Six Months On The Unibody MacBook
Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2009
by Charles W. Moore
I was a Power PC holdout for three years after the first Intel MacBook Pros made their debut at Macworld Expo 2006, but by the time I installed OS 10.5 Leopard in the fall of 2007, it began to be increasingly evident that my faithful 17” PowerBook G4 was no longer quite adequate to fulfill its role as a front-line production machine. The 1.33 GHz MHz G4 processor and ATI RADEON 9600 GPU with 64 megabytes of video RAM had handled OS 10.4 Tiger amazingly well, but the greater video overhead of Leopard was taxing the hardware’s limits, the 80 gigabyte hard drive was too small and getting packed out, and I was getting locked out of more and more Intel-only software that I wanted to use (especially MacSpeech’s Dictate) so by the three year mark with the big AlBook it was definitely time to get serious about a system upgrade.
While a 17” MacBook Pro would have been lovely as a replacement, the economy and my budget put me more in the MacBook range, and I like small computers anyway -- the 17-incher’s predecessor in principal workhorse role having been a 12” G3 iBook, so the choice pretty much boiled down to either the white polycarbonate 13” MacBook vs, the aluminum 13” Unibody MacBook.
I chewed on this conundrum through the early winter, during which Apple released the a substantial upgrade of the $999 white MacBook in January, bringing it closer to the unibody’s internal spec, with the Nvidia GeForce 9400M integrated graphics chipset replacing the previous and sluggish Intel GMA X3100 chipset, and even a slightly faster processor than the base unibody, which made the decision tougher from a value angle, but when I finally made my decision in February, I went with an Apple Certified Refurbished 2.0 GHz unibody model for a couple hundred bucks more than the whiteBook would have set me back, and after six months of production service this delightful machine hasn’t given me a moment’s cause to regret my decision.
That said, it was really a no-lose proposition. My daughter went the other way and bought a 2.13 GHz white MacBook around the same time on an attractive student discount, and has been very pleased with it as well. However, the unibody MacBook is a sublime piece of hardware -- easily the nicest computer I’ve ever owned in 17 years on the Mac. Whether it’s the best Mac I’ve had remains to be seen, but so far it hasn’t missed a beat.
Over the ensuing half-year, the unibody MacBook has done everything I’ve asked it to without hesitation, drama, or a hint of problems -- with one glaring exception. The lack of FireWire is as much of a pain as I anticipated it to be, and things like large file transfers, hard drive clone runs, and file backups are excruciatingly slow over USB 2. Happily, Apple has come to its senses and restored FireWire support on the 13” MacBook’s new MacBook Pro replacement, but too late for me, and I’m shooting for three years before my next system upgrade.
However, the 13” MacBook is otherwise so excellent at what it does that it mitigates the FireWirelessness considerably. I’m especially pleased with Dictate’s performance, which was better than decent with the standard 2 GB of RAM, but just flies since I upgraded to 4 GB with an OWC upgrade kit three months ago.
The little MacBook (and it is disarmingly small) is also a joy to look at and touch -- the solidity of the unibody enclosure carved from a single billet of aluminum and the precision fit of its components are extremely satisfying.
I had been a bit apprehensive about living with a glossy display, since so many folks dislike them intensely, but for me it’s been essentially a non-issue, and I still have no clear preference between glossy and matte. I love the instant brightness of the LCD backlight.
It has been an adjustment going down from the 17” PowerBook’s 1440 x 900 resolution display to a much smaller 1280 x 800 res. screen, and the fact that my 58 year old eyes are not getting better at close focusing has pushed me into using larger screen font point sizes and finally giving in and getting a prescription for bifocals, although I haven’t filled it yet.
As noted, this particular MacBook is an Apple Certified Refurbished unit, as was the 17” PowerBook before it. It arrived packed in a proper Apple shipping box with manuals, software restore disks, and so forth (there’s a lot less “so forth” than there used to be these days) packaged in plastic bags or envelopes just like it would be with a new machine. Indeed, for all intents and purposes, there was nothing tangible to distinguish it from a new computer. It was cosmetically flawless, and showed no indication of having ever been used. After two consecutive excellent experiences with ACR laptops, plus a couple of ACR iPods for my wife and daughter, I’m sold on the value equation of buying Certified Refurbished.
The speed improvement over the G4 PowerBook is substantial, and I find the 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo more than satisfactorily adequate for my requirements, although you can always use more speed. The RAM upgrade has provided a comfortable amount of memory headroom and of course contributes to performance. RAM slot access for the upgrade, incidentally, was reasonably convenient although not as easy as with the PowerBook, although hard drive access is much more amenable if I ever want to upgrade there. For now the standard 160 GB drive is proving more than ample.
Unfortunately, like all Intel Apple laptops, the MacBook has no internal modem, which is still a necessity for me since broadband hasn’t made its way to my neck of the woods quite yet (although it’s now close) so I was obliged to buy one of Apple’s external USB modems, which clogs up a USB port, but happily works very well.
The MacBook’s chiclet keyboard isn’t quite up to the comfort standard of the superb keyboard in my old Pismo and WallStreet PowerBooks, or even the ‘board in the AlBook IMHO, but it’s not bad and the large, glass, multitouch buttonless trackpad has been a nice surprise -- better than I expected.
Another pleasant surprise, which accounts a great deal for my affection for this machine is that it’s almost dead silent. You can hear the whisper of the hard drive is you’re in a low background noise environment, but it’s by far the quietest computer I’ve had since I used to run my old PowerBook 5300 off a RAM disk with the hard drive spun down,
The MacBook also runs pretty cool most of the time, and even when the internal cooling fan occasionally cuts in on hotter days under heavy processor load, it’s much less offensive and lower-volume than the hideously cacophonous fans in the AlBook and Pismos.
I also just love the look and feel of this MacBook - the unibody design being the best-looking Apple ‘Book yet with its beautiful “just right” proportions and fine watch standard of finish. To my sense of aesthetics it’s by far the best-looking of the four (counting the MacBook Air) unibodies. Sort of like the PowerBook 5300 and 12” dual USB iBook had sort of “golden mean” proportions, but the larger PowerBook 3400 and 14” iBook that were scaled up from them were ugly duckling homely and somewhat ungainly respectively. I think the 15” and 17” unibodies fare better in the looks department than those machines, but the 13-incher is the pick of the litter in terms of looks.
After six months use, my conviction is solidifying that these 13 inch unibody machines will be numbered among the greatest Apple portables ever. whether they will be able to match or top the going on 10 years of dependable, trouble-free performance I’ve had from my Pismo PowerBooks his course an imponderable at this point and remains to be seen , but it’s certainly off to a great start and if it can continue delivering the essentially flawless service it’s given me over the past six months, this MacBook is on track to be my “best ever” Mac so far. It’s been everything I had dared hope for and more.
Who knows what will be available in early 2012 when my next system replacement target date arrives, but this design is excellent enough to conceivably still be around by then, although it would be substantially tweaked and upgraded by that time. The dual USB iBook stayed in production for five years through many iterations. It won’t surprise me if the unibody machines have a similarly lengthy production lifespan.
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