Thread: Cheap Apple
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Old November 13th 17, 10:39 PM posted to rec.photo.digital
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Default Cheap Apple

In article , Alan Browne
wrote:

I'm tempted to pick up one of those MacBooks at $149 just to see what
the Mac thing is like, but I probably won't. Dunno what I'd do with a
second laptop.

That is a pretty good price for a refurbished MacBook, (note; Macbook,
not
MacBookPro) and could make for a budget on-the-road machine. It could do
with
a bit more RAM, and perhaps an SSD upgrade. So spend another $200 and you
would have your budget Mac.

considering how old it is, it's not a pretty good price at all.

although adding memory and ssd would help (and very easy to do), it's
wasted money for something that old.

Perhaps $150 is a bit steep in that market.


very steep for something that old.

But the laptop will still
be fine for most general use that isn't CPU intensive. That includes
photo editing, office apps, mail, web, video watching, etc.


small photos and videos, perhaps, but for 1080p and/or h.265, it's
going to fall flat.


No issue for 1080 - used to do that with my SO's prior MBA w/o issue and
it was slow.


there absolutely is an issue with 1080p.

both my '08 and '09 macbook pros drop frames with 1080p, and the latter
has an ssd.

no issue on more recent macs.

h.265 is rare in most respects.


nope. it's actually rather common, and that's even before it became the
default format for iphones.

I sold an iMac (late 2007 v.) with a 2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo with 6 GB of
RAM. The family that bought it still use it daily and w/o complaint.
I'm not sure what OS it is at. I sold it to them with Mavericks installed.


it's probably still on mavericks, and also quite a bit faster than the
macbook.


Not really. The iMac was a 2007 model. If the Macbook quoted is
2009/2010 then it has a pretty good processor.


a core 2 duo of unspecified speed, which can be anywhere from 2-2.4
ghz.

more than likely it's on the slower end, otherwise the store would have
listed the cpu speed as well as jacked their price even more. the
macbook also has a slow laptop drive.

your 2007 imac had 2.8 ghz core 2 duo processor (already faster), more
memory, a much faster desktop drive and a faster gpu.

so yes, it was faster.

If I were to invest in improving that laptop at all it would be for the
SSD first and the RAM only possibly depending on the configuration as sold.


at which point, it becomes not such a good deal.


It's more than fine for someone who is "Mac curious".


it's not representative of what a modern mac can do. for example,
there's no handoff & continuity. the display is also not very good as
well as being pre-retina.

buying something cheap, only to spend money on it to make it less sucky
is not a good idea.