Hands-on: the Apple MacBook

Justin Jaffe Managing editor

Justin Jaffe is the Managing Editor for CNET Money. He has more than 20 years of experience publishing books, articles and research on finance and technology for Wired, IDC and others. He is the coauthor of Uninvested (Random House, 2015), which reveals how financial services companies take advantage of customers -- and how to protect yourself. He graduated from Skidmore College with a B.A. in English Literature, spent 10 years in San Francisco and now lives in Portland, Maine.

Expertise Credit cards, Loans, Banking, Mortgages, Taxes, Cryptocurrency, Insurance, Investing. Credentials

Coauthor of Uninvested (Random House, 2015)

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Justin Jaffe

May 17, 2006 4:52 p.m. PT

Yesterday afternoon, our executive editor ran down to the Apple store on Market Street in San Francisco and nabbed one of the first MacBooks to be sold. (He also witnessed an alleged thief get gang-tackled by Apple's beefy security detail.) You can see the MacBook unpacking process in all of its pornographic detail in CNET News.com's slide show and on Engadget and Gizmodo.

I've been playing with the MacBook since then and have come to a preliminary verdict: Apple may have finally nailed it. The company has corrected a handful of the iBook's shortcomings, hit a totally reasonable price point (at least for the $1,099 baseline white model), and finally delivered a laptop with a 13.3-inch display, which I believe offers a better compromise between size and portability than any other screen size on the market. Although plenty of laptops out there start for many hundreds of dollars less than the MacBook, I believe that with the MacBook, the value gap between Apple laptops and the PC competition has narrowed significantly.

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