2007 - The black Mac: Intel MacBook

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While the Duo is the Apple laptop I've owned the longest, this MacBook is the one that's had the most use under my ownership. Not all this use has been from me over the years, but I'm happy to report that it's getting plenty of use from me again now - all due to a random discovery that I made in researching this piece.

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I didn't buy this MacBook, but it belonged to a company I once ran - having been bought originally for use by one of the sales team to demo software. The irony was that the software we sold only ran on Windows, but thanks to Apple's switch to Intel architecture in 2006, their computer line of this era could run Windows natively using the Bootcamp feature in MacOS. When my colleague left the company, I inherited it, but not being much of an Apple fan at the time gave it to my assistant to use (running Windows still, of course), while I pursued my fondness for Dell machines. When my assistant also finally moved over to a Dell, the MacBook ended up in a cupboard for nearly a year, before I rescued it from being thrown out during an office relocation, and gave it to my mother. It was under her watch that it developed a temperamental boot issue, not serious enough to actually be much of a problem it turned out, but enough to bring wobbles to her confidence with it, and so like a bad penny, the MacBook came back to me. What did my mother get then? Well, I bought her a Dell.

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I subsequently nuked the hard drive, and having re-installed MacOS (10.7 - the latest it supports), it ended up being put into a drawer in the comms cabinet at home as I found it useful having a laptop with an ethernet port that I could just grab to use to diagnose network problems without worry for what data or apps (or viruses) might get in the way of getting the problem fixed. There it remained for about five years, being used exactly twice during this period, until about two years ago when I decided that having a clean-install laptop wouldn't just be useful for network diagnosis but focus work too. I found a copy of Microsoft Office (2011 edition), and so my MacBook began its second life as a word processor.

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Why am I telling you this story?

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Well, I suspect it actually reflects the lifecycle of most laptops; and perhaps also the very one that you've unwrapped just a few days' ago. They are bought enthusiastically by someone who craved that particular design (certainly true of my former colleague Ben), they then get passed as a hand-me-down to someone who doesn't quite appreciate their full glory (very true of me). As the years go by their usage diminishes and many are broken or simply scrapped at this stage. Those that survive are destined to become curiosity pieces, or if lucky, will be relegated to single-purpose devices. Whereas the Duo really can't do much that is useful today other than word processing, I quickly learned that my first-gen MacBook had so much more about it - but it took me a while to make that realisation.

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As a word processor, I rather fell in love with the first-gen MacBook. While I've since rediscovered that the squarer screen proportions of earlier laptops suit the task of writing better, this MacBook still has a decent screen - about half the vertical resolution of a modern device - but more than adequate for most purposes. It's also the first MacBook to have a decent keyboard. I've by now gotten used to the keyboard on the Duo, although the fact that it's been miniaturised to fit the dimensions of the case gives me a slight hand cramp for prolonged use, and the keys are also slightly 'squidgy' (which is a technical term that causes the user to bang hard down on the keys in order to be sure that the keystroke actually registers)! As for the keyboards on the G3 and G4 devices, well they are a bit ''meh'' but the 2007-era MacBook has an excellent keyboard. I'm fairly sure it's the same mechanism as my later 2012-era device, but without the advantage of a keyboard backlight. This is a feature that I'm surprised I miss as much as I do, but on the odd occasion that I really need to find a key in the dark (usually the function keys - I can never remember where F5 is without looking), I just tilt the screen so it illuminates the key caps sufficiently to be able to read the key-cap labels.

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So, the keyboard passes the test, and the trackpad would also if it weren't for the fact that Apple were still even in 2007 denying that there was any utility in a right mouse click. Older Apple devices such as this require you to use the CTRL key simultaneously with a click on the trackpad to simulate the right click, which is especially irritating if you do use Bootcamp to run Windows on the device, given Microsoft's stronger affinity to the secondary mouse button than that of Apple. At least Apple by this point had abandoned their quirky arrangement for cursor keys which continue to tax me every time I use one of their classic era keyboards.

