macbook pro. unibody or no?

[wgzn]

as many of you know my unibody 2.66 mbpro was thieved a few weeks back. so now im looking to replace it.

do any of you know what the unibody versions do that the older ones of the same spec dont?

the 8 hour battery sounds fun. but id almost prefer to just have 2 (or more) standard batteries that i can replace at my convenience...

and im definitely gonna go antiglare... but both models can provide that.

any thoughts?

 

[Oliver Rush]

I have the 15" 3.06ghz unibody MBP with 4 gigs of ram and the 512mb 9600GT, and love it. My only complaint is the lack of the express card port, and if I had to buy it again I would have gotten then 17" just to have it so I could use a P2 card adaptor with it (at the time I had not picked out my camera (HPX170) and size was a BIG factor for me). Right now we usually shoot with both my HPX170 and my friends HVX200, but in a pinch one cam can serve as a reader and we will work as a single cam shoot, but we need to find an affordable solution to the P2 reader situation so we can dump cards while shooting.

The lack of the firewire 400port no longer bothers like it first did, as my main external drive that I dump to daisy chains 800 with 400, so the setup works fine for me with and my HPX170.

I also have the anti-glare display (ie, pay apple $50 to not put a piece of glass on it), and it is worth paying them for it as it does look better, and I am happy I chose that option.

Also, battery life is great with the graphics card turned off, but it drops significantly with it on, but I am usually around power or my inverter in my car, and it is probably the fastest charging laptop I have had.

Lastly, it may just be my machine (i need to have them look at it in the apple store), but I find my DVD burner to be both slow, and unreliable, getting frequent bad burns, and I often use my old lacie burner instead as it is faster and more reliable. That said, it may be a hardware issue that they need to fix.

Otherwise, it is a great machine, runs FCP, PP, AE, Motion, Cinema 4D, etc, very well, and is a well designed laptop. Short of the P2 issue on the 15" model, I would say go for it. I love mine and it has worked in well with the rest of our machines and cameras.

 

[Phenixone]

I have the 15" unnibody with a express slot, and I use it all the time. I use to offload through duel adapter. Now I hade a Nexto DI drive to do that, but I still use it to add a eSATA card to get faster transfer. So if you don't ming the size, go 17". otherwise, 15" is a wonderful machine ! and yeah go antiglare. I can see my reflection on dark areas of the image which is disturbing to edit ...

 

[wgzn]

thanks for your enthusiasm guys, but my question wasnt should i get a unibody. the question was what does a unibody do that an equal-spec non unibody version NOT do.

and i spent quite a bit of time online and chatting with apple and it would appear that aside from better physical strength and better heat dissipation. the biggest (supposed) performance difference is that with the dual video card, you have better control over video performance.

and i also did get apple to tell me that the internal battery can be replaced in an apple store while you wait. so eventually when the internal battery does begin to lose capacity you dont have to ship the machine to apple (unless you dont live near an apple store)

so really what i got from the investigation is that from an overall, rubber-meets-the-road performance standpoint. a unibody mbpro isnt going to gain you much, if at all over an equally built non-unibody version.