The Original Generation MacBook Pro Design is Cool

I think the original generation MacBook Pro design is cool. It's got a great retro trendiness to it, and I think a lot of people really like that aesthetic. Take a look at the power button, doesn't that look like the original Siri button? It's got that same retro 2000s look that I think many people would love to see come back in some form. And it's not just the design language that's appealing - the screen on this device is also pretty great. The fact that it runs Mac OS Catalina and has a screen resolution of 2560 by 1600 is a major bonus, especially considering how dirt cheap it is.

But despite its retro charm and solid specs, there are some significant drawbacks to using an original generation MacBook Pro. For one thing, the graphics card is a major issue. In this case, the device comes with a Nvidia 8600 M GT graphics card, which can lead to crippling widespread graphical defects - a problem that was all too common in these devices back in the day. And it's not just a matter of minor annoyances; some users have reported more serious issues with the graphics card failing or causing system crashes.

Another issue is that Apple has a bit of a spotty track record when it comes to supporting older devices. In fact, if you go back and look at every generation of MacBook Pro sold before Steve Jobs's death, you'll find that many of them had widespread graphical issues - some were even completely non-functional. This is a major reason why I wouldn't recommend buying one of these devices; unless you're looking for a retro device to collect or tinker with, it's just not worth the hassle.

But if you do decide to use an original generation MacBook Pro, there are some things to keep in mind. For example, the installation process is relatively straightforward - simply install Mac OS Catalina and save for some post-install patches, and you're good to go. However, this is where the benefits end. The device's graphics issues can be a major problem, especially when it comes to running modern applications like YouTube videos in high definition.

To put this into perspective, try playing a 1080p YouTube video on both the original generation MacBook Pro and a modern unibody model. On the unibody, the video will play smoothly and without issue - but on the older device, you'll see frames dropping left and right as the video tries to render. This is because of the graphics card's limitations, which can cause it to become overwhelmed by more demanding tasks.

In terms of performance, the original generation MacBook Pro is also not exactly ideal. The device comes with DDR2 RAM, which can limit its ability to handle certain tasks or applications - a problem that's becoming increasingly common in older Macs as they're no longer supported by Apple's latest and greatest operating systems. So if you're looking for a reliable and powerful device, the original generation MacBook Pro might not be the best choice.