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As for the rest of the hardware - it's what you'd expect from a MacBook. Well designed, well-engineered, and a high build quality evident from the fact that it has survived so well despite so many years of use. It's battery still holds about 2? hours of charge, not far off what it would have as new, and helpfully shares the feature that the iBook has that it can be easily swapped out using a slot screw on the base - although the 2007 MacBook's version is plastic rather than the iBook's sturdy metal disc - and so therefore has become quite dog-eared over the years. Removing the battery also reveals the compartment for the other user replaceable parts that Apple envisaged: memory and hard drive upgrades can be made here. In fact, this is the latest-era MacBook that had upgradable components without resorting to disassembly of the case. As you no doubt know, from this point onwards Apple started to make it increasingly more difficult to perform upgrades - the unibody Aluminium machines like my 2012-era devices required first the bottom panel to be removed by screwdriver, and then subsequent machines a special screwhead to further discourage user-servicing.

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As for the hard drive in the 2007-era MacBook, it's a standard 2.5" SATA unit which can be readily swapped out with a modern new one, although with the switch to solid-state cards fitted directly onto motherboards, this format will likely disappear from the consumer market before too long and be the preserve only for servers and network storage devices. While today's latest mechanical drives that can fit the MacBook top 5 TB (5,000 GB) in capacity, the stock unit that is still fitted is a mere 250 GB in comparison. Still, I have a spare 1 TB SSD which I'll eventually get around to adding to this machine, and when I do so, I'll be syncing my data onto the laptop so I have full offline access to all my files.

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This being a relatively modern machine (a mere 15 years old), and on the Intel platform, software is still much more readily available for the 2007-era MacBook despite it running quite a dated version of MacOS. The plus point for me is the fact that I can run (albeit an old version) of Resilio Sync, so when the time comes to transplant a larger capacity disk, I'll easily be able to synchronise my files between the MacBook and all my other newer machines.

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I bet most of you who are reading this use Dropbox for cross-platform file synchronisation, or perhaps you've tied yourself into G-Drive, iCloud, or OneDrive? I also fell for cheap Cloud data storage until moving to a rural location on a limited bandwidth internet connection made me realise that a fallacy that web platforms can be. Leaving aside the fact that my wife has spent nearly the cost of a new Apple laptop since we've known each other on her Dropbox membership (I've as yet been able to convince her of the merits of peer-to-peer file transfer, and fully expect I will fail with you also - but please, hear me out) - it's also a very inefficient use of storage and bandwidth if you spare a moment to consider how it all works:

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Using a Cloud-sync platform, every time I save or create a new file, a copy of it is sent up to the datacentre in the ether, likely many hundreds if not thousands of miles away, and then once safely there is replicated many times across the service provider's datacentres, so, in the unlikely event that you find yourself needing access to your data via their web interface while on holiday in Tenerife, you are able to retrieve it with minimal delay. The holiday snaps you'd have made a generation ago had a single point of failure in the roll of film, but today the solution to this risk is overengineered to the point of it being almost impossible for you to lose any data given that it is replicated across many tens, if not hundreds, of mechanical disks spinning at 7,200rpm all over the planet. While all this might make sense from a disaster recovery and access perspective, when you do want access to a file on another machine, then the process happens in reverse - the file is transmitted back to you from one of these remote storage locations. If, like in my wife's case, you have multiple computers at home then this triggers a back and forth of data transfer that literally cripples our internet connection. A single 5 MB image file might result in 40 MB of data being transferred. 5 MB up, and then 25 MB down plus an overhead back and forth to check everything is in order. In my case, I have about ten devices that I regularly use, and then a few other devices kept safely at places I travel to frequently, so my bandwidth consumption for a single MB of storage would be really dramatic.

