Apple is a jack-of-all-trades. they make all sorts of products, but they are never really the best product in their respective category or price point. Unless you want an apple for the sake of owning an apple product you should keep looking. MSI Notebook Official Website is what im posting from. i got it for $600 new ordered from radioshack, its decent for the price. i never really thought about it but they claim the speakers are nice (THX studio pro baby), dont really sound different then any other average pc speakers IMO.
solid laptop build for that $600 price tag you should really think of getting a set of 5.1 speakers though. no onboard can compare what so ever. go to newegg or tiger direct and search around for a good deal. I'd recommend either: Logitech / Creative / Cyber Acoustics ------------------------------> Good quality to decent quality
Oh, yeah. Laptop speakers are a joke. I laugh at all the speakers labeled "Beats" or "Subwoofer" or any name brand speaker system. Guess what? It's all bullshit. It's a fucking laptop. It is not physically possible to stuff a respectable driver into a laptop. So stop looking for one. Buy a good pair of headphones or speakers. Personally I recommend Sennheiser HD280 pros for headphones ($90) and M-Audio Studiophile AV40s for speakers ($150). They're both relatively cheap and they'll satisfy most people who aren't major audiophiles. They're what I run and I'm real satisfied with both of them.
I have two laptops. One is an ASUS G73jh, which is a beast when it comes to gaming, but it is very heavy and has a rather short (<1 hour) battery life. The other is an Alienware m11x. It is small, light, and surprisingly powerful. It has switchable graphics from dedicated to onboard. With onboard graphics the battery lasts about 7 hours, with dedicated 2-3. Despite it size it can run games like oblivion maxed out.
Indeed they are solid damn headphones. As for the speakers, sure, its possible I guess. I dunno. I just saw them in Wired a while back and they got a good score, so I read reviews on them and decided on em. For $150 I think they're a good deal. Bumpin some trance on them right now.
Macbooks get hot but the way the unibody was made...the heat transfers through the aluminum backing to help cool, along with fans.