I've had my black Macbook, 13", 2.4 GHz for almost 4 years now. With those being out of production, and the only two other black macbooks that i knew personally sadly becoming unusable last week, i'm wondering if any of you still use the most unusual coloured macbook ever :cool:

iStats tells me i'm now up to 1196 loadcycles, anybody got experience on how long this battery can last?

Yep, I do (though it weighs a ton and the new MacBook air is SO tempting).
The clonky graphics look so retro these days
Memory is maxed out so I'm considering giving it an SSD for Xmas.

Battery seems to be holding out.

Mac :ok:

iStats tells me i'm now up to 1196 loadcycles, anybody got experience on how long this battery can last?

Wow, that's pretty impressive usage sir! Out of interest, what Health % is it at ? In general the MacBook Pro/PowerBook batteries are meant to be good (90%) health for 350 load cycles or so. Those black MacBooks looked great, very slick in comparison to the ubiquitous brushed silver of the rest of the range. The whites were ok, but looked cheap to my eyes.



SHJ

I had one in the other day to fix a software glitch on, and was somewhat disappointed to find that to upgrade to the latest version of OSX I would have had to purchased around four sequential downloaded upgrades - as far as I could see there wasn't a way of buying the latest version as a standalone installer package. The whole upgrade was working out at around £180 which was a bit of a dealbreaker for the customer
The plan had been to upgrade it so I could install the latest version of Office for Mac on it - in the end I had to compromise and use an old copy of Office X
The machine itself was fine - virtually spotless and running like a dream, just a shame there seemed to be no cost effective software upgrade route (it was running OSX 10.4)

Out of interest, what Health % is it at ?

It's at 67% health, enough for the top 30% of the battery to drain overnight (when the lid is closed!) :}

it was running OSX 10.4

I myself have still got 10.6 running, I don't think this oldie supports many of the new gestures in 10.7... Gaming is completely out of the question with the lack of a proper graphics solution. But the machine itself is great, i'll see how long it will survive; and when that day comes... :{

Not sure how it compares to iStats, but coconutBattery shows;

http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g11/silsoesid/Battery19Jun.png

I generally leave the MacBook on, closing the lid when not in use and leave the charging until she's running on reserve. She's only turned off when I'm not going to use her for an extended period.

Mac OS X Lion 10.7.4
2.4 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo
2 Gb 677Mhz DDR2 SDRAM
Intel GMA X3100 144 MB
250 Gb HDD

Running;
Microsoft Office 2011
Rosetta Stone

etc etc

http://s1.bild.me/bilder/160512/3092973Picture_1.png (http://www.bild.me)

4.5 years. Rarely turned off but always on charger now. Original battery endurance now very poor when off-charger and watching video, which is rare. I experienced brain fade when I recently purchased a replacement battery from Hong Kong for a quarter of the OEM price. Take my advice: don't. Original battery is back in and staying there.

this place is worth looking at for batteries
RET UK (http://www.retuk.com/)
Trade only in theory, but there shouldn't be too much problem getting an account.
I've purchased 30+ batteries from them and never had a problem, though none were for Apples
The batteries are all either manufacturers originals, or from the same OEM plants as make them

Mac OS X Lion 10.7.4

Does it work properly? I mean the gestures etc, which I don't think are supported properly on our Macbooks. Maybe you can share a little info with me, if it's worth upgrading to 10.7, I would be very interested in doing so!

Here are my coconut battery statistics:

http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/8587/coconutz.png

Hi Doc,

I think with our older BlackBooks it's a hardware issue that prevents the gestures on the trackpad being more than the 2 finger vertical scrolling we have available.

Giving it a bit of thought in the traffic jam on the way home this evening, I have just paired my iMacs magic trackpad to the macbook via bluetooth and I now have the full complement of gesturing available.

All seems to work ok with Lion, although the fan seems to be on more often and as she's also getting a bit old and clogged up, a bit more memory probably wouldn't go amiss.

I guess it's a matter of seeing what Lion gives you over Snow Leopard and whether it is worth it for you. For me, having the same OSX as the iMac and similar features as the newer iPods, made sense...FaceTime is quite a good way of telling the little ones tea is ready :ok:

As always it's personal choice and if you're going to keep using the Blackbook, why not!

Regards
SS
:)