Be careful — very careful — with your new MacBook

Apple's glossy new notebook line is gorgeous, all right, but the new "unibody" design means fixing a dent or a cracked screen could be a pricey proposition.

The bloggers at CrunchGear have compiled a list of reasons why the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros—eye-catching and durable though they are—should never ride shotgun if you're, say, running across a rocky battlefield in pouring rain, à la those Panasonic Toughbook commercials.

Among them (I won't list every point; you can click through to the CrunchGear article for the rest):

• The glass screen is fused with the LCD display: That means if you crack the glass panel, you'll have to replace the actual display, too. Say buh-buy to four or five C-notes.
• "Unibody" design means no individual (and thus, replaceable) panels: As we learned on Tuesday, the new MacBook casings are carved out of a single piece of aluminium—great in terms of structural integrity, bad if you happen to dent the thing, which means you'd have to replace the entire assembly.
• Tough-to-fix keyboard: As CrunchGear points out, teardown analysis of the new MacBook keypad revealed that it contains a whopping 56-plus screws, taking a good 15 minutes to remove. Don't even think of eating a muffin while you type.

Check out CrunchGear for more hair-raising reasons to take extra-special care of your new MacBook; also, this might be a good time to scrutinize the terms of Apple's one-year hardware warranty, which (and I quote) does not apply to "damage caused by accident, abuse, misuse, flood, fire, earthquake (watch out, San Franciscans) or other external causes," nor to "cosmetic damage, including but not limited to scratches, dents, and broken plastic on ports, that does not otherwise affect the product's functionality or materially impair your use."

In other words: Easy does it.

Note: Just to clarify (and as the CrunchGear bloggers themselves note), I didn't mean to imply that MacBooks in general are easy to damage; having dropped my old aluminum PowerBook G4 once or twice with only a few scuffs, I can attest to their durability. The only point here is that if you do manage to crack the new MacBook's screen or dent the chassis, you could be looking at a pricier repair bill thanks to the new "unibody" design. Apologies for any confusion.

Related:
5 reasons damaging your MacBook is a worse idea now than ever before [CrunchGear]