Apple laptop advice

[Stamp]

If I had £350 to spend on an apple mac laptop, which would you go for?
I like the look of the alloy ones, but not sure I can get one on my budget

[cjs]

Stamp said:

If I had £350 to spend on an apple mac laptop, which would you go for?
I like the look of the alloy ones, but not sure I can get one on my budget

Only second hand for that price. Cheapest Macbook is the basic white at around £600.

[toohuge]

For that money, you could get an ibook (12inch screen i think) or possibly a g4 titanium powerbook.

[Stamp]

cjs said:

Stamp said:

If I had £350 to spend on an apple mac laptop, which would you go for?
I like the look of the alloy ones, but not sure I can get one on my budget

Only second hand for that price. Cheapest Macbook is the basic white at around £600.

I was thinking second hand.
I an used to PC but fancy a change.
What is the difference between all of models?
( What is an ibook, power book etc? )

Edited by Stamp on Wednesday 16th April 22:26

[BaconBonce]

If you are looking for a new one, you aren't going to get any Apple laptop for £350 - the entry level Macbook (plastic casing) comes in at £699.

Apple laptops hold their value pretty well and I'm not sure you would even get a decent 2nd hand one for that budget.

Edit: ^ Blimey, nobody had replied when I started typing that

Edited by BaconBonce on Wednesday 16th April 22:27

[PJR]

It wont be anything amazing for that money.. Probably one of the later generation 15" G4 PowerBooks. Good solid machines.. But slow compared to the newer intel versions.
A friend of mine recently sold his 15" G4 Powerbook (1.25ghz I think it was) for about £350.
You'd get a bit more for your money if you could live with a desktop. Late last year I sold my 20" G5 iMac to a forum member here for £350 also. You'd easily get a decent Mac Mini for that kind of money too. In fact £50 more gets you a new one.

P,

[PJR]

Stamp said:

What is the difference between all of models?
( What is an ibook, power book etc? )

Consumer, and professional models. You have the consumer orientated iBooks, which were all G3's or G4's (and in white plastic cases, bar the much older clamshell models). Then the pro "PowerBooks" in their aluminium or titanium metal cases. These also were all G4's.
Later models (From the past year or 2) are the MacBooks (White plastic like the older iBooks (some are black)). And MacBook Pro's which again have the metal aluminium cases. Both of these are intel powered. But you wont find either of these for £350 yet.

P,

[LukeBird]

Bought my first Mac about 3 months ago.
A PowerBook 12" 1.5GHz. Was £425 on fleabay.
£350 will buy you a top iBook (see above descriptions ) or a lower/mid-spec PowerBook.
Cracking little machines, I shall definitely be in possession of a Mac & PC from now on

[The_Jackal]

You have 350 to spend but what is your criteria in what you want it to do?
For 350 you can get a dual core windows laptop with a lot of processing power. Do you really want to waste 350 on some thing that "looks nice".

[Stamp]

The_Jackal said:

You have 350 to spend but what is your criteria in what you want it to do?
For 350 you can get a dual core windows laptop with a lot of processing power. Do you really want to waste 350 on some thing that "looks nice".

I have a windows machine and fancy a change. I thought £350 would get me a reasonable machine for web, small photo manipulating etc

[LukeBird]

This is the type of machine I went for -
http://computers.search.ebay.co.uk/powerbook-12_Po...
And I would again

[PJR]

The_Jackal said:

You have 350 to spend but what is your criteria in what you want it to do?
For 350 you can get a dual core windows laptop with a lot of processing power. Do you really want to waste 350 on some thing that "looks nice".

Your posts are verging on the troll like. I noticed it in another post yesterday too. Evidently you don't like Apple stuff. Fine. So perhaps you can piss off and keep your nose out of Apple related posts then? There's a good chap.

P,

[JustinP1]

PJR said:

The_Jackal said:

You have 350 to spend but what is your criteria in what you want it to do?
For 350 you can get a dual core windows laptop with a lot of processing power. Do you really want to waste 350 on some thing that "looks nice".

Your posts are verging on the troll like. I noticed it in another post yesterday too. Evidently you don't like Apple stuff. Fine. So perhaps you can piss off and keep your nose out of Apple related posts then? There's a good chap.

P,

Yeah. This is a local thread for local people. You must shout the word 'Jobs' a hundred times and begone banshee!

[cyberface]

JustinP1 said:

PJR said:

The_Jackal said:

You have 350 to spend but what is your criteria in what you want it to do?
For 350 you can get a dual core windows laptop with a lot of processing power. Do you really want to waste 350 on some thing that "looks nice".

Your posts are verging on the troll like. I noticed it in another post yesterday too. Evidently you don't like Apple stuff. Fine. So perhaps you can piss off and keep your nose out of Apple related posts then? There's a good chap.

P,

Yeah. This is a local thread for local people. You must shout the word 'Jobs' a hundred times and begone banshee!

