Daring Fireball written by John Gruber is a Macintosh-oriented site that often publishes long essays that contain gems of information for readers who are patient enough to read to the end. One example is the information about the MacBook that appeared in the Confidence Game, an essay that was published about two weeks ago:

I always liked Apple’s iBook laptops, but it was often quite obvious that Apple crippled the machines in certain ways so as to protect the sales of higher-profit PowerBooks.... Not so with the new MacBooks. For $1099, you can get a MacBook today that’s almost every bit as good as the $1999 MacBook Pro that first shipped just three months ago.

Gruber goes on to say that the differences between the MacBooks and the MacBook Pros are that MacBook Pros have:

• bigger screens,
• more ports and expansion slots,
• backlit keyboards, and
• a different case {and screen} finish.

I never mentioned this here, but Kathleen and I went to the Apple Store in King of Prussia, PA to see the MacBook on the Sunday before Kathleen gave birth to our son Jimmy. When we took a look at the 2.0-GHz MacBook side-by-side with the least expensive MacBook Pro, we found it hard to detect performance differences. We realize that we were not using software that would tax the graphics hardware, but, we agree that the MacBook is a suprisingly aggressive move by Apple.

That experience and the confirmations of our analysis that we've seen in places like Daring Fireball and from respected technologists like Walter Mossberg in The Wall Street Journal, I wonder if I was mistaken when I recommended that my wife buy a MacBook Pro as her next computer?

Technorati Tags: MacBook, MacBook Pro.