Mid 2010 Macbook

[rajputwarrior]

While I wasn?t really looking for a laptop anytime soon as my old late 2006 MacBook was doing just fine, an intoxicated Monday night browsing the Apple store online changed that. On a impulse, I had bought a new MacBook, and am I glad I ever!

The model that I purchased is a refurbished model and I was able to snag it for $899 Canadian. The factory specs of the MacBook are below:

? 13.3-inch LED-backlit glossy widescreen display

? 2GB (2 x 1GB) of 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM

? 250GB Serial ATA @ 5400 rpm

? 8x double-layer SuperDrive (DVD?R DL/DVD?RW/CD-RW)

? NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics processor with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory

Not bad I thought, but then I also replaced the Hard Drive with my 320gb 7200 rpm Segate Momentus HDD and upped the ram using a Munchkin 4 (2x2gb) kit. Craziest part of the setup, all I did was take the HDD out of my old MacBook and slap in straight in here, booted her and away she went. It was like I never switched laptops, while not completely surprised that it worked (you can easily do this with a lot of *nix systems) the fact it was two completely different chipsets made it surprising it worked no problem. But I digress?

Design

These things are pretty, but really, which Mac isn?t? In terms of size it is maybe a half to full centimeter smaller then the previous generation MacBooks but the clamshell design gives it a unique look (like the old coloured iBook?s, but not as round) but I think the finish is what takes the cake. When the notebook is opened, it reveals a nice looking keyboard, the powerful glass trackpad and finally a gloss finish not only on the monitor, but along the casing as well.

What is probably my favourite part about the entire thing is that it is dead silent, even when gaming, watching HD video or rendering something in Photoshop, you never hear the thing, which definitely was not the case with the previous generation MacBooks that would sounds like a jet engine was going on even on just random web browsing sessions.

Performance

Compared to my old guy, it?s just a tad bit faster in terms of boot up, but it is snappier. The added advantage of the better video card makes the OS a lot snappier and things like resizing a window or scrolling through apps with a lot going on screen happen a lot quicker and smoother.

Gaming is the big difference though. This laptop can actually game pretty well for a 13.3 inch laptop. Games like Call of Duty 4, Half Life 2 and Torchlight can be played without issue and all look pretty good. Click on an image below to see a bigger shot. Call of Duty 4 and Half Life 2 will show the FPS, couldn't figure it out for torchlight.

Speaking of the video card, watching HD content and online flash video just became a whole lot nicer and faster due to Adobe finally adding GPU acceleration to OSX (only for nvidia cards though so far) and VLC using the GPU to render movies. All this means is less load on the CPU and because of that, longer battery life when watching movies online or offline.

Keyboard & Trackpad

They keyboard is fully functional, but compared to my last keyboard it is definitely missing a feature that I miss. On the old guys you had a numlock button where the ?F6? key button would be which would turn the middle of the keyboard into a number pad, that?s not there anymore. They also stuffed a whole lot of more functions into the F keys such as dashboard control, expose, keys to control iTunes and volume buttons. Other then that small quirk, it?s an enjoyable keyboard to use.

The trackpad is a completely different beast though. The glass trackpad may I say is a touch of genious. From a piece of hardware that most people hate using on laptops but this trackpad is a totally different story. You actually want to use it or even more, you enjoy using it. Flicking your fingers to scroll webpages and watching whatever you scroll keep scrolling like you are on an iPhone is an awesome feature. I can describe it some more, or you can just watch the youtube video down below that does the job better then I?ll be able to.

Obviously it?s not as precise when gaming or using Photoshop, but for everything else it more then does the job.

Battery

The battery life on this thing is simply put amazing. Well Apple may advertise it has a 10 hour battery life with the monitor dimmed down just doing light web browsing or word processing, I was able to pull about 8.5-9 hours doing the same type of thing. 9 hours on a full featured laptop is amazing.

When gaming on a full battery I was able to pull about 4 hours out of it and watching 720p video I can get about 4-5 hours out of it as well. All in all amazing. What was impressive for the last generation was getting 4 hours if lucky while browsing the web.

Value

The biggest arguing point against people who use Mac?s is that they are not worth the money, that for the same money you can get a laptop with even better specs. But I challenge you with this, can you find me another laptop with this hardware in it, 13.3 inch screen, about 5lbs, can run all three major OS types and has battery life like this for same price?

Conclusion

Am I glad I bought this? Absolutely, especially since I was able to sell my last one in about 3 days for $600. This thing does everything I want it do now, including gaming ,which is something my old guy was missing. I would definitely recommend this guy to anyone looking for a laptop.

Pros

? Battery Life

? Performance

? Trackpad

? Design

Cons

? Keyboard missing sudo number pad

? Still only two USB ports (you think you would be able to add ONE more especially after you toke out the firewire port)

? DisplayPort out (another proprietary port just so I can hook up a monitor to this thing)

Overall ? 9/10 BUY IT!!