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The alternative is a peer-to-peer data transfer method which is the digital equivalent of buying locally grown food. Rather than my data being sent up and down the internet pipes to my house when two devices on my home network are synchronising; all the data transfers happen locally - between the two devices - and are end-to-end encrypted also. Simple, safe and secure - oh, and free - as what is the point of paying for Cloud storage when I have abundant data capacity on each of my hard drives that I carry around with me?

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I've often thought about the phenomenon over the years of how wasteful modern data architecture is both from a computation and data storage perspective. Think of all those billions of computers that each have a copy of the Microsoft Windows logo that they access just once a day, and until the dawn of solid stage storage, were stored on mechanical spinning disks simply consuming space and electricity unnecessarily. If you assume that the Windows 7 logo is about 1 MB in size (the Windows 10/ 11 surely must be smaller?), then multiplied by the 100 million computers still estimated to be running that operating system, then that's 100 Terabytes of red, yellow, blue and green squares around the planet. Windows 10/ 11 is installed on about 1.5 billion computers, so just imagine how much bigger the impact is for every megabyte of storage that's wasted?

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The converse of all this is something which is stored and set locally that probably doesn't need to be: time.

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I bet the average British household has 50 or more devices which keep time. Whether the time is precisely set is rather irrelevant, what matters is that they should all be in sync with each other. Yet I'd guess half of them only have the facility to be set manually, and the other half require an internet connection to display the right time. Atomic clocks work on the basis that they pick up a high powered, and centralised radio frequency that is constantly transmitting - but wouldn't it be more efficient to use low-power local radio frequencies such as Z-wave or Zigbee to keep time in sync around local hubs and leave the internet time lookup to devices which need internet access as a matter of course and everyone else can essentially piggy-back off them? Solving this problem isn't going to save the planet, but if you think about it long enough then you'll hopefully agree that the way we architect these systems just doesn't make sense.

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So why don't we all use peer-to-peer file synchronisation?

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Well, peer-to-peer has a bit of a bad name in polite circles, being the way by which illegal music and movie sharing was facilitated by platforms like Napster around the turn of the century. Open file sharing platforms like that from BitTorrent make it harder for digital rights owners to control the distribution of their content, and unlike the days of optical and magnetic media such as DVD and VHS, record labels and movie studios don't actually want to distribute their content at all - they just want to lock you into their Cloud platform and keep you paying that monthly recurring fee. The cost-of-living crises that we're now facing is likely to be a major downer for some media companies, as many people will surely now be turning off their Netflix and Disney+ subscriptions as they tighten their belts? But what of Dropbox, iCloud and OneDrive? Well, the companies behind these platforms have you bent over a barrel. If you want to preserve your data, then you'll keep paying, and just like how human psychology keeps self-storage companies in business into perpetuity as no-one will ever default on their payment for fear of losing their family heirlooms, so too will you probably sooner go hungry than miss a payment to Dropbox. Even though you likely have all the data at home saved many times over, even though you're very unlikely to be revisiting the photos of that summer trip you made to Greece in 2013 any time soon.?

All this is a digression, yet serves to frame the gratitude I have that Resilio Sync will run on my 2007 MacBook which therefore keeps it a fully useful member of my stable. As for the apps that were built into MacOS, I'm not so lucky. This, being the oldest Apple laptop generation with built-in webcam, has the FaceTime app bundled with MacOS when installed. But just like FaceTime on an original iPad won't enable you to call grandma this Christmas, neither will the version on my 2007 MacBook. This is the earliest manifestation of the problem of Cloud-tethering that I have in my laptop collection, a problem that is much more likely to be found with smart-home devices such as the appalling examples of Belkin, Sonos and other 'smart' device companies generating masses of e-waste by careless planning, lazy design, and downright deliberate sabotage. The reason this triggers me so strongly is because I was brought up with the belief that if you should save up for what you need, buy the highest quality thing you can afford, look after it, and repair it when required - and then repeat for ever. Doing so means that things will last you a lifetime.

