The day Apple released the MacBooks, I remember noting that they came in two colors, and then thought immediately about benchmarks. Would Macworld and its similars be benchmarking both colors? Would there be any difference in performance of equally configured machines? Of course, I pretty much dismissed these thoughts as ridiculous, because what does case color have to do with performance? Well, it turns out I may have been wrong.
This Macworld article covers exactly the kind of benchmarking I initially thought about. It turns out the white MacBook is slightly faster than an equivalent black MacBook. However, the difference was narrowed down to the difference in performance between a 60 GB drive and a 80 GB drive (both of which ran at 5,400 RPMs and had 8MB caches). How odd.
Stranger still, BareFeats.com speed tests say their black MacBook was faster than their white MacBook. Weird.
How can you say that the white is faster than the black by just testing two machines? It should have been tested several times with many machines to rule out the possibility of a performance difference in the processor or the ram.