MacBook C2D: My Review

I recently got one of the new MacBooks with Core 2 Duo as a replacemnt to an old MacBook. The original was replaced thanks to AppleCare, it had a myriad of problems (none of which I will talk about in this post, but suffice to say it was overall a bad unit). My model is the base black unit (2 Ghz, 120 GB HD), but I maxed out the RAM to 2 GB with memory I had purchased for the previous machine.

I am happy to say that I now truly have a Mac. The first MacBook was the first Apple computer I had ever owned, but I seemed to spend more time fixing it than using and enjoying it. Overall, this new unit works as well as can be expected from any laptop, there's no real hiccups or problems to speak of. The hinge creaked horribly on the other MacBook, and the hinge on this unit is flawless. Performance is of course better with Core 2 Duo, but at the end of the day, there's nothing you can do with the new MacBooks that you can't do with the old ones, aside from running Vista. It's worth noting that Vista wouldn't even run well on the MacBooks due to the wimpy graphics card.

I've been using CoreDuoTemp to monitor how hot the MacBook gets, and although it actually peaks higher than the old MacBook (I got to 82 degrees Celcius breifly), it runs cooler overall once the fan kicks in. I made a small C++ program that simply makes an infinite loop and prints to the terminal, thus putting a significant load on the processor. I did this because I wanted to drain the new battery, and I've heard that doing that is good practice. I did this for maybe 30 or 40 minutes (the battery was not full when I started this), and the computer never got hot, it merely got warm, which is to be expected. I was quite pleased with this because my old MacBook ran pretty hot often times, and they seemed to have addressed the problem on the new machines. Battery life is about the same as the old MacBook.

I've come to the conclusion that gaming is pointless on Macs, at least ones with integrated graphics. I'm not going to test anything out via Bootcamp, although I will likely install it sometime down the road.

That's about all I can comment on at this point, if any interesting developments arise, I will certainly post about them. Also, if you guys have any questions I will gladly answer them.

Oh yeah, it's also worth saying that the built-in speakers seem a little louder on the new models, which is nice because the old ones were a bit too quiet.

jerbils said:

I made a small C++ program that simply makes an infinite loop and prints to the terminal, thus putting a significant load on the processor.
...
and the computer never got hot, it merely got warm, which is to be expected.

Click to expand...

Did you by chance run two copies of your program? Unless your program was multithreaded, wouldn't it just max out one of the cores? The only reason I mention this is because it would not heat up the processor nearly as fast... Glad to hear that you have finally got a reliable macbook!

It's true that the processor wasn't going 100%, but I have the activity monitor in the dock and it showed that both cores were working pretty hard; it was usually between 80 and 90 percent.

good to hear, just got my macbook on the 24th, black with 1g, i love the quietness of it, i installed folding @ home and the system does get hot, even once the fan kicks in, like most OEM's i am sure the thermal paste and heatsink is good, but not made for a cpu running %100 for more long period of time, almost seems like they are using the casing as part of the heatsink.