Why, oh why did you do it Apple? The new MacBook could have been great, but you had to ruin it. Shiny screens might make people go “Oooh!” but they don’t make a better notebook. They pick up all kinds of horrible reflections and glare. Not that long ago, we were buying CRT monitors with anti-glare coatings to reduce reflections from the naturally shiny glass. Now we have LCDs made from silicon that has a natural matte finish, and we go making them shiny. John Siracusa has already posted a good write-up on this.
And integrated graphics chipsets that share system RAM with the CPU are going to suck worse with Mac OS X than they do with Windows. OS X uses the GPU for simple tasks like the final composition of the windows on the screen, and Dashboard’s funky effects, and Exposé, and lots of other things. Every time something like this happens, the GPU and CPU will fight for precious memory bandwidth. This will really slow the MacBook and Mac Mini down.
Please, Apple, can you give us a machine that isn’t top-end, but doesn’t just plain suck? And while I’m at it, can we have 802.11a as well? You know it’s faster and has better range!