How bad is a NEW $47 laptop... used MacBook killer or eWaste?

I bought this mostly new laptop for 47.96 that is what we in the business call cheapest but the real question is if you're paying less than 50 bucks for an open box laptop it there's no way that this thing could be remotely usable right well you guessed it we're gonna find out today and of course whenever I talk about a PC here I can't help but compare it to available Max at the same price but for 50 bucks it is slim pickings in fact this looks to be one of the only machines that would actually be viable it's a 13 inch mid-2009 MacBook Pro that appears to be fully complete all those other listings were missing things like hard drives and RAM but this one is an intact and albeit a little bit rough around the edges MacBook that even comes with a charger so keep in mind as we're talking about this laptop that if you wanted to buy a Mac this is what you'd be looking at the unboxing experience is is truly incredible I think boom laptop right on top we pull that out boom charger that's it we're done is there anything under here no no instruction manual that's all you get and you know what that's all you need so there's your charger there's your 50 laptop it's honestly not the ugliest thing that I've ever laid eyes on here we have a couple of speaker holes down at the bottom but there's no vents I'm assuming this is going to be a fanless system let's go ahead and open it up that is that is not one-handed operation let me tell you so there we have it we got some Plastic Fantastic bezels Intel Inside that's right we have an Intel Celeron 3450 I think yeah it's a 3450 four gigs of RAM 64 gigabyte emmc storage now the thing that's really curious to me we'll go ahead and turn this thing on is I I wanted to know who this is for Well the box says Maestro education notebooks so that seems to indicate that they're targeting the education Market but I went on Amazon to look at some of their results and honestly it's super oops hey it's a good thing I've got the K School magic stand case on protecting my phone from Falls exactly like that the magic stand case is a super Innovative blend between a magsafe compatible charging case and a kickstand case the magnetic charging ring flips out from the back of the phone allowing you to prop your phone up in portrait or landscape orientations and you can collapse it right back into place and use it with a magsafe charger that is the kind of Versatility that I like to see in a phone case they come in a wide variety of colors to match the finishes of the latest iPhones and if you want to get 10 off you can check out the link in the description below now let's get back into some of these Amazon reviews for this thing because it honestly opened my eyes to a whole world out there that I didn't even know about so I was expecting these reviews to be full of parents talking about buying it for their kids but I was completely wrong the very first review is from someone who is buying this for radio gear and that was actually a trend that I know notice quite a bit if we scroll down here there's another one talking about several members of their ham radio club purchasing this computer and they all are satisfied with his performance now the one right below it talks about how it came with the Box seal broken and a trojan horse installed on it so maybe we should check if uh if I have anything so why is it's muted let's see how the speakers sound no audio output device is installed okay so this didn't come with drivers so the very first thing that I noticed setting this up is the trackpad is slightly abysmal it it feels like a track pad that was made out of not trackpad material like it's it's too rough almost let's open up Edge and test out the keyboard here youtube.com Okay key travel is very shallow the feedback is not great but I will say this keyboard deck is pretty rigid I was expecting it to sort of feel like typing on a piece of tin foil you're just kind of punching holes in it all the time but it's surprisingly rigid apparently a lot of people are talking about removing an LTE card and and using an SSD in the M2 slot so I I was not aware of this because again I just saw this very plain box I really didn't know anything about the features of this machine so I think we got to open it up and find out all right so let's see what we got here looks like a pretty standard setup with a couple of Phillips head screws and while I'm pulling these out I figure this is as good a time as ever to tell you guys about my upcoming event the day after WWDC I'm going to be hosting Genius Bar goes dark you can kind of think about this as a big get together with a bunch of tech enthusiasts to discuss what Apple's releasing at WWDC this year we've got some YouTuber friends that are going to be there Ken from computer Clan he's going to be there Quinn from snazzy Labs is going to be there and the event is sponsored by clean my Mac X which has been a huge supporter of the channel they made this entire thing possible and they are the best way to keep your Mac clean protected and running at full speed heck I might even uh bring this laptop and and give it away to one of you guys so if you want this laptop let me know in the comments below and show up to Genius Bar goes dark Regency Ballroom in San Francisco on June 6th it's going to be a ton of fun now the final screws coming out here although not all of them are actually falling out of the thing there they go wow the seam to get in this bottom case here is really tiny I will give them credit the fit and finish on this laptop is surprisingly good for 50 bucks there we go look at that what a glorious glorious little machine very simple very straightforward as these machines often are and a surprising amount of black electrical tape being used here curiously enough this ribbon cable is actually too long so it looks like they taped it down uh this is our i o board over here so on this side we have a headphone jack USB and a Micro SD card slot which is an interesting choice then on the main board we have of course our DC in a USB a port and a micro HDMI which is not a choice that I would have made but I guess they didn't really have a lot of