Unibody Macbook: how's it working?

[PatrickVogeli]

Hi there,

my girlfriend is considering getting one of the new macbooks, the normal one, not the pro.

I've seen in the wiki that there seem to be some problems, like shuting down and rebooting sometimes hanging. Also battery life seems to be very bad, and no backlight adjustment.

So, can anybody with a new macbook confirm those issues? How's it working for you? Sound, suspend, hibernate, etc?

thanks a bunch

[WinterWeaver]

I have a standard Macbook, running Ubuntu withou any of the problems you mention. Note however that there are some tweaks one have to do initially, but once that's done, all is fine.

I have to also state that I dont have one of the shiny new macbooks. Mine was bought in June, before the release of the pretty new ones.

Another thing I should mention, I'm running 8.04 Hardy, NOT Interpid.
So my experience is only related to Hardy.

Though, I'd have to say, even if you get the macbook, and dont put ubuntu on, it's still a good buy.

hope it helps,

WW

[PatrickVogeli]

thanx!

But I'm mostly interested in the new unibody macbook: anybody out there with one of those??

[jeyaganesh]

Two days back, there is a news at www.engadget.com that reported performance of Macbook Pro (i think) getting slower when it is connected only with wire without any battery in it. The processor is programmed to work slower when connected with wire.

Moreover, there are rumours about release of new Apple's OS Snow Leopard on January '09. Another rumour is about multi-touch imac on January.

I planned to wait for that. Last year also I waited for release of new imac and happened to bought Dell desktop.

[ltHank]

...performance of Macbook Pro (i think) getting slower when it is connected only with wire without any battery in it. The processor is programmed to work slower when connected with wire...

This is true, according to Apple.com. They claim the reason is that when running with the power adapter only, the computer can attempt to draw more electricity than may be provided at any one moment. The reason for this is that the electricity running through an outlet is not the most consistent in output. I don't recall exactly what it is that is lacking (I'm no electrician), but because of the unstable current/voltage/w/e it could be theoretically bad for the computer.

With a battery in, the computer can draw any extra power from the battery without hassles - the battery provides a consistent, steady current/voltage/w/e that the computer can draw from as needed.

This is supposed to protect the hardware.

[juanstiller]

Hi there, i bought the macbook unibody 2.0, 2 gb ram, 150gb harddrive, i am really satisfied at the moment honestly i think it was the most wise computer purchase of my life, i ve been suffering microsoft based notebooks and tried debian, ubuntu, redhat and fedora with not so good results as with this notebook. The battery started lasting 4 hours, but every time i used it a little more the time is growing now i can use it for 5 hours without any trouble. I havent got not a single reboot or shutdown and i can hibernate without any problem. The only things i think are not that good is the keyboard cos i am used to pc keyboards, some punctuation marks that i use since in spanish we use tilde' s a lot and the way of using them it s just a little more slow if you are used to type pretty fast. But IMHO i would buy it again without thinking.

Hope it helps.

[maflynn]

I have a unibody MacBook Pro (2.53Ghz 4 gig ram) running kubuntu 9.04.

I've found little problems with installing/configuring ubuntu to run on my MBP. I found this link to be very helpful and handy to deal with some of the specific hardware needs of a unibody Mac. For instance how do you right click on the touchpad.

The issues I have so far are waking up from sleep, the lack of switching to the integrated GPU on my MBP and rebooting. Other then that its been a very stable and fast OS.