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Laptops · Apple MacBook Pro

Apple MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo

7owners with an opinion
67%of verdicts positive
1/1positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and durability; criticized for support.

What people wrote

Likes it
>>Who's realistically going to use a laptop/desktop with a Core 2 Duo (2006), for instance? I was literally still using a Core2Duo Macbook Pro as a kitchen laptop just for looking up recipes and watching youtube videos etc until last year. Worked absolutely fine until Chrome decided that it's not going to update itself anymore and since I'm on an old version of chrome I can't use google sync. That's what killed it for me - the hardware itself was still perfectly functional.
Doesn’t like it
I’ve been in the Apple ecosystem in one form or the other 40 years and that’s definitely not true compared to Microsoft. Most recently they dropped support for 32 bit Mac and iOS apps. But before that it was dropping support for PPC apps and 68K apps. On the hardware side, the funniest was they dropped support for my Core 2 Duo Mac Mini and I could still install a supported version of Windows 7 on it.
Likes it
I had this occur with my 2004 PowerBook back in the day, it was pretty bad. At the time I had found a company that made adhesive transparent stickers that you could place on either side of the trackpad that would protect the aluminium from being eaten away by the sweat on your palms. I bought this when I upgraded from my PB to my Core 2 Duo MBP in 2007, fearing that this newer machine would suffer the same fate as my PowerBook, but all is well and that machine didn't experience pitting. Having said that, the pictures in the link are pretty bad, I've never seen pitting that bad before, that looks horrendous!
Likes it
Now we're getting into a different topic. They were really well-rounded machines—I just upgraded to 14" from an M1 Air myself, and only for compile + transcode times—but I wouldn't rank them higher than most others I've had: - Core 2 Duo Pros proved to me you can have a laptop as your main computer for real dev + video work - First-gen Retina 15" saved me from daily tension headaches - Second-gen 12" MacBook, after only having a maxed out 15", changed the way I structure my days and where I consider going to work I briefly had a Touch Bar supplied by a job; initially it was cool, but after the first month my only use for it was volume and brightness. I thought I wouldn't like going back to function keys but when I got the M1 Air I realized I prefer them
Doesn’t like it
Five years later (if that!) this was expected behaviour on any x86 laptop! My original Macbook Air ran its Core2Duo at the rated 1.6 GHz for about 5 seconds before dropping to 1.2 GHz. Thirty seconds later it dropped to 1.0 GHz, and a couple of minutes later to 800 MHz where it could run all day. In 2019 I had at the same time two machines with i7-8650U CPU: a NUC and a Thinkpad X1 Carbon. The NUC could build riscv-gnu-toolchain (which I did many times a day, as I was helping develop new RISC-V instructions) in 20 minutes with mild throttling (to 3.2 GHz) while the Thinkpad took over 30 minutes with extreme throttling.
Likes it
I rolled my own system, initially with MotionEye, and then rolled over to Frigate. I appreciate the extra object detection feature in MotionEye, whereas MotionEye really only records on, well, motion. Even with two 720P streams, I'm able to do motion detection and object recognition on an ancient Core2Duo Mac Mini, no TPU. No data leaves my LAN unless I want it to. The most painful part of the whole process was the YAML files for Frigate.
Likes itDoesn’t say they own it
The Core2Duo were the first Intel Macs worth a hoot . IIRC, you could get this CPU in the white MacBook, along with an education discount and iPod rebate. I rocked dual Xenons until early 2023's M2Pro mini (the energy savings are substantial, with minimal GPU performance degredation).