple is calling the Force Touch trackpad. This trackpad is very sensitive to touch and can be found in the 13 inch Macbook Pro with Retina. It is pressure sensitive and deep presses, light swipes etc can all be employed to do a variety actions as can be determined by developers using the SDK to build Force Touch utilities.
Another special thing about the golden Macbook is the screen. With the thin dimensions at less than an inch at its thickest point, it is astonishing to see the resolutions on this baby. 12 inches, the screen comes with a 2,304 x 1,440 res, with a16:10 aspect ratio, and it is edge-to-edge glass. You can actually see everything from any angle, the colors pop out that much.
The last really special thing about this laptop and that which has been the reason for much controversy is the single USB port. It is very surprising that Apple has created a laptop with only one USB port, even it is a USB-C port, especially these days with laptops coming in with so many ports, the sides look pockmarked. The port can transmit at 5Gbps which is the USB 3.1 speed and it is also compatible with HDMI and VGA, which suggests that users are going to be buying a lot of dongles soon to connect. But it is easy to see from the design that, this is a laptop meant for the future, like Christina Warren suggests, and the apparent lack of ports suggests users who have most of their files in the cloud and work from a wire-free office anyway.
Is the golden Macbook special? Well, that’s answered isn’t it?
