Apple MacBook vs. Shanzhai MacBook

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Comments Posted on Sep 02, 2009 Posted by Yellow Tiger

We’ve recently seen a lot of MacBook look-alikes come out of China. They’ve been popular with consumers by virtue of adopting Apple's slick design mentality and coupling it with traditional super-competitive shanzhai pricing. Here’s the latest off the ranks. Pics come courtesy of our sister site, Shanzhaiben.com, and we take a quick look at how this new device stacks up against both the original Apple MacBook, and the recent upgrade.

First a quick run-down of the Shanzhai MacBook: it sports the traditional white Apple color scheme and styling, with a recessed chassis that allows the screen to open 180°. This also serves to disguise the ports that it supports (check out the table below for more details).

Shanzhai_Mac2

Here’s a comparison table showing how the Shanzhai MacBook fares against the real deal. As everyone knows, when the Macbook was first brought out, it adopted the Intel GMA950 integrated graphics chip, which aroused plenty of complaints. When Apple brought out the new Macbook it exchanged the GMA950 for the NVIDIA Geforce 9400M, which brought a big performance improvement.

Shanzhai_Mac1

Conclusions:

Looking at the specs, the Shanzhai MacBook isn’t really too far removed from the original MacBook; not great news for those hoping the devices coming out of Shenzhen are up there performance-wise with the real things. Still, both hardware and software improvements are coming thick and fast from the Shanzhai manufacturers, and you can bet it won’t be long before the next-gen devices hit the market. In fact, given that in the last few days we’ve seen an Ion-based Shanzhai device reviewed, a dual core Atom 330 with Geforce 9400M chipset probably isn’t that far off. Then we’ll see some real performance at a far better price than the Apple products will be offering.

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