Installing Windows
The MacBook doesn't have a BIOS, so don't expect to just slip in a Windows installation DVD and get things going. However, Apple makes installing Windows trivial thanks to Boot Camp. Accessible in OS X's Utilities folder, the Boot Camp tool seamlessly partitions your hard drive and offers to let you reboot into the Windows installation DVD. Installation goes on as normal from there, although you do need to select and format the right drive partition.

Once you're in the Windows desktop, you can simply pop in the OS X restore disc, and a friendly Windows installer takes care of loading up drivers. The installer also adds a little system tray tool through which you can change settings for the trackpad, keyboard function keys, and infrared remote support, among other things. Once you're all set, you can boot into either Windows or OS X by holding the option key at startup. Cool.

Update: It looks like the MacBook's BIOS compatibility module does let you boot from a Windows DVD out of the box by holding down the option key. You'll still need Boot Camp to partition your hard drive without erasing OS X, however.

You can tell Windows wasn't the first thing on Apple's mind when it made the new MacBook, though. The default Realtek audio drivers seem to prevent Service Pack 1 from installing in Vista, and when I grabbed the latest driver from Realtek's website, the sound cut off altogether. The trackpad implementation is also a little buggy. While you can use two-finger gestures for scrolling, depressing the trackpad with your thumb makes the cursor move, and right-clicking in tap-to-click mode involves depressing the trackpad with three fingers (instead of just tapping with two fingers like in OS X). Also, leaving the pointer in a text field can causes the system to erase random chunks of text—presumably because one's palms come in contact with the trackpad surface.

Despite those little kinks, Windows Vista works just like you'd expect—and it's fast. Since the MacBook has a decent graphics processor built in, you can also run current PC games well above slide-show speeds, provided you don't mind turning down detail settings. I still wouldn't recommend the MacBook if you're planning to run Windows as your primary OS, however. Apple could very well iron out the issues I just mentioned in future driver updates, but Boot Camp driver support just feels too flaky for everyday use right now.

That said, you don't have to dual-boot to run Windows apps on your Mac. Thanks to the magic of hardware virtualization, virtual machines like VMware Fusion and Parallels can run Windows inside OS X with a minimal performance penalty. You don't even need to have Windows open in its own, isolated window: both of those VMs support running Windows apps within the OS X desktop. If you don't want to buy a Windows license, you can also use CodeWeavers' CrossOver, which is essentially a pimped-out Mac version of the Wine compatibility layer for Linux. CrossOver doesn't run everything, but it can take care of things like Microsoft Office and Valve's Source Engine games.

Performance and battery life
Unfortunately, time constraints and other obligations prevented me from running a detailed set of desktop productivity benchmarks on the MacBook. With a 2GHz Penryn Core 2 Duo and couple gigs of RAM, though, this machine is more than speedy enough to handle just about anything you'd want to run on a 13.3" notebook. Heck, the CPU in this thing might actually be slightly faster than the one in my desktop PC (a first-gen Core 2 Duo running at 2.13GHz).

I ended up testing two things: gaming performance and battery life. For gaming, I ran Valve's popular team-based shooter Team Fortress 2 with a custom timedemo at two custom detail levels. I set all the options to "high" and reflections to "reflect world" for my "High" preset. For my "Medium" preset, I toned down shader detail to "low," other detail settings to "medium," and reflections to "simple reflections." I also disabled color correction, motion blur, and high-dynamic-range lighting. Both tests were run with antialiasing, anisotropic filtering, and vsync disabled.

As you can see, TF2 runs quite well on the MacBook. Even at the high detail level, I found frame rates stable enough for relatively smooth gameplay. Actually getting kills was a different story, since I was too lazy to find a spare mouse and ended up using the trackpad to look around and fire. Anyway, the MacBook isn't a gaming machine by any means, but it's a surprisingly capable backup if you're far from home and feel like hopping in a multiplayer game with your friends. (Just don't tell them you're using a Mac.)

What about CrossOver Games? CodeWeavers' tool allowed me to install Steam and TF2 inside OS X without a hitch, although the actual game ran in DirectX 8.1 mode and had a few minor graphical glitches. Still, performance was shockingly decent:

I had to use slightly different settings in these tests, since CrossOver's DirectX 8.1 compatibility layer doesn't support graphical options like HDR lighting and motion blur. Nevertheless, you clearly don't have to install Windows to play TF2 (and presumably other Valve games) on a Mac. The CrossOver Games compatibility list includes a healthy number of other titles, too, from recent ones like Prey and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion to older games like Fallout II and Deux Ex.

At this point, die-hard Apple fans might point out that you can get Mac versions of recent games like Call of Duty 4 and Spore. I won't disagree, but considering the MacBook's obvious unfitness as a primary gaming platform, I wouldn't recommend buying another copy of a game just for it. If anything, loading up a leftover copy of Windows XP with Boot Camp is probably the cheapest and easiest way to game on the MacBook. While CrossOver Games is neat, not everybody will want to pony up 50 bucks for the full version.

Testing battery life was a bit more straightforward. With Wi-Fi on, Bluetooth off, and the display brightness set to around 66%, the MacBook stayed on almost exactly four hours while I wrote this review, browsed the web, watched YouTube videos, and installed some software. In Windows Vista, I hit the 50% mark in just an hour and 18 minutes with a similar config and the "Power saver" preset enabled. That's another reason not to use Windows as the primary OS on this system—at least not for the time being. The MacBook can't exactly match a new Eee PC's battery longevity in OS X, either, but four hours of desktop productivity ain't half bad for a full-featured 13.3" laptop.