iPad for MacBook trade. [ noobie needing advice ]

Wesj00 said:

I currently have a iPad 3 32GB in excellent shape. I got offered the following for it:
A 13" MacBook unibody aluminum, it's running lion 10.7.5, has 3gb DDR memory, 250 gb hard drive, has office Mac 2011'has new mag safe power adapter, CPU is 2.4ghz core 2 duo with 3mb cache memory.

Would this be a good deal for me? They are in the same city as me and the Mac is in good condition.

Thanks,

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That sounds like a pretty good deal, actually. It is the only unibody aluminum macbook that they made, right? Just know that you will have to go back to Leopard or Snow Leopard since the other two OSes are tied to an AppleID that was used to purchase them.

It also(since it was made around the same time) has the same hardware as the early 2009 iMac as far as GPU is concerned, so I would start with a RAM upgrade and be sure that the ODD works properly since they have a tendency to fail within 3 or so years(my iMac Superdrive failed recently and no longer recognizes DVDs)

Wesj00 said:

So I would have to change operating systems to like leopard? How much is that? The person says it has not one flaw internally.

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If they are the original owner, then they should have to sell you the computer plus the original installation disk to make sure. If you can get them to install Snow Leopard, then that would make the cost for Lion/Mountain Lion only $30 to you.

And make sure what year it is, because the aluminum macbook was from 2008, and the older the machine is, the less it's worth the trade. I have to tell you though that my early 2009 iMac(except for the ODD) is running flawlessly with 8GB RAM and a newly installed 3TB HDD.

Wesj00 said:

They said the would install snow leopard for me. Also the ODD is working perfectly and so is everything else I've been told. Is this something I should definitely do? Or could I find a better deal. It is the 2008 model.

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I would go for it if it were me. Just make sure that you get the Snow Leopard disk as well(or the leopard one). There should be no reason why they wouldn't want to include the original disk with the machine. And if they can't or won't do that, find an external hard drive that can boot up an intel mac and clone the OS onto it in case anything goes wrong in the future.

Just be fully aware of what you'll be getting rid of when you do go with the trade. battery life is not as long, airplay is no longer an option, you won't have 3G data access(unless you have a usb stick). Other than those, any other loss is negligible or not even a concern.

And make it official and get a receipt or some kind of documentation that shows the model and serial # of both devices and that this trade is for two devices in "as is" condition and that neither party makes claims as to the length of time that either device will remain working properly. Or something like that. It would suck if anything was contested and this way you both know that you're each committed to the deal.

I would go for it!