I remember when these first came out, I bought a 15" MacBook Pro that year, I think it was 2ghz. I broke it near the end of it's one year of Apple Care and Apple was taking too long to send the part to the authorized repair service, ...so
offered me this option in '07, "We can send you a new 15" MBP, but with the new LED screens, there's a two week wait, OR, we could send you a 2.4ghz 17" MBP right now".
So I had a brand new 17" MBP with another years warranty, ....sold that a week before the warranty was up (worried about the Nvidia chip problem) and got a great iMac.
Sold that in '10, moved to the US from Canada and had a '10 21" iMac to use, and a new girlfriend. We split up last July and I came back to Canada, I'm stayin with my brother and his fiancée until I get back on my feet (almost there), ...so he gave me this old '06, 1.87ghz Macbook to use as a loner while I'm here, I'm running 10.6.8.
I use it for Photoshop CS3, two versions of iMovie (HD 6 and 8), Audacity/Mbox 2 mini for recording music (my own) and I can't believe how much I can actually get done with this thing.
These old beaters are far from useless, even now, 8 years after they came out. Oh, there's a place here in the GTA you can get batteries for around $40, soooo... yeah, it kinda' sucks to have gone from Mountain Lion and Nvidia graphics and 16 gigs of RAM that I was using down in North Carolina, ....funny though, I only ever surfed and played Borderlands II on that iMac.
Sure, it will be nice to get a '11 or '12 27" iMac, ...which is my plan, ...when I have the scratch. But, I'm keeping this old boy until it dies. Who knows, it may outlive me?
Oh, I made this video (iMovie 6 HD and iMovie 8) last week, and wrote and recorded ...well, more like mixed from some old orphaned WAV files from guitar and bass tracks I'd recorded in '01, ...I did record the vocals with the tiny l'il pinhole mic on the Macbook. All in all, it took three hours, ...from scratch.
http://youtu.be/dgDpEeiJ7ew
Don't tell me these are useless, I won't believe you.
PS: ignore that stuff down there:
Macbook 1.1
1.87 ghz Core Duo
2 gigs RAM
120g HD
Camera's broken, so's the CD drive, ...like I care