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While this was once possible with computers, as proven by all my older Apple laptops that still, to a greater-or-lesser extent, work just as well as they did when new, this is not true of my 2007-era MacBook or any of the later devices - as once a software company has removed 'support' for a Cloud-tethered application then that functionality is gone forever. My ire with Apple over FaceTime could easily be targeted at Zoom which also no longer supports old versions of their video conferencing platform and thus renders my MacBook redundant of video capability despite a perfectly adequate built-in webcam. I accept though that software companies have a difficult task in supporting all the multitude of devices and operating system combinations that users might have, so can somewhat excuse Zoom - but in Apple's case – since they are responsible for both the hardware and the software - it's simply indefensible.

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What should they do differently? Well, for starters they should clearly communicate the planned lifespan of their devices at point of purchase and we should all pressurise them to extend this far beyond where it currently sits. Apple currently treats devices that it doesn't currently sell as 'vintage' and once they have been off the shelves for seven years or more, then they are unsupported. Given their propensity to replace models in each category every year, this means Apple's definition of the lifespan of your iPhone, iPad, Watch, MacBook, iMac, AppleTV or AirPods is a maximum of eight years.

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Let's pause for a moment on this point. What you've just unwrapped for Christmas this year will likely be e-waste by the end of the decade.

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As for their ability to make money from us all, well, assuming you have two iPads and two MacBooks and at an average entry-level cost of ￡500/ $600/ €600 for the range, this means they can be pretty sure of ￡40/ $50/ €50 per month from you for life. They are also betting on the fact that while your data can be transferred across to the Linux or Windows ecosystem at a push (albeit a rather cumbersome one), the apps you've bought and music/ movies you've licenced are not at all portable; so, every time you spend with them you tie yourself in further and tighter. Of course, investors know this also, which is why Apple is the darling of the public markets and the most valuable technology company in the world.

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All this is fabulous for Apple's revenue predictability and thus their share price. The fact that Apple laptops have changed less dramatically in the period 2007 to 2027 than they did between 1987 and 2007 is evidence that there is simply a much lower incentive for them to innovate now than there was back then. To be sure, MacBooks will continue to get lighter, they will be cooler (from a thermal perspective), they will be thinner, and they will be more powerful. But they won't get appreciably better, not least for which because they don't need to do - all Apple need do is to keep switching off Cloud support for devices over ten years old, encourage their software ecosystem to do the same, and that will keep you spending. It's exactly this commercial driver that will push Apple products to become increasingly more expensive with time also. They'll no doubt try and launch a 'value' range to avoid the criticism for being overtly ostentatious products only for the affluent, but these principles of techno-feudalism will hold true - it'll just become a two-tier tribute system that we all pay each year to our overlords from Cupertino.

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Apple has sold over 20 million laptops a year for the last few years, which translates into over 30,000 tonnes of e-waste that will be created as these devices reach the end of their Tim Cook-determined life. But I'm not worried so much about the e-waste implications of Apple's business model, it's the social injustice that it causes that really gets my goat. If you're a struggling family and want to give your kids a laptop to go to university, there will be a lot of pressure on you to buy them an Apple laptop and so you might decide (sensibly) to look on platforms like eBay to buy second-hand. Second-hand prices of Apple devices hold up well as long as they are able to still run current operating systems and software, but as soon as support is removed then their price drops like a stone. Given you might spend ￡150-200 for a good quality MacBook that's still has all its Cloud faculties accessible - you might only get a year or two of use out of it before one of the main web services withdraws its support and you're left with an expensive paperweight. ￡75-￡100 per year computer cost is much better than the ￡500 per year for a user who prefers to buy new, but the truth is that all this is fully unnecessary. The machines are engineered well enough to last a lifetime, as my earlier reviews have proven - and very little of your likely requirements will ever be beyond the capabilities of a device from the 2007-era or beyond.

Think about it? What do you do with a laptop today that you couldn't 15 years ago? I bet the answer is nothing, yet it is almost impossible to still do these things regardless of how well looked after your 'vintage' device is.

