First off to address the astigmatism issue.
A. I have astigmatism (fairly severe)
B. I own an aluminum macbook
C. I have owned previous laptops with LCD backlight.
Here's how I'll explain it I guess. Astigmatism is defined by having spherical abberations on your eyes. Ie like the Hubble telescope, the lens is not perfectly round. It results in blurry vision regardless of the distance you are viewing the object at. You can reduce the blurriness by squinting... because you are using the center of the lens in your eye which will have the least spherical abberation.
Now given that, there is no reason astigmatism will have any relation to an LED backlight specifically. I can imagine eyestrain, wearing toric contact lenses and staring at the screen causing those symptoms, as when I am tired and am wearing contacts and they get dry etc, this happens. (raising the humidity helps)
Second, the poly macbook is now the best deal you can get on apple hardware. Despite what people say, it there will be really no discernable difference in performance due to DDR2 to DDR3... the additional bandwidth/increased latency are really insiginificantly small differences at this level. I would hazard a guess that the actual performance difference would not exceed 3%. Given that a ~15% increase in memory bandwidth on a PC will result in a real world performance increase of 2-5%. Clock for clock the benchmark on the same platform shows DDR2 800 (which can be installed on new nvidia plastic macbook I hear) with a memory bandwidth 6143 on sandra
DDR3 800 scores a memory bandwidth of 6156 and DDR3 1066 scores 6613.
This shows that clock for clock they are similar... and the bandwidth increase of ~10% would result in a 1-3% real world performance change. Which is, except in very long tasks, well within the margin of error to even detect a difference.
When I hear the snow leopard argument, it's silly.. The processor is the same, and they both will run snow leopard equally well now that it has hardware acceleration.
When you boil it down, it really comes to, Do I want something that looks like a unibody macbook and am I willing to pay ~300 more for it (at retail). If you want the most hardware for the buck, it would be the plastic macbook. All questions of keyboards, case cracks aside, which I'm sure all laptops have, and there are going to be plenty of aluminum macbook problems (I've exchanged mine once. I just don't get on to whine about it.) It's just that there are so many more plastic macbooks out there than there are aluminum ones. so even a 1% problem rate will be magnified alot.
No one knows how the aluminum macbooks will age and whether new defects will show up or what they might be, as they have only been around for about 6 months. The polymacbook has been out for 2.8 years. There's been alot of time for manufacturing problems and other issues to come to light.
I will say, I do like the aluminum macbooks look and feel. I did also buy mine before they announced the new plastic macbook. In retrospect I might have bought that one or maybe not. I don't know. But the decision would have been hard. But I want it to be clear this is an argument of asthetics mostly, not performance as some people would like to make out. Just accept the fact that you liked the new design and you were willing to shell out the money to have the newest thing.
user..)
