Shopping for used MacBook, MBPro. Advice?
 

I'm in the market for a used mac book, or macbook pro. $500 is my ceiling, so it'll likely be a Mac Book.

My question is: are there models I should look for, and ones to avoid? I'm thinking later models with faster chips and maybe designed for Snow Leopard or Lion are best.

But, are there certain older models that might be better even than newer ones?

Is there much diff between a 2ghz Mac Book and a 2.4ghz mac book?

I'm shying away from 2007 and earlier. Is that generally a good idea?

thanks for any thoughts!

a

One of the decisions you must make is .
Do you want to run Lion ?
and/or Mountain Lion when it comes out in Summer ?

Lion needs an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and i woudl say 4GB is Ram even though it states 2GB RAM minimum. Mountain Lion will need a 64 bit kernel boot support to run which cuts your options down to a smaller range of Macs in the second hand market in your price band if any.

As far as I know, Lion occupies too many system resources. In this budget, you may get something that could run Lion by hook or crook but I don't think you are gonna enjoy that.

I'm not sure how important it will be for the machine to run Mt. Lion or not...a friend says that Lion is sort of the test version of Mt. Lion, and that Mt. Lion will be the "cleanup release" fixing all the things plaguing us in Lion now. I see machines being sold with 2GB; very few with 4, but I can look for those, certainly..

Thank you for the information and link!

a

Are there methods of testing used hardware? I thought of bringing a blank DVD to test media burning/reading on the disc player, and maybe testing wifi.

is there a test for battery life? maybe screen pixels? Any others?


Thank you!

a

You can always add 4Gb of RAM later but I advise everyone to have at least 4GB to run Lion effectively.

You must make the choice to either get a Mountain Lion compatible Mac now or be left with Snow Leopard/Lion forever...the choice is yours really. The way Apple are moving to yearly releases of OS is not good IMHO from my sysadmin perspective but will sell more Mac's which is what they want.

Battery Life : have a look at cycle count in About this Mac > More Info > Power anything over 200 cycles will more than likely need a new battery soon. Dead pixels are obvious and expect an older Macbook to possibly have issues with Superdrive.

I must have been under a rock..I just learned that the Mac Book has been discontinued...

does this change whether a used Mac Book is a good investment right now at all?


a

I personally would save up a bit more and find a 13inch MacBookPro 2009/2010 model.
The graphics are reasonable, upto 8GB RAM, nice size/weight/portability, ports etc. They are well balanced machines IMHO and a very good replacement to the MacBook.

that sounds like good advice..thanks!

a

Do procurement as part of my job and have helped many friends make the right purchase :-)
Cracking machines those they remind me of the ground breaking 12inch PowerBook G4.
All the best and a bit more spent now will be worth it.

agentx...you have the best of me..I must say I don't understand that last paragraph...

sorry!

;-(

Terse Anglic re-rendered
 

He does procurement as part of his job (he buys things, presumably Mac computers).

He has helped many friends make the right purchase.

He has a very favorable opinion of the 13 inch MacBook Pro machines from 2009 & 2010. They remind him of the 12 inch Powerbook with the Motorola G4 processor, which he considers to have broken new ground.

He wishes you the best, and advises you to spend a bit more money now, and says that it will be worth it in the long run.

Ahh, well, then..I made the right move. I got tired of emailing craigslisters with their 1 word answers about machines they were hoping (?) to sell, and nabbed a 2010 refurb 13" MBP from Apple's site. should be here next week.

I do like the size; I had a Snow iBook from 2002. Rockin' computer..very capable, despite not having the stones of the "Pro" book. I expect this to be quite nice.

thank you for your views on this!


a

Nice move think you will be happy.

Just arrived the other day and got time to take it out of the box and set it up.

Holy Cow, what a nice little machine! Noticed right off it has an extra-crisp display...that Snow iBook I had was same size, smaller rez and not as nice a picture.

I will have to re-adjust to the size of things, tho, as I'm used to an 8-core MP with a 23" and 17" monitor...

A question: This machine came with Snow installed. Is this a subtle message that that's where Apple thinks it ought to stay?

I have a friend with a similar machine who says that Lion seems slower than Snow; wondering if Snow Leopard is this machine's sweet spot.

Thank you for any thoughts.

a

Glad you are happy good choice cracking machines.

I moved my Primary machine to Lion yesterday mainly as i need full iCloud sync between all my machines/devices, iBooks Author and Apple Configurator etc.

Those machine run external screen pretty well too.

I would say move onto Lion if you want all the bells and whistles and new software that is coming and Mountain Lion is coming 10.8 in June ! going to hard to keep up with yearly OS cycles ;-) Get 4GB RAM and 8GB is you can afford it.

What is your primary use ?

Lion is maturing and overall it does run better on i5/i7 than C2D. But a complete fresh install of Lion is as fast on both, i have found quite a bit of cleaning up needs to be done with migrated computers from 10.5/10.6 > 10.7. But out the box 10.7.3 is very usable.

OK...this rig came with 4GB and OWC wants just $50 US for an 8GB kit (not sure upgrade or total).

My uses: video, 2D illustration, 3D, web development (html/css) web surfing. I'm probably at the higher end of power usage with 3D and video.

Not wild about such frequent new OS cycles even if the new OSs are super-cool, but...they didn't ask me!

;-)

a

Are you saying that Lion is fast on C2D initially..as in, right after it's installed, or Lion is faster after a nuke and pave than an upgrade/install from Snow to Lion?

a

Get 8GB kit to get the best out of it and the right adapter for external screen.
You dont have discreet graphics like the 15inch Macbook pro/Mac Pro/iMac etc but it was in your budget so....you got what you could.

I have done lots of migrations.....

I have found that many of my pro systems have so much cruft leftover as they have been migrated from 10.5 > 10.6. I backup user folder using rsync. Clean install and then reinstall all programs...i cheat as i have a deployment solutions using Deploystudio and Munki. I can rebuild a machine in 2 hours with all the pro apps installed and authorised.

Then pull back user folder and create new user matching the old user details and sort out the little bits.

Overall my main issue is that i have a very "dirty" machine as i have so much Pro software installed for my work FCP, Logic, Ableton, VJ software, CS5.5, Filemaker, the list goes on.... ;-) so my migration needed a lot of extra work.

I realize that nobody can predict the future, but how durable are these 2010 13" MBPros? How long do you suppose their parts can last? The battery clearly will go first, but beyond that...how durable?

Thanks!
a

They are well built resilient machines have loads in deployments Low failure rates.
Yes battery and hard disk may need replacing but should be good for 5-7 years if all goes well from time of build.

Battery is not so clearly first, IMHO.
Those newer batteries SHOULD get 4 to 7 years of useful life, maybe more, so I'd say hard drive first (unless you have an SSD), then battery.
By then, you would be at or past obsolescence anyway - the end of the hardware's "useful" life, along with end-of-life for upgrading to the latest OS, whatever that is - unless you don't follow along with the update-now crowd. But then, as long as it remains mechanically sound, and does what you ask, it remains useful. (I don't really want to start a "useful life" conversation, although your question leans toward that)

I tend not to be part of the update now crowd and I personally wish they'd all chill for a few years...

My question is about how long will it last physically..still boot up and function mechanically and computationally.

I'm impressed with the battery. I was loading things into it, unzipping, etc and on wireless for most of the day yesterday, all on battery. Granted I had the display turned low, but that battery gave a lot of service and still had 1.5 hours remaining when I plugged in finally.

a