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Laptops · Apple MacBook

Apple MacBook unibody

10owners with an opinion
100%of verdicts positive
5/0positive/negative since 2024
2 yrslongest happy owner
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for repairability and ease of use.

What owners wrote

Likes itOwned 10 years
I'm on my third mac which has a glossy screen and tight tolerances. I won't sweat it. The hardness of the coating is getting better with every generation. I'm on my M1 MacBook, which I'm using for ~4 years every day. The scratches are visible, but becomes almost invisible when I clean the screen. Moreover they're invisible when the screen is on. My 10 year old Unibody also has them, and while they're worse, they're not visible either. The best defense is having a padded case and using it even carrying in a bag. Carrying a cloth can bend and damage the screen in worse ways.
Likes itOwned 2 years
At home, I have a Core i5 desktop with 4GB of RAM and dual 22" monitors running Windows 7, and also a 13" unibody MacBook which I bought back in October 2008 -- on the day they were released, actually. In the past I used the desktop for quite a bit of gaming as well as remoting in to my work PC with Remote Desktop. These days I find I don't really game very much anymore, and I can connect to my work VPN/RDP through the Mac anyway if I need to work from home. Consequently, I'm on the MacBook almost 100% of the time. I'm actually considering getting a Mac Mini, moving the big HDDs out of the desktop into external enclosures attached to that, then getting rid of the Windows box and the older 22" display. I suppose I could also just get a NAS, but I like knowing I have a spare machine around in case my MacBook dies. Work is a Q6600 with 3GB of RAM running Vista Business, since I'm currently working with mostly with .NET.
Likes it
Still to this day I don't understand how people manage to do software development on a Windows PC. I started with my first secondhand MacBook which was one before the unibody, and then upgraded to unibody and never have left ever. The only reason I was forced to use Windows was for clients that didn't have support for MacOS or Linux. The only thing I need Windows for is rootkit enabled games... which pains me, otherwise I'd have Linux on my desktop
Neutral
It's funny: there was a time when Apple understood that it could attract customers by making its devices the first choice for developers. And it did a good job, with a real Unix underneath that wasn't overly hidden, with a lot of open source support, and just generally being an ok citizen in the developer world. That strategy, which I think ran from early OSX through until mid-2010's? worked, and you'd see the results, with a sea of glowing Apple logos, even at Linux conferences. I think they've changed since then. It feels now like developers are not a priority, even as they've re-added some power-user features in recent years. As for longevity, I think my current laptop speaks for itself. It's now 11 years old, and going strong. I've carried it around the world, dropped it numerous times, and it's been the best laptop I've every owned. They do artificially force an end-of-life, usually at around 7 years old, for their operating system. I don't really have a problem with that: I appreciate that it's difficult to continue to support old hardware in new releases, and I think that timeframe is reasonable. I'd prefer that it was explicitly stated, and I'd prefer it was longer, but ... it's not bad, really. Over the years I have had many devices: desktop PCs, Unix workstations, Linux workstations, and laptops from 6" to 17". In the early 2000s I bought a 12" Powerbook, which was my first Mac -- the motivation was to get seamless Microsoft Office document support on a Unix…
Likes it
Battery life deteriorating is only a pain point because they make it so users can't trivially service the battery themselves. It is amazing seeing the walk back over the years from sensible affordances to the consumer to binning those features behind expensive repairs. I still remember my ibook where you could pop out the keyboard with your fingers and pop out the battery with a dime. I remember when they released the unibody macbook and they gave you a simple clasp to access both the battery and the hard drive as they were anticipating consumers shifting to SSDs in the near future in 2010 and wanted to offer an affordance. Slowly that went away. The latch went away for a dozen small screws that are easy to strip and lose. Eventually the ability to change out the drive or the battery yourself went away too. Slippery slope of setting up user expectations for a worse version of the product in a few generations from certain standpoints. Sure it is faster but imagine if it was faster and also as serviceable as devices used to be. There isn't good reason for it other than to gouge you when you spec out your macbook at rates that are always at a convenient premium over today's prices for these hardware.
Likes it
I remember the first RAM/HD upgrade I did on a Unibody MacBook...mind-blowing simple. Most laptops were such a pain to work on before that. Edit: I remember some models having the drive in a bay and the RAM in an easily accessible panel (or under the keyboard), but most were a sandwich of tiny panels and cables.
Likes it
>> Windows quality has gone up significantly since XP. I no longer associate Windows with constant crashing like I used to. This. Apple's long term strategy on hardware had me getting ready to leave their ecosystem over a year ago (they discontinued the unibody Macbooks that I love so much, which were a perfect balance of size, power and end-user expandability). It didn't help that I have one of the early 2011 MBP's with the overheating and GPU issues. Mine just died over the Christmas holidays. The only way my 2011 MBP would run without glitching and crashing was... surprise, surprise, running Windows 8.1 in Boot Camp. And in general, it felt and ran faster than OSX did. That experiment led me to install Windows 8.1 on my 2008 Macbook -- which can't run anything newer than Lion. It was a pig, nearly unusable until I installed Windows on it, and now it's snappy enough to use daily. While there's something to be said about Apple not looking to the past when providing OS upgrades, I think there's also something to be said about Microsoft's strategy of providing backwards compatibility to older hardware.
Likes it
New MacBook Pro models are coming soon. At the very least, Apple will likely release new models with Ivy Bridge CPUs sometime between now and mid-summer. Further, there's long been rumors that Apple was re-working the entire "Pro" line to be more like the Air. So people are speculating that the new Pros will be much thinner and drop optical drives, gain SSDs by default and (I hope) have a dual SSD & HD configuration. (so you have the speed of SSD for your boot disk and applications but an HD to store volumous data like photos and video.) This is rumor, of course, but it seems very logical. Apple is not a company that normally keeps legacy technology around and the DVD has become pretty legacy. There is a very active modding community replacing their DVD drive with a second hard drive or SSD, enough that companies like OWC make special parts for it, so I think Apple's a little behind the curve on booting that legacy technology. (Personally I think they intended to do it last year with the 2011 models, but held off because of a delay in some aspect of the design.) Even if you don't end up preferring the new model, the older models will get cheap when they're announced. I've gone shopping looking at other laptops periodically, but the unibody construction of the MacBooks makes them unbeatable. You don't' realize how flimsy plastic laptops feel until you've a unibody. Even the fairly robust aluminum and titanium MacBooks feel flimsy by comparison. These days so much of
Doesn’t like itHasn’t owned it
The first gen unibody macbooks had seriously sharp edges, enough to grate a block of parmesan cheese. I suspect Sir Johny Ive is behind this madness. The latest apple watch ultras also seem quiet aggressive, so much so that I am having to sport the lame looking normal apple watch.
Doesn’t like itHasn’t owned it
The last straw for me was around 2009. I was in college minoring and interning in media production. Invested pretty heavily in Final Cut, which was long in the tooth, and hoping for better I/O in Macbooks to support better ingest. That was when Apple announced the following: - Final Cut X. Its first incarnation was a huge slap in the face for features and workflow. They completely cut a large swathe of the rest of Final Cut studio, and knew they were shipping shit with the new pricing. - The first Unibody Macbook came out. Very little could be upgraded, the keyboard was a leap backward, and all they had for I/O was a half-baked USB3. It's usage for pro video workflows was severely hobbled compared to the last generation. - Mac OS Lion came out, which was when it started showing signs of user hostility. Power-user features were getting locked down or removed, the app store was being pushed harder, and it was consuming more base resources for the privilege. The tend was clear that advanced users were no longer welcome in Apple land. These things made me change majors back to computing, and a full return to Linux. I've never regretted that.