A Not-so-vintage 2007 Black MacBook

[kem554991]

I just won a used May, 2007 black MacBook on eBay for $355. While it's not vintage, it's certainly an upgrade from my G4 MDD tower, which is perfectly functional, but nonetheless beginning to show it's age. This one has a 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, and a bad battery. I'm pretty sure it's running Leopard, since the seller indicated he had done a fresh installation of whatever OS was on the original install disks. No matter what it's running, I'll be upgrading to Snow Leopard and then to Lion. The next thing on the agenda is to get one of those $30 batteries from eBay until I can get a $130 OEM battery from Apple.

Link to the auction (now closed):

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-MacBook-13-3-Laptop-MB063LL-A-May-2007-Great-condition-/170754958355?pt=Apple_Laptops&hash=item27c1c9e413#ht_3459wt_922

 

[tmtomh]

Congrats - looks like a great machine.

 

[kem554991]

Thanks! My thoughts exactly. You can't beat a MacBook like that with that little wear to the keyboard and trackpad, bad battery or not!

 

[Cosmo]

That's good machine! The black is a beauty and getting rare. My wife's using late 2007 C2D as well.

 

[LCGuy]

Nice score, the 2007 MacBooks are still a great machine, especially in black. I did a Blackbook conversion on my Late 2007 nearly 12 months ago and I haven't looked back.

For what its worth, since its a Mid 2007, if he has reinstalled it using the original installation discs, it'll have Tiger on it - Leopard didn't start shipping on the MacBooks until the Late 2007 MacBook came out.

 

[kem554991]

I always liked the black version, and this happened to be the best deal in my price range. I realized after my last post that there was no way the Mid 2007 model came with Leopard, so I was pretty sure it had Tiger, but I appreciate the confirmation. This was actually my second choice auction. The first one I bid on was another black MacBook of the same model and specs, but it had a good battery and it was signed by Steve Wozniak, which the seller offered to authenticate with a signed letter and pictures of Wozniak signing it. The seller had apparently been working on an animated series for which Wozniak had done a guest voice. When that auction went out of my price range, I placed my bid on this and won the same day. PayPal was confirmed today, so it should ship from Norfolk tommorow or the next day and arrive here in San Antonio within a week.

 

[Cosmo]

Indeed the late 2007 Macbook (Santa Rosa) came with Leopard as it was released at the time. I remember i was waiting for Leopard to be released to order the Macbook from apple. Even our sales guy printed some promotional T-Shirts for "Mac OS 10.5 - Leopard".

 

[LCGuy]

Yeah, I did the same thing - I waited about 3 months from when I had the funds to get the machine up until the release of Leopard, so I wouldn't have to buy it...at about that time I also heard rumours of new Santa Rosa MacBooks being released...so I waited an extra week or two, and indeed they were released...the Santa Rosa based machines are quite a step up from the GMA950 models (given that they can support twice the amount of RAM, for one thing), so I'm glad I waited.

 

[Scott Baret]

Fellow BlackBook owner here. Although I find I'm not using it as much with the iPad and MacBook Air around, it's still a solid machine. I have the Santa Rosa model, which I bought new in December 2007.

A hidden perk of the black MacBook is the resistance to the nasty staining common to white MacBooks and iBooks. I've seen some pretty ugly ones in laptop carts around the schools.

It's still a solid machine today. I upgraded it to Lion almost immediately and find it runs it just as well as it did Leopard and Snow Leopard. The black color also turns a lot of heads, since they aren't really that common.

Out of curiosity, how long of a battery life is everyone getting with their BlackBooks? I'm getting about 3 hours max, which seems to have fallen off a lot from where it had been when new despite the battery reading in at 91% of capacity. (EDIT: This is on the original battery, now four years old).

 

[mcdermd]

That's a pretty old battery. How many charge cycles is that? On my (fairly) new battery (20 charge cycles) in a Late 2008 2.1GHz Macbook, I'm getting about 3.5-4 hours with heavy wifi usage.

 

[LCGuy]

Ah, yes - that was another reason as to why I converted mine to a Blackbook rather than getting new white case parts to replace the cracked ones - after 3 years my MacBook had gotten pretty grubby, even though I cleaned it on a regular basis. As you said, the black case hides the dirt and stains pretty well.

In regards to battery life - my original battery still got about 2.5 hours up until it started expanding in November. It had somewhere around 300 cycles on it from memory. I'm now using an even older battery that originally came from a Mid-2007 MacBook that got scrapped for parts, and it actually gives me 3 hours. Has 583 cycles, apparently. Pretty damn good for a machine that'll be coming up to 5 years old this year.

 

[mcdermd]

3 hours at 583 cycles is incredible.

The opposite extreme is the battery I had in my MacBook prior to the current battery. It got to 14 charge cycles before Lion decided it would no longer charge the battery saying it need to be replaced. The Apple Store actually came through for me and (reluctantly) replaced the Apple-branded battery even though I bought it new online from a third party.

 

[LCGuy]

Well thats what it says, anyway - I'm not sure if maybe something's screwed up with the cycle count and its reporting more cycles than what its really had....but I do get about 3 hours out of it. I got the battery out of a machine I stripped 12 months ago so I have no idea as to its history.

 

[sunder]

It's a good little machine. I'd replace the hard drive with one of the seagate hybrid SSD/RD 500G drives. Or an SSD, or both (you can get sleds on amazon.com for about $15-$20 that will let your replace the optical drive with an SSD.)

 

[Cosmo]

The battery on my wife's Macbook broke down some 8 months ago. It just started to swallow bigger, maybe 2mm from the side so far the trackpad did not work anymore. At times also the machine just booted up itself, i thought it was dead otherwise before i notised the whole machine wasn't level on the desk! I didn't fight with Apple about it, didn't want to ruin my day on phone so i just bought myself an 27" iMac (signature) and gave the Macbook to my wife, who's using it without battery (no need to move it). It's running really nice 10.7 Lion and Windows 7 x86 on bootcamp. Memory was upgraded to 4Gb long time ago. Another problem seems to be the topcase. There is a crack on the corner, but i think the replacements are no longer valid for it?

 

[LCGuy]

I'm pretty sure that Apple will still give you a free top case if you take it to an Apple Store.

 

[wardsenatorfe92]

I have a E. '08 Black MacBook and it's been doing very good, even better since I finally upgraded it to Snow Leopard. Over the years I've only seen very few of them around, so I feel very glad that I decided to buy it rather than the late 2008 unibody MacBook when I had the opportunity. My only complaint is the case shows fingerprints too easily but I'm used to wiping it off... I still like it better than the white though.

And yes, I can confirm that Apple is still replacing the top case on MacBooks. I had a friend that bought a MacBook recently that had cracks around the palm rest and Apple replaced the top case, no questions asked, a few months ago.

 

[kem554991]

Found out today that the sellers PayPal was frozen, so he should finally ship in the next two days.

 

[Scott Baret]

Just ran Coconut Battery on mine. Here's the stats:

752 load cycles.

Now down to 85% capacity, 4312 mAh (original capacity was 5020 mAh)

Gets 3 hours on average.

Original battery, 51 months from manufacture date (purchased in Dec. 07)

Should comment about use patterns, just in case that plays a role:

Primary machine from Dec 07 - Dec 10

Has been used occasionally over the past year, maybe 2-3 times a week

Typically gets charged when the battery is near depletion unless it's only being unplugged for a little bit. Rarely charged at, say, 50%. (This is true of all of my battery-powered devices except the Air, which I use in the field a lot and just plug in at night regardless of what it's standing at; if I can, though, I do run it to 5% before charging it).