[Tenchiro]

...by its otherwise identical white brother.

Black and white differences
By James Galbraith

...

Well, the white 2GHz configuration arrived finally, so we put the laptop through our battery of tests. You might think, “Why did they bother?” After all, aside from the case color, the only other difference between the white and black 2GHz MacBook is the hard drive—a 60GB 5,400-rpm drive in the white model and an 80GB, 5,400-rpm one in the black. And if you were to look at their scores on our overall system performance testing tool, Speedmark, you would find data to back up that position.


However, the differences in some of the individual tests that make up Speedmark were big enough that we rushed the black the MacBook back from its offsite photo shoot to run some more tests. After testing the white 2GHz MacBook and comparing the results to the published scores of the black model, we saw small performance differences in many of the tests, with the edge going to the white model in most cases. Retesting leveled out a few tests (though I can’t explain why), but still shows the white 2GHz model performing better than the black model, most notably in our Compressor MPEG-2 Encoding test and our iMovie test applying the Aged video effect to a clip.

Doh!

 

[Kornphlake]

Finally a sport where white guys are faster than black guys... if you can consider mpeg encoding a sport that is.

 

[bdamschen]

Maybe it has something to do with retaining heat? Could the black macbook be hotter inside causing the machine to throttle down a little bit?

 

[blue]

Black being excessively warm has nothing to do with heat and everything to do with light, so no.

 

[binary visions]

A little selective quoting, Tench?

the only other difference between the white and black 2GHz MacBook is the hard drive&#8212;a 60GB 5,400-rpm drive in the white model and an 80GB, 5,400-rpm one in the black<snip>

With the systems shipping with identical processors, RAM and graphics, we focused our testing attention on the hard drive. Thankfully, switching hard drives between the MacBooks is fairly painless, because we did a lot of it and found that the results in question followed the drive to whatever system it was installed in.

 

[Tenchiro]

A little selective quoting, Tench?

But how many consumers have both models and/or would be willing or able to swap the drives around?

 

[binary visions]

But how many consumers have both models and/or would be willing to swap the drives?

Huh?

Not really the point. The point is a discrepancy in the drive's performance, which is the drive manufacturer's problem and can vary from batch to batch. Who knows if this problem even exists outside of a small handful of machines?

Just pointing out that it's not Apple's problem.

edit: besides, the spec comparisons here are a little silly. The black one took 16 seconds longer on a 4+ minute job to do an encoding, but the white one took a whole 57 seconds longer to import photos on only a ~1.5 minute job.

The differences are small where they exist, except for the photo difference which is huge and the white one is outperformed.

 

[Tenchiro]

Huh?

Not really the point. The point is a discrepancy in the drive's performance, which is the drive manufacturer's problem and can vary from batch to batch. Who knows if this problem even exists outside of a small handful of machines?

Just pointing out that it's not Apple's problem.

The average consumer doesn't know the difference. While this is a problem that almost nobody will notice, but even if they did they would blame Apple.

I just thought it was funny that you would pay $150 more for black and a insignificant amount of storage and get dinged on performance.

 

[binary visions]

Please see my edit.

You get "dinged" a second here, a couple seconds there, but across the board if you were to add up all the +seconds and -seconds, the white one would still lose on that massive, almost doubling of the photo import time.

Reality: hardware varies, and the performance differences aren't even noticable... except for the one area where the black one clearly outperforms the white one.

I agree that it's silly to charge $150 for a 20gb upgrade and a different color, but if Apple knows one thing, it's their market. They don't know how to expand beyond it, but they do know their target market. And their target market will pay more for black. Good for them for turning a profit.

 

[DamienC]

According to Sam Hill the green Macbook is faster.