Within the past 7 days, we have gone from no shipping date, then getting a date and that date soon changes and finally at the end of last week many of us learned that we were getting faster MacBooks than previous expected. Does a faster clock speed mean more watt usage? I hope Apple has beefed up its batteries for all of the extra components it has added to the new portable.

Apple�s watt to clock speed scale for the new Core Duo is similar to their WWDC MHz myth presentation from 4 years ago. I believe this is one big gimmick so when we get new machines with 256Mbs of video ram, a 5400 RPM processor, brighter display and 2.16GHz processor, we can�t bitch when the notebook only gets 1.5 hours on a single charge.

If the size of the new power brick (http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewescobar/101215449/) is any indication, I would be willing to bet money you won�t get 2 hours with one of those especially if you are running only 512 Mbs and the HD is constantly spinning due to memory paging just from running the OS and iPhoto. Either way, the new MacBook is coming with sub par battery life, exceptional performance (on dual binary applications) and a much-improved architecture, which should perform better than previous ALBooks.

Everyone complains that this design is years old now but the same goes for the iBook but my 600MHz G3 iBook, 800Mhz G4 iBook and 1.2Ghz iBook look the same but have better structure, design and elements beyond just raw speed that make the notebook a lot better. Having used the MacBook Pro while in San Francisco, I have to say that this new notebook is sleek and is only 1� thin beating the previous 15� notebook.

There�s nothing bad to say about this new notebook except what is yet to be determined and that�s battery life and Airport range but let�s hope that sucks so I can complain about it in next week�s article.