Someone is willing to sell me his old Macbook Pro for about USD 650. It’s 4 years old, and the battery is about 1/3 through its life-cycle (that’s what the owner tells me).
I am primarily using it to do iPhone development.
Is it worth the price? Should I get it?
Unless you specifically need it to portable I would suggest getting the Mac Mini. It’s comparable in price but blows away that MBP hardware wise.
Having it to be portable will be a plus. I’m currently without a laptop at the moment…
That model appears to be the 17-inch model in the revision before mine. It has a “Core Duo” processor, which is dual-core, but 32-bit. The “Core 2 Duo” as used on mine is dual-core, 64-bit. It appears that the next revision of Mac OS X, “Lion”, will be 64-bit only and not supported on this machine. The machine will continue functioning, but updates for the system software will eventually stop.
Ad for iPhone development, check the requirements for the SDK. It currently requires 10.6 on an Intel Mac, so it will work on the proposed machine, but who knows whether that will change.
That’s very unlikely. I’m not saying the owner is lying; I would imagine he/she just doesn’t know, but a lithium ion battery permanently loses a portion of its capacity every year even from just sitting, typically about 20% if it was plugged in at 100% most of the time.
My husband’s three year old Macbook Pro holds about half the charge it did when new so that sounds about right. He rarely uses it on battery so an hour or two of charge is fine for him for at the moment. I use my year old MacBook Pro on battery for 4 or 5 hours at a time, so when my battery drops by another another hour of charge it will be below that threshold and I’ll replace it, even though it’ll still be at more than half its “life”. Battery life is not as important as whether the battery supplies you with the charge time you need for the way you use the computer.
To the OP, for double the price you could get a brand new model, so your friend certainly isn’t giving it away. If you only have $650 to spend, it might be a good fit for you, although you will likely have to buy a new battery soon.
Oh, he did replace the battery before. Sorry for missing out that relevant detail.
4 years is a bit long in the tooth for a laptop.
I think you’d be better off finding a more recent model (maybe with a smaller screen if budget is a limitation).
For < $1000, you can get a factory refurbished late model Macbook Pro. Better hardware, not 4 years old, newer, faster stronger. About the only thing worse is that it’s only a 13" screen.
If your budget is limited or you really want the big screen, then this may be the computer for you, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless both of those are true.