If you get a third-party refurbished MacBook, you likely won’t have any coverage or options if the computer stops working.You should only buy certified refurbished MacBooks if you want a warranty.A refurbished MacBook can give you the same reliable performance as a new one at a lower price.Is it worth it to buy a MacBook refurbished?.Things to Consider When Buying a Refurbished MacBook.Best Place to Buy a Refurbished MacBook.All laptops MacBOok pros prior to my last one, unibody, were at least in the shop 3 times each - thanks god for Applecare. My mom has her core 2 duo from 2006 and it runs great on Lion and she's been lucky with no repairs but she don't travel with it so who knows. Refurb apple store is where I buy all my laptops or Craigslist with one that has at lease 2 years of apple care on it.Īnd remember if you do take a gamble and get one for $500 you have to get a CORE 2 Duo NOT core duo as you need the former to run Lion on it. Get a windoze machine or beg/borrow/ to get more money for one that you can get Applecare on. Remember all laptops have about a 20% failure rate when bought new, after that I'm sure it goes up and a really old one is bound to fail sooner or later and it's not if but when. If you get an older mac you're just asking for trouble without AppleCare. I just sold my Mid 2008 MacBook Pro for $899 so all Mac laptops sell at a premium. I doubt if you're going to get anything decent for $600. The only drawback is it isn't portable and you need a monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

And it will outperform a MacBook that is a few years old. You can get a new or Apple refurb well within your price range. The OS is going to be OS X regardless of the hardware.Īnother suggestion is to consider the Mac Mini.

I'm not sure why you're afraid of being overwhelmed by an iMac.

It was refurbished and came with a 14 day warranty (I could have paid for a 1 year). I bought my MacBook from my local MicroCenter. The more features an editor includes, the more ram it wants.Ĭomputer programs are just text and you can fit a LOT of text in 512 MB of ram.Īgain, photoshop is going to use more ram than any IDE i'm aware of.īut to the original question: PowerMax is supposed to be good, but will be on the more expensive end of the spectrum. The biggest usage of ram will probably be from the editor you're using to write the code. Mine has 2GB of ram and that's been plenty for what i do on it.Īs for how ram much you need for programming, that's going to depend on a few things. The 2006-2007 Mac Book can hold 3.4 GB of ram.

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