Used MacBook

Apple is one of the best producers of computers and other electronic devices in the world. The company was founded many years ago in 1976 in Cupertino,  California, United   States of America and it still has the headquarters there today. Its founders are Ronald Wayne, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. Today it had become a large multinational corporation, so it has many others locations all over the world (284 in January 2010). It also has around 35.000 employees and makes sales of billions of dollars each year (42.91 billion dollars in 2009). As we said it makes all sorts of devices, and some of the most famous Apple products are: the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, the iMac computer, the MacBook laptop, the Mac OS X operating system or the iTunes Store.

Today we’ll discuss about just one of these products, and we’ll choose the Apple MacBook notebook. It is a cool looking laptop, that also offers very good technical details. But of course, all of these cool features come at  high price. There are actually three series in the MacBook family and these are : the MacBook (with prices starting from 999 dollars), the MacBook Pro (with prices starting from 1199 dollars) and the MacBook Air (which has prices that are starting from a big sum of 1499 dollars). So if you don’t have so much money, but you still want to benefit from the many advantages offered by an Apple MacBook laptop, you can buy an used MacBook. And you will find a lot of them in many places.



First of all you can search through your city, in the local retail stores that are selling used products. But it will be even simpler to just browse the internet and search for the laptop you want right from your own home. And you will also receive it right at your home, so it is really simple. Unfortunately you won’t be able to see and try the product before buying it, so this might be the only negative aspect. But on the internet you can find some really good offers (much better than in stores), so you might want to try and take the risk on buying a laptop online. The best place to start searching are the auction sites, such as ebay.com or amazon.com.

For example if you visit ebay.com, and search for products by using the key word Macbook, you will find more than 40,000 result, which is quite a lot. Not all of the results are MacBook laptops, they are also parts, accessories and other products related to the MacBook. And of course there are many laptops too, and one of them is the Apple MacBook Pro MA 464 LL/A, with a display screen of 15.4 inch and a price of just 295 dollars. And let’s not forget that the starting price for a new MacBook Pro is 1200 dollars, so this can be a really good deal.



Now let’s find read more details about this laptop, and find out if it is a really good deal or not. This one was bought in March 2006 so now it has exactly 4 years. This is quite a lot of time, so it has some signs of wear and tear. Two of its keys (the F8 and the C) are pretty lose, the paint has peeled in some places and one of the speakers has a small dent. These would not be so major problems, but unfortunately the battery and the optical drive need to be replaced. So you will have to spend some extra money for these parts, but still you will have a good total price, which would be less than half of the real price of a new MacBook.

So you can buy this one and invest some more money to make it better, or you can buy it for spare parts in case you already have a similar laptop. And now let’s discuss a little about its technical details. It comes with the Intel Core Duo processor, which has a speed of 2 Ghz. The motherboard has a bus speed of 667 Mhz, and the ram memory is just 1 GB of DDR 2 SDRAM. As we mentioned earlier the display screen has a diagonal of 15.4 inch, and a max resolution of 1440 x 900. for extra security it has a Keningston Lock Slot, and its expansion ports are 2 USB ports, 1 IEEE 1394 FireWire, one DVI (Digital Video Interface), one modem port RJ 11 and also one RJ 45 (NIC) port. Since it is an older model it has a smaller hard drive than the ones usually found on laptops today – one with a capacity of 100 GB and a speed of 5400 rpm. Its optical drive is a DVD ± RW / CD – RW, with these features:
- Optical Drive Read Speed: 24 x (CD), 8 x (DVD)
- Optical Drive Write Speed:     24 x (CD), 4 x (DVD + R ), 4 x (DVD - R)
- Optical Drive ReWrite Speed: 10 x (CD - RW), 4 x (DVD + RW), 4 x (DVD - RW).

The video card of this laptop is a ATI MOBILITY RADEON X 1600 with an installed video memory of 256 MB , and a maximum supported resolution of 2560 x 1600. it also has audio ports such as one for 3.5 mm headphones, a microphone port and also built in speakers. Its networking types are: Bluetooth, Integrated Wireless LAN, Network Adapter, and the data link protocol technologies are: AirPort Extreme, Bluetooth, Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, IEEE 802.11 g. It has a Lithium polymer battery, and the overall dimensions of this used MacBook are:
Depth: 9.6 in
Height: 1 in
Width:  14.1 in
Weight: 5.6 lb