The brand new replacement MacBook Apple sent me is now 1 week old and here's a brief overview to go along with the YouTube Video I posted to my account over the weekend.

-Speed:  Overall system performance feels 35 - 40% faster.  This is inline with benchmarks published online and it's what I expected considering that this new laptop is 4 generations ahead of the 32-bit Core Duo laptop it's replacing.  Building Firefox took 34 minuted on my 2 GHz Core Duo MacBook.  With the architecutal improvements in the cache, fetch/decode front end, branch prediction, and dynamic acceleration technology a Firefox build now only takes 19 minutes to complete.  A 15 minute reduction in build time is nothing to sneeze at, so if you're a programmer, you're going to love compiling on this machine. 

-Boot Time: With my old MacBook the quickest I could get my system to boot from a cold start was 43 seconds.  The average start time is now 29 seconds, so it feels much better when starting up.  It's still not as good as Tiger's 23 second start time, but good enough so that I won't notice difference.  (You can view this video comparing boot times with my first MacBook.)

-Driver Stability: WiFi no longer drops out with the build of Mac OS 10.5.4 that came with this MacBook.  The current build availble for download is cited as Build 9E17 in the Wikipedia article.  This newest model comes bundled with Build 9E25, so these are the freshest drivers available for my laptop.  Everything works properly out of the box and so far I haven't experienced and application crashes, freezing or dropout issues when using my Wireless.  This is how Leopard should have been from the start!

-iPhoto '08: Currently I have 4,670 items in 110 events.  This is a vast improvement over simply showing every picture and video in 1 huge showing of pictures and it's much, much easier to hunt down that one picture you're looking for when everything you have is in a neatly labeled bundle of pcitures for each day that you shoot photos. 

-Speaker Volume: Dramatic improvement compared to the 1st generation MacBook I was coming from.  Easily 70% louder than a first generation MacBook and the quality of the "bong" at startup sounds just as beefy and manly as my old iBook G4.  

I plan on doing 2 detailed reviews - 1 on software, the other on hardware - as soon as time permits.  Here's a quick look at my first impressions in a video I posted a few days ago to my channel.

Peace.