Why do any threads about Apple have to degenerate into infantile fanboi-ism?

FFS I'm probably the biggest Pro-Apple enthusiast on Pistonheads (and that's a challenge, if you've seen my office) - not because from financial ability to buy their kit, but to early-adopt, hack and do decidedly anti-Jobs things (like unlocked iPhones, OS X on the Eee, etc.) - but I try to avoid partisan BS in these threads in the forlorn hope that everyone will stay civil and the thread won't spiral into a puerile platform war. Sadly, I'm starting to lose the will to be as equinanimous as usual.

Back on topic, Apple laptops are a thorny subject because they seem to hold their value remarkably well - being neutral (which I'm obviously not) it doesn't make sense, since G4 laptops are decidedly slow these days - seriously slow except for certain apps which have been optimised for the (awesome) Altivec vector processor. Investment beat innovation in the case of CPUs, and the AMD vs Intel investment war left Apple with what were effectively router / embedded CPUs. Jobs saw this before he came back to Apple, and how he kept OS X's platform independence secret for so long is remarkable. Put simply, PC (i.e. Intel and AMD, forget the small players) CPUs are now so much faster than the PowerPCs used by Apple that you *will* be buying a slower machine. The exception is the Quad G5 but that was a freak, and wasn't a laptop

But Apple laptops built in the G3/G4 era were built to last. I have an original, revision A (i.e. early adopter, most prone to faults) Titanium Powerbook... still runs 24 hours a day as my GF's laptop in her office. I sadly sold my 12" PB which was the best package they ever made - perhaps that explains some of the high residual value - but my current workflow wouldn't work on a maxed out PB 12", with a max of 1.25 GB of RAM.

That said, you should easily be able to find late G4 white iBooks at that price point. Just before the Intel revolution, the iBook had the same processor and arguably comparable discrete graphics chipset as the Powerbook 12", which is the one all the fanboys go on about (including me). The iBook was built for schools, and sold to American schools in vast quantities, and is a polycarbonate brick that can take a pounding. It's as fast as a G4 Powerbook, and unlike current Macbooks, has a discrete GPU (though current integrated graphics have finally caught up in some respects, but still not in others, speaking as an owner of a Macbook Air with X3100 integrated GPU).

Get a last-of-the-line iBook G4. You can bung a big hard drive in these days (it's fiddly, but feasible for anyone who can wield a screwdriver) and it can take 1.5 GB of RAM which is dirt cheap nowadays. For general use, I'd advise Tiger (I'm still suspicious about Leopard, and I was born in the year of the Tiger so I have an affinity with tigers) and you'll have a nice, useful machine that can handle most you can throw at it. Screen resolution is a bit low but you can attach an external screen. I don't think the last-of-the-line G4 iBooks needed the Open Firmware hack, but if it does, then it's easily done (to allow spanning across two monitors, which it handles admirably).

One of my best mates has done just that - got a cheap iBook G4, loaded with RAM, and is very happy with it. He is a Solidworks / ProEngineer trainer, so is used to big PC iron to run said packages, but finds the wifi freedom and the long battery life of his iBook G4 (they're not powerful, so their batteries last a long time) ideal for bumming around the house on the net, using iTunes, Safari, etc.

They're old but will be reliable. Trust me on this one, unless it's been obviously abused school-bag style. It may need a new battery, but a new battery will be higher capacity these days and inexpensive.

One of the reasons I'm reluctant to sell my Macbook rev 2 now I'm using the Air as my consultancy machine (apart from the embarrassing fact that the RAM in it cost nearly as much as the laptop - 2 GB so-dimms were £450 each in 2006) is that it'll last forever. That said, my GF's Titanium powerbook isn't showing any signs of age, other than hammering the CPU with Flash-heavy websites (poor old 400 MHz G4 CPU, remember) - still on original hard drive as well.

I was expecting the Intel revolution to make G4 iBooks worthless, but this hasn't seemed the case.

I have no affiliations (other than a mate who works for a certified reseller / servicer) but try the web - these guys have a used G4 powerbook for £250, though my gut feeling would be to be very selective, and get my recommendation of a last-of-the-line G4 iBook since some models had specific issues.

They're still very usable machines (they're faster than my Cube G4 and I'm still using that, as a 24/7 server...) and they're robust. Still a classic design, and ergonomically great to use, even standing up in a train (serendipitously, a bloke carrying a rucksack with 'Immunology Research' embroidered all over it pulled out a PB 12", standing, and did something with it, presumably work rather than posing, since he looked like an old photo of Einstein...).