room on this machine um the reviews were all talking about the M2 slot I I don't see one I think we're gonna have to keep taking this thing apart if we're gonna figure this out well I've cut my fingernail opening it oh look at all those connectors hiding under there what's this big one all right there's our display cable over here this looks to be our wireless antenna that we can unplug battery is out well that's easy enough so aha this makes sense now we've got our keyboard connector over here we've got a trackpad zip connector over here and our speaker wires are just running across the whole machine they both connect to a single terminal there oh my goodness look at this tiny little microphone that's so cute all right the only thing left to disconnect now is our other i o board and now we should be able to just pull this little tiny board out oh my gosh look at that it's so little but I am confused because I definitely am not seeing an m.2 slot I mean this is uh this looks like a pretty standard board I would wager that you could find this exact same logic board in a bunch of these little devices one thing I am surprised by is this metal keyboard back plate it is pretty rigid and it seems to be plastic welded into this case so replacing the keyboard wouldn't be easy but that's probably why it's so relatively rigid compared to the rest of the machine I mean look at that we don't even have a logic board or a bottom case in it and it's still got decent stability but I'm definitely starting to think that I don't have the same version of this laptop that other people were talking about on those Amazon reviews because there's definitely no m.2 slot in here although this does kind of look like where you would Mount one so maybe this empty space in my machine is populated in that other more expensive version I do want to know how this machine performs it's totally fanless it's using a Celeron 3450 it's not the most modern or powerful processor obviously but it should be decently usable so let's put this machine back together and find out [Music] so remember that part where I said that this CPU should be decently usable that I met I was wrong about that 798 that's our cinebench score but it's not really the score that concerns me as much as it is what happened during the test I think there might be something wrong with the computer because it's making a noise something is hissing and fizzing inside this computer after running cinebench and it's getting it's getting real slow it's getting a little warm down there but why is it that is so weird so I'm not exactly sure what that sound was my hunch would be coil wine because it does have a copper heatsink so that is the most optimistic scenario uh I was a little worried that I was boiling the thermal pads that are in this thing but more so the issue with this laptop is I think it is too cheap I think there is such a thing as saving too much money and when you sacrifice this much to get a laptop to this price point I just think it's not worth it this is basically just a piece of E-Waste waiting to happen now we saw in the Amazon reviews that some people found it sufficient for checking emails or for ham radio stuff and that's great I'm sure some people will be able to get a limited amount of use out of it it does physically function I'm able to search on YouTube and very very slowly click my way through to a video now granted this is not we are really pushing the limits of this Celeron just loading the uh YouTube AdSense ad but I mean look it does play a video what resolution is this oh we're only in 720p let's go up to 4K doesn't even have a 4K screen those black levels are atrocious and and the viewing angles are terrible you can see colors shifting even when you're looking at it straight on so yes it does physically work and you can see it is capable of playing back video so if nothing else you could give this to your kids load some movies on it and have a cheap playback machine however the problem that I have with laptops like this isn't necessarily that they're completely useless right the reviews mentioned ham radio email and we're watching videos on it and it is capable of doing those three things the question is for how long and at what total cost not in dollars but in E-Waste this is basically just a hunk of plastic and even though it might have some amount of functionality now I think we'd all agree that this is not going to be as long lasting of a device device as something like a MacBook Air and obviously this is a lot more expensive now I don't mean to compare them but remember earlier we found a Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro on eBay for the same price I'm not necessarily saying that you should buy a MacBook Pro instead of this but what I am saying is that MacBook Pro is 14 years old do you really see this still having any life in it in 14 years I don't think so and the problem is this is just inviting a big piece of plastic to get thrown away because if I were someone that bought this I would maybe be able to use it for let's generously say four years and after that amount of time it is so slow and worthless that it's not even worth putting on eBay I spent 50 bucks on it what am I gonna get ten dollars back at that point people are just going to throw them away I think there's a bit of a sad irony that recycling centers all across the world are literally overwhelmed with perfectly decent modern usable laptops that are being thrown away by businesses and schools and out here yet the rest of us can't access that ostensibly free perfectly adequate supply of electronics instead we have to go and spend 50 bucks to acquire some E-Waste I don't know it just feels weird knowing what's out there in these recycling centers and then seeing that you have to pay money for something like this I don't know let me know what your thoughts are in the comments down below thank you all for watching this video and I'll see you in the next one [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Luke Miani

Views: 257,986

Keywords: Cheap, Laptop, Review, Unboxing, Mac vs pc, Windows, Apple, MacBook Pro, eBay

Id: LSS-pp__fjc

Length: 14min 37sec (877 seconds)

Published: Wed May 17 2023