Mac 630

I just picked up the original Macbook off of ebay for a grand total of $429.00. I thought it was a great deal (It’s also really helpful when buying on ebay to have a reputable source for such purchases like ebay seller, PowerON). I upgraded the 60 gb hard drive to 160 gb for $45 through an OWC garage sale, and I will soon be bumping the ram from 1 to 2 gbs for $26 through my favorite ebay memory retailer, SterlingMemory. Looks like I’ve got an even $500 in the machine. I was recently wondering how great a deal I got if I compared the price and performance of my Macbook to a new Macbook.

My Macbook is the 1.83ghz Intel Core Duo model. The upgraded specs are -

1.83 ghz Intel Core Duo Processor
667 mhz bus
2 gigs of ram
160 gig 5400 rpm hard drive
2 MB shared cache on CPU
VRAM: 64 MB DDR2 SDRAM (shared w/ main memory, actually uses 80 MB of system RAM)
802.11g AirPort Extreme

Specs of a new Macbook are -

2.1 ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
1066 MHz bus
2 gigs of ram expandable to 6 gigs
120 gb 5400 rpm hard drive
VRAM: uses 256 MB of system memory
3 MB shared cache
802.11n AirPort Extreme

Two of the bigger stats for me are price and performance. My 1.83ghz Macbook cost $500 and scores 2262 on Geekbench under Leopard.

A new Macbook 2.1 ghz machine would cost me $994 at macmall.com with $10 for the cheapest shipping; a grand total of $1004. It attains a Geekbench score of 2759 under Leopard: 22% faster than the 1.83ghz Macbook at 100%+ the cost.

Of course, the glaring deficit is that I’m stuck at 2 gigs of ram and won’t be able to take advantage of all the features of Snow Leopard. But 2 gigs of ram seems plenty for the immediate future. I’m not too worried about the video performance difference as I don’t use the machine for gaming. To date, I haven’t thrown too much at the Intel Core Duo processor, and it hasn’t seemed to have been taxed by web browsing, running multiple applications, etc. Of course, I received it with some minor cosmetic issues and a less than new but still holds a 2 hour charge battery.

The wireless performance is leaps and bounds better than any ibook or powerbook that I’ve owned. And I’ve owned several of both. The graphics and cpu power is also a giant step ahead of the ibook and powerbook. I most recently was using a 17″ Powerbook 1.67ghz G4 with 128 mg of vram. That machine was the only powerbook or ibook that I’ve ever had that could handle Leopard with relative ease. All the others would choke on Leopard. I really think that the vram was the deciding factor as it didn’t possess a huge advantage in processing power over other Powerbooks and Ibooks.

What a huge advance for Apple when they introduced the Macbook. Powerbooks and Ibooks were caught in a G4 time warp. Come to think of it, switching to Intel must have been a significant step forward over the G5 as well. I bought the last model of the G5 Imac only to have Apple release the new Intel based Imac only about a month later. Oooh, that still smarts.

If you are in the used laptop market, I would strongly recommend an older Macbook over any Powerbook or Ibook unless you really need that 17″ screen on some of the Powerbooks. You know that when Powerbooks and Ibooks are struggling with playing YouTube videos that they are reaching the end of their useful life. Heck my 17″ Powerbook even struggled with my mail application and I tried Apple’s Mail, Thunderbird and Postbox (I’m sure it would help if I removed several thousand emails from my inbox but the Macbook handles it fine).

You can find 12″ ibooks for under $200 on ebay if you search long and hard. Your Geekbench score will precipitously drop to a measly 742 under Leopard. That equals a performance drop of over 3x for a price drop of only 2.5x (see what I mean by the huge leap forward that Apple made by switching to Intel).

If you are looking at new Macbooks, you may want to consider a 22% performance reduction for a 100% reduction in price. I’m sure glad I did.

February 2010 update – I got a chance to upgrade to a MacBook Pro 2.4ghz machine for $750 so I recently sold my MacBook White for $485. I took the new hard drive I had out and sold it with the 2gb memory upgrade. I think I still made a profit despite using the MacBook White for several months. Not bad!