Well, my favourite Scottish laptop has finally arrived, and for the past few days I’ve been reading up on the MacBook. As the first completely new Intel Mac product (though the mini, iMac and MacBook Pro are all drastically different, I wouldn’t go so far as to say they’re 100% new), the MacBook is an impressive piece of work. It’s the best looking iBook descendant to date, and the specs are quite good for an Apple low-end laptop—so good that the MacBook is actually fairly competitive price-wise with comparable PC laptops. From the magnetic latch to the easy-to-upgrade RAM and hard drive enclosures, there isn’t much to dislike about the MacBook on the surface; most of the outstanding issues appear to be contentious ones, such as the integrated graphics (which I think people are perhaps making too much of a fuss about) and the glossy screen (haven’t seen one in the flesh yet, so I don’t know how bad it is, but I hear “not very”). Most of all, I really want one. I may very well purchase one. A home run for Apple, then?

Well, not exactly. The heat problems with the MacBook Pros have returned with the MacBook, it appears, and apparently the same cause persists:

Yes, the machine still runs hot. Individuals with access to the MacBook’s service manual indicate that it—like the MacBook Pro manual—suggests applying piles of thermal compound. My analysis of the temperatures seem to bear this out.

It’s one thing to make an honest mistake and screw up the application of thermal grease on one system (though how this got past Apple engineers, I’ll never know); it’s another to then repeat the same mistake on your new mass-market model, after everyone’s given you flak for the initial problem. This whole thermal grease issue has put me off buying a MacBook a bit; the thought of having to crack open my laptop just to fix a stupid but major problem like that is ludicrous.