Now here's a remarkable thing that the Macworld team has turned up in its lab tests. The black Macbooks, when compared to the top-end white versions (the latter, you'll recall, are £90 cheaper but have no other noticeable configuration differences), are actually slower at a number of tasks than the mid-config white ones. (That is, if you leave the disk on the white model at 60GB, rather than upgrading to 80GB.)
Huh? Yes, even the Macworld testers are confused:
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.
Since everything non-swappable is the same, they focussed on the hard drives. Sure enough, swapping them over produced a difference. So what's the difference? The white model (which is faster in the tests) uses a Seagate 60GB 5,400rpm drive, while the black model (mostly slower) uses a Fujitsu 80GB model rotating at the same speed.
But even there it's not uniform:
The weirdest results came from our iPhoto import test, which appears to be very hard drive sensitive. Surprisingly, the winner wasn't the Seagate 7200RPM drive, but the Fujitsu 5,400-rpm drives found in the black MacBook and 17-inch MacBook Pro. The white MacBook had a Seagate 5,400-rpm drive, which edged out the Fujitsu in zipping and unzipping large folders, but lagged far behind in the iPhoto test.
What could it be? File cache size, latency, seek, any of those things?
The top-level specs of these drives don't offer any explanation—both have 8MB caches and both run at 5,400-rpm. We installed, wiped, reinstalled, and moved the drives around trying to figure this one out, but the results always followed the drives.
IOW, no. The Seagate is faster at most things, slower at a couple of others. As one commenter observed, it shows that disk rotation speed "is about [as] accurate [a] measurement of throughput as MHz is to measure the speed of a CPU."
Which still leaves the black MacBook looking like an even less good deal than it did before. Unless, of course, you like black..