One thing to avoid at all costs. There's all this talk about running Windows apps on Macs these days because of virtualisation. This is true, because modern Macs are just PCs with EFI instead of BIOS (effectively) and can run Windows binaries natively. However your budget puts you back in PowerPC CPU land, which is (to use the engineering terms) like the difference between the two ends of an egg, little-endian and big-endian. You *can* run Windows on a PowerPC Mac (e.g. a G3, G4 or G5) but it's not virtualisation, it's emulation. Which means it's incredibly, incredibly slow. For one desperately-needed Windows app that doesn't consume many resources, it's a solution of sorts (Microsoft bought the product, it was called 'Virtual PC') but if you're going to buy a G4 iBook or Powerbook then expect to be using OS X or Linux (yeah, Linux runs just fine on PowerPC too, though it's not as well supported. Yellow Dog Linux is the name to look for, last time I tried).

One warning - if you've had no experience of Apple's OS before then it'll be a culture shock. If you like Linux but wish it was as polished as Windows, you will fall in love with OS X. (OK I had to put a partisan fanboy comment in at the end).

I hope this information is of some use, and please don't read it as the rantings of an Apple addict out of rehab with 10 Macs (however true this may be) - I'm giving practical advice. If you want to try OS X, a refurb Mac Mini with your existing screen and keyboard is a good call - if you hate it then you can rape it and run Windows on it instead - but Apple never did the budget laptop range, even their 'school' laptops. If you're keen, you'll love it.


Playing devil's advocate, yes you could buy a POS bargain-bucket crapola PC laptop, and if chosen carefully you can hack OS X onto it (I have, for example, got Tiger running on my Asus Eee baby laptop, which was only £200) - however it's a grey area even if you have popped into an Apple Store and bought a copy of OS X (which I have, many times). If you just steal a torrent and do it, then you're a thief. Also, the 'Hackintosh' experience is still really only for the experienced, since you need to know a fair amount about how OS X works to ensure you don't break it with patches, etc.

[RedCabbage]

We have a 15" Powerbook G4 Titanium that has run everyday faultlessly for 7 years. Upgraded it to 1GHz for around £150. Built to last.

Edited by RedCabbage on Friday 18th April 13:31

[LukeBird]

Cyberface is a Mac-lover....

GET HIM!!!!


Sorry chap, couldn't resist!
I have to say, I don't find my PB that problematic for CS3 use. Mainly it's iTunes, MSN, Safari and thats about it. But I do occasionally (more than I expected) use CS3 - illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Fireworks and it's not too bad. Obviously nothing like the oomph of my PC (god), but more than I think you give it credit for

[Stamp]

cyberface said:

JustinP1 said:

PJR said:

The_Jackal said:

You have 350 to spend but what is your criteria in what you want it to do?
For 350 you can get a dual core windows laptop with a lot of processing power. Do you really want to waste 350 on some thing that "looks nice".

Your posts are verging on the troll like. I noticed it in another post yesterday too. Evidently you don't like Apple stuff. Fine. So perhaps you can piss off and keep your nose out of Apple related posts then? There's a good chap.

P,

Yeah. This is a local thread for local people. You must shout the word 'Jobs' a hundred times and begone banshee!

Loads of really good stuff

Thanks a lot CF. Just what I wanted. After reading some of the earlire posts, I have been looking at a 12" PB. I am a sucker for small and square and aluminium. It looks as if I might, if patient, get a 1GHz for around £300.

[JustinP1]

Stamp said:

cyberface said:

JustinP1 said:

PJR said:

The_Jackal said:

You have 350 to spend but what is your criteria in what you want it to do?
For 350 you can get a dual core windows laptop with a lot of processing power. Do you really want to waste 350 on some thing that "looks nice".

Your posts are verging on the troll like. I noticed it in another post yesterday too. Evidently you don't like Apple stuff. Fine. So perhaps you can piss off and keep your nose out of Apple related posts then? There's a good chap.

P,

Yeah. This is a local thread for local people. You must shout the word 'Jobs' a hundred times and begone banshee!

Loads of really good stuff

Thanks a lot CF. Just what I wanted. After reading some of the earlire posts, I have been looking at a 12" PB. I am a sucker for small and square and aluminium. It looks as if I might, if patient, get a 1GHz for around £300.

The one you are talking about is a super little bit of kit. It is currently being used by one of my employees to do audio recording on location. As you can imagine our machines get a lot of mechanical and physical punishment, we had no mechanical problems with 4 years of use for both of our iBooks, and when I replaced these with the 12" PB it still looks immaculate despite the knackering it gets. I put an extra 1GB in it to get 1.25GB. It runs very well even with demanding audio work.

With regard to holding value, I am sure I bought ours about 18 months ago for about £250- £280, it was definitely less than £300 - that means in that time they will have increased in value!

[Stamp]

Well, I have bought a Powerbook 1.5 GHz with an 80GB hard drive. 12" as I love small, and super drive. Built in Airport running OSX tiger.
Paid £380 for it and chuffed to bits. It is mint!

[LukeBird]

Stamp said:

Well, I have bought a Powerbook 1.5 GHz with an 80GB hard drive. 12" as I love small, and super drive. Built in Airport running OSX tiger.
Paid £380 for it and chuffed to bits. It is mint!

Nice
Exactly the same as what I bought!