Overall, while I think the original generation MacBook Pro is a cool piece of hardware with some great retro design elements, its numerous drawbacks make it less than ideal as a daily-use device. Unless you're a die-hard collector or enthusiast who doesn't mind digging through eBay for a vintage find, there are much better options available - and those options are undoubtedly the unibody MacBook Pro models.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enin front of me today are two pre-unibody MacBook Pros this is the first generation from 2006 to 2008. now both of these computers are worth basically nothing you can buy these on eBay for forty dollars in working condition however one of these is an almost completely Obsolete and useless hunk of junk can you guess which is which lighting up that's good what are you doing come on okay there we go oh no a flashing folder all right what's all what is this bunch of nonsense wait a sec is that Mac OS Catalina ow I hit my chin yes it is that is Mac OS Catalina running on a 15 year old non-unibody MacBook Pro let me explain what the heck is going on here because these two machines might look nearly identical but they certainly are not because this is actually the first ever MacBook Pro from early 2006 and this is the last first MacBook Pro from early 2008 because right after this they redesigned it and made it into a unibody and you would be quite surprised how different these machines even though they're just two years apart actually are now this one obviously has a bad hard drive and I tried to reinstall Mac OS but I didn't want to do that and it spat the disc out so you know what screw you buddy I don't care because you kind of suck anyway that's right the first ever MacBook Pro was garbage the first generation MacBook Pro came out as part of Apple's initial transition to Intel in 2006 which they announced with a fair degree of fanfare and to be fair the Fanfare was not without reason Apple was very keen on showing the performance per watt differences between the previous power PC chips and what they could now do with Intel and it was significant the Intel Core Duo was four and a half times faster than the powerpc G5 and they could put it in a new laptop the MacBook Pro now the design for this new laptop was largely carried over from the previous PowerBook G4 aluminum but there were a lot of subtle design changes the display aspect ratio got slightly wider the antennas were Now hidden inside the display for a cleaner look and the ports were updated it was also the first Apple laptop to feature a built-in eyesight camera which was really big back in 2006. and to be fair it was four to five times faster than the power books that preceded it which is really impressive however that first year of the MacBook Pro didn't go terribly smoothly but what is going smoothly is this transition to today's video sponsor today's video is sponsored by software keep a Microsoft certified partner who sells only 100 genuine Microsoft software software keep has loads of options for popular Microsoft Suites including many versions of Microsoft Office for PC and for Mac they also have individual programs like Microsoft Word and PowerPoint as well as certified Windows keys and anti-virus programs but these aren't shady gray Market Keys software keep is a Microsoft certified partner so they stand by the product they're selling with a full service human driven customer service system that doesn't use robots their goal is to provide you with the best possible experience so right now if you want to try software keep use the link in the description below and coupon code lmyt20 to save save twenty percent off your order and now let's get back to the video so the original MacBook Pro seemed great on paper but things started to get weird there was a six week gap between its announcement and when they started shipping and during that time rumors abounded people thought that there were shipping delays that apple had been hiding the real design and it was different all along but in the end one day before original shipping dates started happening Apple mysteriously increased the chip speed of both models of MacBook Pro that were on sale and then they started arriving and their problems became apparent early customers were reporting problems with the airport connectivity flickering displays excessive heat and really bad whining coming from the machines yeah that's that's really bad and so by April 2006 there were five different revisions of the MacBook Pro they even had to start replacing logic boards in some of the early machines so clearly Apple missed the mark on that initial one but even the later variations including this final 2008 version have substantial limitations and there's a reason why they're so cheap on eBay because even though this does have the capability surprisingly of upgrading all the way to Mac OS Catalina that doesn't necessarily mean that you should this is a late 2008 MacBook Pro and it's attempting to start up right now I think this one should be good surprisingly enough original battery still holds charge it's more than I can say for this one and good luck finding a replacement they're they're not really around very much so early 2008 late 2008 pre-unabi body unibody what are the differences well in some ways I think you'd be surprised at how much you can still do on these old pre-unibody MacBook Pros this one for example has a full multi-touch track pad so even though it has the old design with the single big button at the bottom the trackpad surface itself can do all of the same multi-touch gestures found on track pads even today so that's a pretty good Mark for it also the display is identical between the early and late 2008 it's the exact same panel obviously housed behind the unibody glass enclosure versus having these aluminum bezels in all honesty I kind of like the look of the aluminum bezels and they are thinner than the unibody MacBook Pro but that's beside the point this guy even has a dual link DVI port which is good for connecting to Apple's 30 inch Cinema HD display that's an absolutely gorgeous panel 2560 by 1600 and it's quite the attractive retro Computing pair to have this design language MacBook paired with that design language display it just looks great and of course there's the fact that we can actually run Mac OS Catalina on a 15 year old MacBook installation process was completely normal saved for some post install patches bada bing bada boom you're in it acts completely normal and that's where the benefits end unfortunately because Apple had a real a real habit back in the the late Steve Jobs era of shipping some products that or shall we say not up to par all