Macs and Me: Part 5 – MacBook 13″, Black (Early 2008)

(This is the fifth of a nine part, self-indulgent series about me and Apple Macs. The previous parts can be found here: 1, 2, 3, 4. Strap in, and please keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. You’ve been warned.)

OK, maybe I exaggerated a little when referring to my previous MacBook purchase as the most ridiculous. Only a year after the purchase of a glossy white MacBook, a perfectly functional and adequate machine, did I cave and buy another laptop. This was no major upgrade; no leap to a different, superior form factor, or a larger screen, or some other suitable differentiator. No, I traded my glossy white MacBook for a near-identically specced matte black 13″ MacBook (early 2008). Yup, I changed the colour of my MacBook.

Sure, it had double the memory and storage, and a slight CPU speed bump, but it was, ostensibly, the same machine. But black. Matte black. It was also around this time that I picked up a matte black Epiphany Les Paul Junior¹, so I must have had a thing for matte black at the time.

There’s not much more to say about this wholly unnecessary purchase. My previous perfectly adequate laptop had been replaced by a slightly more perfectly adequate one. The finish, whilst awesome looking, was just as bad at betraying greasy fingerprints as the glossy white finish, albeit in a different way. Also, this was the first machine I’d bought from the Apple Refurb Store, so it came in a slightly underwhelming plain brown box², but a corresponding 15% reduction in the ticket price wasn’t to be sniffed at for an unnecessary purchase.

So that was about it. I passed the white MacBook down to Kath, and we finally got rid of the 12″ iBook, venerable old beast that it was.

Hi, my name is Marcus and I have an Apple buying problem.