There's a guy I did some booksetting corrections for a long time ago. He had a unibody 17" MBP and I met him at Starbucks for a few hours. Used his 17" with QuarkXPress 8 to make the corrections there in the cafe. I guess he was some sort of contractor or something, but these were Honeywell manuals for flight technology used in aircraft. That was my first experience with the unibodies. At the time I was still solidly PowerPC.
Working a Quark project on a 17-inch LED display, wherever you sit to do the work, sounds like a dream to my younger-self, back when I was doing much the same kind of work as the person for whom you made corrections.
Now that I think about it, it’s quite possible I’ve seen or set my hands on no more than maybe one handful — if a handful counts as five, one for each digit — of unibody 17-inch MBPs in all these years. Also, in thinking about this, I’m recalling the very first time I saw a unibody MacBook in person: a 13-inch MacBook5,1, in an Ottawa camera store which also sold Apple products, in December 2008. I had only begun to use an aluminium 15-inch MBP barely two months earlier (the first of any aluminium Mac laptop I’d used).
When I saw the keyboard, I bristled in disdain, even though I’d seen plenty of photos of it by that point. Although I acclimated to it over time (and especially so after I bought a mid-2009 13-inch MBP to replace the just-stolen A1226), I still have a mixed relationship with it. It’s the only keyboard form factor in Apple’s laptops wherein I’ve had to replace the keyboard outright — twice on my own 13-inch MBP and once on a friend’s 15-inch retina MBP. Moreover, that the entire top-case requires replacement when wanting to commit to a different keyboard localization was a big modular step in the wrong direction.
That all said, when a unibody Mac is working, whether 17-inch MBP or 11-inch MBA, to use it for work is a truly solid experience which has little to any peer.
It wasn't until years later that I realized how uncommon this guy's MBP was and I didn't want to exclude anyone here that owned one. Again, we (us PowerPC users) at the time were a refuge for the Early Intels when the other Mac subforums were all still chanting "Get a new Mac!".
This makes complete sense. And I’m quite sure those other sub-forums are still on about that and their Sisyphean task of staying current and dumping plenty of lightly-used Macs into secondhand circulation (and, more than likely, recycling — especially if they’re trading in their two- or three-year-old Mac, many lightly used at best, at the Apple Store for a new, shut-up-and-take-my-money replacement).