right if you go back to early 2006 and we list out every generation of MacBook that was sold before Steve Jobs's death This is how many of those have crippling widespread graphical defects yeah that's that's not ideal and here's how many of them have fairly common but not as catastrophic Graphics failure yeah that's that's not great Steve not not the best track record there now of course that's just talking about 15-inch MacBook Pros but pretty much any of them can suffer from Graphics issues it was almost ubiquitous and these 2008s are just as bad as the 2011s that you've probably heard of the 2007 and 2008 15 and 17-inch MacBook Pros came with Nvidia 8600 M GT graphics cards now these things have a very similar fate as those later AMD models which means that you can never really rely on one of these gpus and it's a major reason why if you go on eBay type MacBook Pro and sort by Price low to high you will find a bunch of non-working ones of these you can save yourself a lot of time and headache by just getting a unibody and I think it's a shame because I think the original generation MacBook Pro Design is cool I think it's coming back it's got a cool retro trendiness I mean take a look at the power button doesn't that look like the original Siri button it's got that like cool skeuomorphic retro 2000s look that I think a lot of people really like these days and it's got a pretty good screen too I mean the fact that this thing runs Catalina has the same screen resolution and is dirt cheap you would think that would make it more popular but those Graphics issues really hold it back and if I'm being honest even without the graphics issues it it's not a great experience using this device so here's what happens if you try to play a 1080p YouTube video on both of these devices things look like they're going okay this one's playing it pretty decent this uh oh we're uh we're dropping a bunch of frames here folks oh Jesus it's a slideshow it's a complete slideshow this one is a nice playing back just fine this is a difference in these graphics cards also this is using ddr2 Ram so like yeah these are just getting to the point where unless you want to go full on like Linux build Mac OS is is outgrowing them so the original pre-unibody MacBook Pro it's it can be a tempting idea every once in a while I pull this thing out of storage and I go hey you know what I'm going to try to use this you can downgrade it and run El Capitan which they supported natively and you can you can try to get the the most amount of performance out of it but they're just they're just getting to a point where there's not a ton you can do so do I recommend buying one of these devices definitely not I mean these are the type of things where if you find it just being left in the trash it's a fun retro device you can put an old copy of snow leopard on it and have a great time but if you want a device to use primary or secondary just buy a unibody it should be that should be my tagline at this point just buy a unibody they're great even though they're 11 12 13 14 15 years old they get the job done that's the unibody MacBook Pro tagline unibody MacBook Pro they get the job done so thank you guys so much for watching this video let me know in the comments below if you've had one of these in the past and let me know how long you were able to keep using it for before you upgraded or if you're a real crazy guy and you're using one of these right now put that in the comments below because that's impressive thank you for watching like comment subscribe I'll see you in the next one thank youin front of me today are two pre-unibody MacBook Pros this is the first generation from 2006 to 2008. now both of these computers are worth basically nothing you can buy these on eBay for forty dollars in working condition however one of these is an almost completely Obsolete and useless hunk of junk can you guess which is which lighting up that's good what are you doing come on okay there we go oh no a flashing folder all right what's all what is this bunch of nonsense wait a sec is that Mac OS Catalina ow I hit my chin yes it is that is Mac OS Catalina running on a 15 year old non-unibody MacBook Pro let me explain what the heck is going on here because these two machines might look nearly identical but they certainly are not because this is actually the first ever MacBook Pro from early 2006 and this is the last first MacBook Pro from early 2008 because right after this they redesigned it and made it into a unibody and you would be quite surprised how different these machines even though they're just two years apart actually are now this one obviously has a bad hard drive and I tried to reinstall Mac OS but I didn't want to do that and it spat the disc out so you know what screw you buddy I don't care because you kind of suck anyway that's right the first ever MacBook Pro was garbage the first generation MacBook Pro came out as part of Apple's initial transition to Intel in 2006 which they announced with a fair degree of fanfare and to be fair the Fanfare was not without reason Apple was very keen on showing the performance per watt differences between the previous power PC chips and what they could now do with Intel and it was significant the Intel Core Duo was four and a half times faster than the powerpc G5 and they could put it in a new laptop the MacBook Pro now the design for this new laptop was largely carried over from the previous PowerBook G4 aluminum but there were a lot of subtle design changes the display aspect ratio got slightly wider the antennas were Now hidden inside the display for a cleaner look and the ports were updated it was also the first Apple laptop to feature a built-in eyesight camera which was really big back in 2006. and to be fair it was four to five times faster than the power books that preceded it which is really impressive however that first year of the MacBook Pro didn't go terribly smoothly but what is going smoothly is this transition to today's video sponsor today's video is sponsored by software keep a Microsoft certified partner who sells only 100 genuine Microsoft software software keep has loads of options for popular Microsoft Suites including many versions of Microsoft Office for PC and for Mac they also have individual programs like Microsoft Word and PowerPoint as well as certified Windows keys and anti-virus programs but these aren't shady gray Market Keys software keep is a Microsoft certified partner so they stand by the product they're selling with a full service human driven customer service system that doesn't use robots their goal is to provide you with the best possible experience so right now if you want to try software keep use