So after about two and a half years I decided to upgrade my first generation black Macbook to one of the new ones released earlier this week. I went for the 2.4 GHz model and maxed out the memory to 4GB. After unpacking it, I plugged in my USB drive with the latest backup from my original MacBook, and proceeded to use Migration Assistant to transfer all my data to the new machine. After an hour and a half I was up and running.

So far it’s quite slick. Going from a 1st gen MacBook to this, it is much faster and responsive. The keyboard is really nice to type on and the display is superb. I’m still calibrating the battery so I’m not sure if it’s any better or worse than my old machine just yet. The backlit keyboard which I originally thought would go mostly unused I’m finding myself using quite a bit. The Nvidia 9400M video processor is WAY BETTER than the subpar Intel GMA GPU I had on the old one.

Multi touch gestures are surprisingly usable and I don’t even notice that there isn’t a separate physical mouse button on the trackpad. The speakers are much much louder and crisper than before. In some cases setting the volume to maximum is too loud.

One thing to note though is this new MacBook has no firewire port. Not a big deal for me since I only had one external firewire drive which is too small now for a full backup. I know for some people this would be a deal breaker and they would be forced to upgrade to a MacBook Pro if they wanted to upgrade.

As soon as the new 24″ displays are released in November I’ll be getting one to use with this machine as well. Hopefully the 9400M will have enough horsepower to keep things speedy with the higher resolution but we’ll see.

Final Verdict: Two thumbs up.