MacBook Pro (Unibody, Late 2008)

Apple started milling laptops out of solid aluminum on October 14, 2008, and has not really stopped since. The unibody process took a single block of aluminum and hollowed it out with CNC machines, forming the lid, the keyboard deck and the internal chassis as one continuous piece. That was aerospace manufacturing applied to a consumer product, and it replaced the riveted and bonded panels every previous MacBook Pro had used. The result was far stiffer and considerably harder to break. The trackpad grew and lost its button, the whole glass surface depressing to click, which took a week to stop feeling strange and then felt obvious. The display gained a black glass bezel and LED backlighting and lost the matte option entirely, and professional users who worked near windows complained loudly enough that Apple brought matte back the following year. Inside were the same Penryn Core 2 Duo chips as before at 2.4 and 2.53GHz, so the processor barely moved. Graphics did, with an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M and an optional discrete 9600M GT. The battery in this first unibody was still user-replaceable. Later ones were not. Everything else about how this machine was made went on to define every MacBook since.