Gallery - caution high res photos

[Duffydemon]

Congrats bro, so you finally quit hackint0sh :laugh:

[rajputwarrior]

Congrats bro, so you finally quit hackint0sh :laugh:

lol nope, stiil got my dell mini ;)

[instant.human]

Nice review, mate! =) I always loved the non-Pro MacBooks, almost more than I loved the Pro-line... I just kinda had to end up buying a Pro because I needed FireWire 800 (or ANY FireWire, for that matter) and loved the glass trackpad... Now, that the non-Pro have that too, the only drawback is no FireWire... :( Oh and I would LOVE to see a black unibody MacBook... I so loved my BlackBook back in the days... I sold it to a good friend who had it with him when he hung out at my place recently and I was so in love with that machine... Great built-quality, even after three years of heavy use on stage (DJ) it still looked adorable, if a little used-up, which only suited it well. :) no dead pixels, only shiny keys and the "F"-key which was not fitting properly anymore and always flipped out... But considering I spilled beer, Martini Rosso and coffee over it over the years and it never ever let me down only speaks for it's awesome quality. And my luck. :D

Haha the only thing that ****ed me off a little was that the battery... well it grew... physically... It was kinda... blown. Looked not so good and felt... dangerous. :D I ended up buying a new one off of eBay but yeah that shouldn't happen.

unfortunately, a black unibody MacBook won't happen. Which is a shame.. But I guess the majority didn't like that anyways... But if they offered one, I would not wait one second and buy one... if only for nostalgic-sakes. :D

[rawr_boy81]

I used to have a MacBook Pro and found that the cooling wasn't as good as it was with the aluminium MacBook Pro's for some reason; even on a flag surface the heat was able to get dispersed a lot quicker especially when it comes to CPU intensive stuff. I wonder how the new range of the MacBooks compare when it comes to heat dispersal for cpu intensive work.

[rajputwarrior]

Nice review, mate! =) I always loved the non-Pro MacBooks, almost more than I loved the Pro-line... I just kinda had to end up buying a Pro because I needed FireWire 800 (or ANY FireWire, for that matter) and loved the glass trackpad... Now, that the non-Pro have that too, the only drawback is no FireWire... :( Oh and I would LOVE to see a black unibody MacBook... I so loved my BlackBook back in the days... I sold it to a good friend who had it with him when he hung out at my place recently and I was so in love with that machine... Great built-quality, even after three years of heavy use on stage (DJ) it still looked adorable, if a little used-up, which only suited it well. :) no dead pixels, only shiny keys and the "F"-key which was not fitting properly anymore and always flipped out... But considering I spilled beer, Martini Rosso and coffee over it over the years and it never ever let me down only speaks for it's awesome quality. And my luck. :D

Haha the only thing that ****ed me off a little was that the battery... well it grew... physically... It was kinda... blown. Looked not so good and felt... dangerous. :D I ended up buying a new one off of eBay but yeah that shouldn't happen.

unfortunately, a black unibody MacBook won't happen. Which is a shame.. But I guess the majority didn't like that anyways... But if they offered one, I would not wait one second and buy one... if only for nostalgic-sakes. :D

the blackbooks were definitely sexy looking laptops. Not sure why they haven't brought them back. A buddy of mine has one and it still the nicest looking all black laptop I've ever seen. And you are right, my old macbook toke a beating too but it kept chugging along with issue. The thing ran as good as the day I bought, better actually because I upgraded it. Even for a almost four year old laptop it still looked and ran better then most of the laptops on the market today. I guess the advantage of apple controlling the hardware and the software they really know how to optimize the software to take full advantage of the hardware that it's built on.

I can see your beef with the lack of firewire, it's weird that they completely killed it considering firewire is an apple tech. My batter was still good, they use really high quality batteries on all their laptops as long as you take care of them.

I used to have a MacBook Pro and found that the cooling wasn't as good as it was with the aluminium MacBook Pro's for some reason; even on a flag surface the heat was able to get dispersed a lot quicker especially when it comes to CPU intensive stuff. I wonder how the new range of the MacBooks compare when it comes to heat dispersal for cpu intensive work.

The cooling on these guys is pretty good. They do get hot but nothing unbearable as the coolest in these guys in really well done. The fact I can convert mp3's, browse the web while watching mkvs and still not hear the thing is a testament to apple's engineers.

[rawr_boy81]

The cooling on these guys is pretty good. They do get hot but nothing unbearable as the coolest in these guys in really well done. The fact I can convert mp3's, browse the web while watching mkvs and still not hear the thing is a testament to apple's engineers.

Oops, the first 'MacBook Pro' should have been 'MacBook' :)

The problem I mainly have was when I was compressing videos using Media Encoder CS4 (at the time) and found that the temperature of the CPU would get really high and take quite a while for not only the fans to kick in but also the temperature to drop (based on iStat Pro readings). It was ok as long as it was on a totally flat surface but even then the bottom would get really hot. I'm sure it is nothing to worry about but I do get concerned about a shortened life because of long periods of high temperatures.