the link in the description below and coupon code lmyt20 to save save twenty percent off your order and now let's get back to the video so the original MacBook Pro seemed great on paper but things started to get weird there was a six week gap between its announcement and when they started shipping and during that time rumors abounded people thought that there were shipping delays that apple had been hiding the real design and it was different all along but in the end one day before original shipping dates started happening Apple mysteriously increased the chip speed of both models of MacBook Pro that were on sale and then they started arriving and their problems became apparent early customers were reporting problems with the airport connectivity flickering displays excessive heat and really bad whining coming from the machines yeah that's that's really bad and so by April 2006 there were five different revisions of the MacBook Pro they even had to start replacing logic boards in some of the early machines so clearly Apple missed the mark on that initial one but even the later variations including this final 2008 version have substantial limitations and there's a reason why they're so cheap on eBay because even though this does have the capability surprisingly of upgrading all the way to Mac OS Catalina that doesn't necessarily mean that you should this is a late 2008 MacBook Pro and it's attempting to start up right now I think this one should be good surprisingly enough original battery still holds charge it's more than I can say for this one and good luck finding a replacement they're they're not really around very much so early 2008 late 2008 pre-unabi body unibody what are the differences well in some ways I think you'd be surprised at how much you can still do on these old pre-unibody MacBook Pros this one for example has a full multi-touch track pad so even though it has the old design with the single big button at the bottom the trackpad surface itself can do all of the same multi-touch gestures found on track pads even today so that's a pretty good Mark for it also the display is identical between the early and late 2008 it's the exact same panel obviously housed behind the unibody glass enclosure versus having these aluminum bezels in all honesty I kind of like the look of the aluminum bezels and they are thinner than the unibody MacBook Pro but that's beside the point this guy even has a dual link DVI port which is good for connecting to Apple's 30 inch Cinema HD display that's an absolutely gorgeous panel 2560 by 1600 and it's quite the attractive retro Computing pair to have this design language MacBook paired with that design language display it just looks great and of course there's the fact that we can actually run Mac OS Catalina on a 15 year old MacBook installation process was completely normal saved for some post install patches bada bing bada boom you're in it acts completely normal and that's where the benefits end unfortunately because Apple had a real a real habit back in the the late Steve Jobs era of shipping some products that or shall we say not up to par all right if you go back to early 2006 and we list out every generation of MacBook that was sold before Steve Jobs's death This is how many of those have crippling widespread graphical defects yeah that's that's not ideal and here's how many of them have fairly common but not as catastrophic Graphics failure yeah that's that's not great Steve not not the best track record there now of course that's just talking about 15-inch MacBook Pros but pretty much any of them can suffer from Graphics issues it was almost ubiquitous and these 2008s are just as bad as the 2011s that you've probably heard of the 2007 and 2008 15 and 17-inch MacBook Pros came with Nvidia 8600 M GT graphics cards now these things have a very similar fate as those later AMD models which means that you can never really rely on one of these gpus and it's a major reason why if you go on eBay type MacBook Pro and sort by Price low to high you will find a bunch of non-working ones of these you can save yourself a lot of time and headache by just getting a unibody and I think it's a shame because I think the original generation MacBook Pro Design is cool I think it's coming back it's got a cool retro trendiness I mean take a look at the power button doesn't that look like the original Siri button it's got that like cool skeuomorphic retro 2000s look that I think a lot of people really like these days and it's got a pretty good screen too I mean the fact that this thing runs Catalina has the same screen resolution and is dirt cheap you would think that would make it more popular but those Graphics issues really hold it back and if I'm being honest even without the graphics issues it it's not a great experience using this device so here's what happens if you try to play a 1080p YouTube video on both of these devices things look like they're going okay this one's playing it pretty decent this uh oh we're uh we're dropping a bunch of frames here folks oh Jesus it's a slideshow it's a complete slideshow this one is a nice playing back just fine this is a difference in these graphics cards also this is using ddr2 Ram so like yeah these are just getting to the point where unless you want to go full on like Linux build Mac OS is is outgrowing them so the original pre-unibody MacBook Pro it's it can be a tempting idea every once in a while I pull this thing out of storage and I go hey you know what I'm going to try to use this you can downgrade it and run El Capitan which they supported natively and you can you can try to get the the most amount of performance out of it but they're just they're just getting to a point where there's not a ton you can do so do I recommend buying one of these devices definitely not I mean these are the type of things where if you find it just being left in the trash it's a fun retro device you can put an old copy of snow leopard on it and have a great time but if you want a device to use primary or secondary just buy a unibody it should be that should be my tagline at this point just buy a unibody they're great even though they're 11 12 13 14 15 years old they get the job done that's the unibody MacBook Pro tagline unibody MacBook Pro they get the job done so thank you guys so much for watching this video let me know in the comments below if you've had one of these in the past and let me know how long you were able to keep using it for before you upgraded or if you're a real crazy guy and you're using one of these right now put that in the comments below because that's impressive thank you for watching like comment subscribe I'll see you in the next one thank you\n"