Difference between new 2.0 and older 2.4??

Question

I'm curious as to why the new Macbook whites are 2.0ghz. I purchased a 2.4 a few weeks ago and I assume the 2.4 is faster. What sense is there to sell 2.0 when just a couple months ago Apple was offering 2.4 and 2.1?
Just very curious

Answer 1

Gregory Mcintire wrote:
What sense is there to sell a car with a smaller motor than an earlier production car?
Generally slower chips are cheaper. Generally slower chips use less electrical power (longer battery run time). There can be all kinds of marketing reasons.
It could very well be because a manufacturer wants to differentiate levels of performance with slightly different products. In many cases it's because of an older processor sold at a better price point. However - for this case it's a matter of this processor being the same T7350 processor used in the entry-level aluminum MacBook.
This processor is capable of communicating with a 1066 MHz front-side bus and is talking to the newer NVIDIA chipset. The graphics performance should be even better than the X3100, and I've heard that it might even be able to pass off some tasks to the graphics unit that used to be handled by the main processor. It's actually a pretty tricky balancing act of main memory, FSB speed, cache, etc to extract overall performance. I've seen some benchmarks that indicate that the 2.2 GHz (w/ 4 MB of L2 cache) Santa Rosa MacBook might actually outperform the 2.4 Ghz (w/ 3 MB of L2 cache) Santa Rosa MacBook in some identical main memory configurations. The idea is that the additional cache helps until there's enough main memory to compensate.
I'd actually prefer the new white MacBook to the older 2.4 GHz white MacBook, all things considered - even if they were sold at the same price. It should be able to handle HD or Flash video better, which is something that always seemed to cause the fans to ramp up on the MacBooks with Intel graphics.