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OK – rant over, back to the review:

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While you can't look purely at CPU clock-speed any more as a comparator of relative performance, the fact that the 2007-era MacBook has a modern-ish 2 GHz+ CPU and 4 GB RAM is indicative also have how progress has plateaued. Modern machines derive their performance improvements from parallelising multiple 'cores' and providing faster 'bus' speed to components such as memory. Even in my own benchmarking the newest Apple devices are some 25 times more powerful than my 2007-era MacBook, but this does not equate to 25x the capability. Yes, if you're editing professional-grade video files and want to do real-time after-effects in 4K then you'll really appreciate the extra oomph of a modern machine, but most of us don't work for Hollywood or aspire to this standard with our home movie editing skills, and so all this extra capability might be flash, but is function-less.

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So why did I relegate my MacBook to light word processing tasks if it's got all the capability that I need? Well, again - the blame is pointed to the modern web, but not like with the iBook where even with a modern web browser such as the Wayfarer app built into MorphOS taxes the hardware too much. You see, in the case of the 2007-era MacBook it's simply a case that Apple gave up on a compatible version of Safari and so have everyone else with their own browsers. I long-ago moved over from Safari as my browser of choice preferring a cross-platform solution, and you'll have learned enough about me by now from reading this to not be surprised when I say that I refuse to use Google Chrome. My loyalty is therefore to Firefox, given its relative security-conscious credentials compared to Chromium-derived browsers like Edge, and the fact that it has strong cross-platform history, bookmarks, and other setting syncing between devices. The latest version of Firefox that will run on MacOS 10.7 is version 45 however, and this version won't let me login using my Firefox account. Another example of the evil of Cloud-services being switched off for devices that once were perfectly happy using them. What's more severe though is that Firefox 45 is so long-in-the-tooth that it's quite hard to browse the modern web, and especially websites that have Cloudflare or similar services to cache their content simply won't load.

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If you're a commercial organisation that has limited resources, then you'll of course have to prioritise the browsers you support to being those run by the highest concentration of your target customer base. But when adding functionality to your website, you should be very conscious of what happens to the web experience for those users you are leaving behind. The beauty of the web in the 1990s was its universality and the levelling that it offered all users. The web of the 2020s is becoming a very different place, and the constant nagging to upgrade your browser is perhaps alleviating cyber-security risks but does so at the cost of fragmenting web users into the digital haves and have-nots.

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Unable to use Safari or Firefox, I had given up on web browsing on my 2007-era MacBook, that is until I discovered 'Firefox Legacy', a project from ParrotGeek software which is the software house of Ethan Nelson-Moore. What Ethan has done is continued to 'build' the latest Firefox source code for older versions of MacOS. Not all the way to the latest version 100+ that I use on my newer Macs, but to version 68 - high enough to still be able to login with my Firefox account and more importantly be able to browse 100% of the modern web, snag-free (for now).

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Having access to the full modern web gives me full ability to do everything that I would do on a brand-new machine, save for specialist CPU-intensive software such as video editing or 3D design apps. YouTube? You've got it. Amazon Prime Video? No problem. Even F1TV via VPN to circumvent the location restrictions - it laps it up! So far, the only issues I've had is that Slack have removed browser support from Firefox 88 and below (more on this later), and Zoom simply craps out when its running in a browser. This incidentally is why it's always better to host video conferences on dedicated 'fat' clients such as Teams or Zoom rather than Google Hangouts. Fat clients tend to be much more efficient with CPU and bandwidth as the team at EthicsGrade discovered last year in our research into the energy efficiency of the various platforms. We also discovered that Zoom was 2.5x more efficient than Teams under similar circumstances - but all this is mute when neither operate on the 2007-era MacBook.

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If I could still use Zoom and Slack on it, then there would be no reason why I couldn't use this machine as my daily-driver as soon as I had upped the hard drive capacity. But the Cloud-vendor sabotage proves to be a deal-breaker - and so the first-gen MacBook today lives beside the sofa as a "I just need to quickly look that up" device - a somewhat clumsy iPad alternative.

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