MacBook

Redesigned. Reengineered. Re-everythinged.

To build something truly different, you need to work in a truly different way. Apple designers and engineers work together through every stage of product development. It’s a partnership that makes innovation possible. And it’s exactly how the new MacBook was created. With its breakthrough unibody enclosure, industry-first features, and environmentally sound design, it’s a revolution in the way notebooks are made.

Until now, all notebooks were designed the same way.

By assembling multiple pieces to create a single enclosure. But once you include all the necessary parts, you add size, weight, complexity, and more opportunities for failure. Solving a problem like this required more than an incremental change. It required a breakthrough. To create the new MacBook, the design and engineering teams devised a way to replace many parts with just one. That one part is called the unibody — a seamless enclosure carved from a single piece of aluminum.

Of course, building only one part creates its own set of challenges. When you have multiple parts that are fastened together, tolerances don’t need to be perfect. You have wiggle room, both literally and figuratively. But when one part is responsible for many functions, it’s critical to manufacture that part with absolute precision, down to the micron. Every time. Millions of times over. There was only one way to achieve this level of precision: mill the unibody from a solid block of aluminum using computer numerical control, or CNC, machines — the kind used by the aerospace industry to build mission-critical spacecraft components.

When you pick up a new MacBook, you immediately notice the difference. The entire enclosure is thinner and lighter. It looks polished and refined. And it feels strong and durable — perfect for life inside (and outside) your briefcase or backpack.

The thickness of a notebook depends on the technology inside.

LCD displays typically use cold cathode fluorescent lamps, or CCFLs, to create light and project a picture onto a screen. But that poses two problems. First, these lamps require more space, so the display can be only so thin. Second, just like the fluorescent lights in your home or office, the ones inside a CCFL display take time to warm up before they reach full brightness. That’s a lose-lose situation. And it’s why Apple engineers chose LED backlight technology for the new MacBook.

An LED backlight creates the same amount of brightness in less space. So you can make the structure that houses an LED display much thinner. And unlike fluorescent lamps, an LED backlight reaches maximum brightness instantly.

Look at the MacBook display and you’ll see another big difference. Glass. That edge-to-edge, uninterrupted glass display does more than look good. It also adds structure to the LED display beneath it. And there’s no metal frame (another extraneous part) to distract you from what’s onscreen

The new Macbook trackpad has no button because it is the button.

That means there’s more room to track, more room to click — left, right, center, and everywhere in between — and one less part. Apple designers and engineers spent countless hours considering things like sensitivity (how much pressure triggers a click?), audio feedback (what does the click sound like?), and friction over the smooth glass surface (what does it feel like?).

And that’s just the hardware. Apple software engineers had a large part to play in the development of the trackpad, too. They incorporated Multi-Touch gestures, including swipe, pinch, rotate, and the new four-finger swipe. The result is the largest, smartest, most ergonomic MacBook trackpad ever. It’s one of many details considered and reconsidered during the design process.