Pre Unibody Macbook 13"...long in the tooth?

I'm looking for a small-ish laptop for travel and maybe a little bit of on-location editing with Photoshop. Doesn't need to be a powerhouse as I usually do my editing at home with my i720 PC.

Is a pre-unibody 13" Macbook (Black or White colored) a dinosaur that shouldn't be considered? Something like 2Ghz Core2Duo, 2GB RAM, 120GB HDD?

Not familiar at all with Macbooks although the newer ones sure do look sexy!

They're OK, with an SSD upgrade it'd be very fast. More ram may be required depending on the extent of your onsite editing.

The "Santa Rosa" models from Nov. '07 can support 6GB of RAM, while the older ones can only support 3GB, so I wouldn't go older than that.

Personally I don't think any of the old Macbooks are that great...the touchpads stunk compared to the ones on the Macbook Pro, and the display was even worse - just another terrible TN panel, as opposed to the pretty good ones on the MBPs.

Also: The older Macbooks didn't have firewire IIRC...

René Damkot wrote in post #11507525
Also: The older Macbooks didn't have firewire IIRC...

Only the unibody Macbooks don't have FW, all the other ones have FW400.

Oops. My bad

I have a pre-unibody 2.16Ghz 13" Macbook with 2Gb ram. Pre-Santa Rosa

It's 3-4years old now and it runs Aperture fine (not great). I don't do a lot of post processing and I don't waste time on bad pics so I don't run into problems with it being 'too slow' very often.

I'm a serious geek (trained and certified) but 99.9999% of what I do is online these days and these old machines run Snow Leopard with all the features, so I'd suggest they're a bargain.

Is it too slow for photoshop? I wouldn't know. I don't think I really need to use it.

i have a white macbook with a 2.1ghz core duo and 4gb ram. it runs lightroom and photoshop at the same time just fine.

I have a black MacBook 2.0 C2D with 4gb of ram, and a 750GB 5400RPM and it does alright. It has been my main computer since 2006 for everything, but it is starting to get slow for me as my main editing computer. Because of this I am building a new desktop for the editing but will be keeping this laptop as my carry around and for editing on the fly if needed.

I have a white Macbook from July 07 that still runs, and I use it heavily. I will admit, though, that I have had so many problems with the hard drive. The first time I had to replace it was March 08, but I couldn't do anything until May, so I was without a computer for 2 months. The next time I had to replace it was November 09. It should have cost me over $300 to do, but the guy at the Apple store decided against that and everything got done for free, including an upgrade to Snow Leopard from Tiger.

Ever since then, I'm sad to report I have had almost daily problems with programs crashing, running super slow, and my laptop crashing and then booting up again on its own. I just restarted my laptop about an hour ago and even that is no longer helping it to speed up. I can only hope and pray this thing keeps running for several more years, as student loans are a nightmare and if I lose my MacBook, I will no longer have reliable computer access (my mom's laptop and desktop do NOT count, as they are not reliable and they are not mine, plus they run the nightmare that is Windows Vista, which even my mom despises).

My recommendation? Make sure that the hard drive in it works well. If I was in a better financial position (re: one that would allow me to get a MacBook Pro), I'd offer to sell you mine at a really nice price to compensate for the stupidity of the hard drive.

If you have the nerve to play with the commandline, go install AppleJack and run a RAM check, then let it fix everything in auto mode.

I had 3 weeks of instability when I first bought it. Eventually, by watching the memory usage, it seemed to crash anytime it was using more than 1Gb of RAM, so I yanked the second stick of RAM and it seemed to be ok. They replaced it without fuss.

I like AppleJack because I get a frequently get HDD issues that would usually need the OSX install disks but booting into Single-User mode and using AppleJack to run fsck is more convenient.

i am pretty sure you can get something with more processing power from asus or toshiba for cheaper, both of which are reported to have lower failure rates than macs (3 year projections).

-reign- wrote in post #11605017
=-=reign=-;11605017]i am pretty sure you can get something with more processing power from asus or toshiba for cheaper, both of which are reported to have lower failure rates than macs (3 year projections).

Definitely, but an Asus or Toshiba won't run OSX, which is way superior to Windows.

Sp1207 wrote in post #11605021
Definitely, but an Asus or Toshiba won't run OSX, which is way superior to Windows.

that is user-dependent but if OP uses photoshop, i think it would be a lot more hardware dependent than software.

here is a comparison between macs though

bdp23 wrote in post #11595046
If you have the nerve to play with the commandline, go install AppleJack and run a RAM check, then let it fix everything in auto mode.

I had 3 weeks of instability when I first bought it. Eventually, by watching the memory usage, it seemed to crash anytime it was using more than 1Gb of RAM, so I yanked the second stick of RAM and it seemed to be ok. They replaced it without fuss.

I like AppleJack because I get a frequently get HDD issues that would usually need the OSX install disks but booting into Single-User mode and using AppleJack to run fsck is more convenient.

Thanks for that tip! I did it pretty much immediately upon reading your post and was able to get a number of issues resolved and my computer is working a bit better now. I don't have any install discs at all because they pre-installed Snow Leopard on my hard drive when I sent it in for repairs, so I have no way of doing anything that requires the install discs.