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Am I an Idiot for Spending $285 on an iBook?

E

Epsilon88

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 26, 2009
327
0
Hey guys,

I was bidding on an iBook 12 inch G4, 1.25 GB RAM on eBay. It looks like it is in great condition, and includes all the DVDs, cables, and box, and it has a newer battery. Anyway, I was the top bidder at $165 until the very last minute, when someone bid above me. I bid all the way up to $285 and then won the bid.

Then I look at Mac2Sell, and apparently it's worth a hundred bucks?! Lol, did I just spend too much money? :eek:
 
Their price doesn't really matter.

Was the iBook worth $285 to you?

If so, then who cares?
 
they said my ipod touch was worth 80 bucks but i got 150 so they are not right. THat is how much they would pay for it not you. plus most people would not sell it for that much
 


Personally, I feel that anything lower than a Core 2 Duo (yes, even a Core Duo) isn't worth much.


If you were looking for a netbook, this was a great alternative.

Take that with a grain of salt though because our needs are different.
 
the question(s) that should be asked is what do you think you can do with it? it will not be able to do much if you are using current software. Let us know what you are going to do with it.
 
definitely i would rather spend £ 300 on a ibook g4 ,then £ 200 on a macbook
but thats my personal opinion as i just like the old design nice clean white or colorful it has to be on my desk ,as i am not a funeral director ,
you are not an idiot ,i say its worth that
 
In my opinion, yes, you paid too much. I'd rather have an easily Hackintoshable netbook than an iBook G4. There's just so much software that won't run on the PowerPCs now.
 
i agree there to a extend if its a MSI WIND as its white and as easy to install osx snow leo as it is on a MPB, and even snow leopard things its a MPB :D
but a ibook is a real Mac and not a intel pc with a apple on
 
Good choice

I'm still using my iBook G4 as a spare. Not sure how your ram is 1.25 gig. Mine came 500 meg, option is 500 more or 1 gig more (single available user slot). My hard drive is 40 gig. You can boot from the firewire port or just use a larger external for fast storage.
 
Yeah, that is failBook pricing, you could have gotten a brand new netbook for 6 bucks cheaper. 9 hour battery life too. http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/s...dexp/hhoslp/psg/notebooks/Mini/mini110_series


Epsilon88 said:
Hey guys,

I was bidding on an iBook 12 inch G4, 1.25 GB RAM on eBay. It looks like it is in great condition, and includes all the DVDs, cables, and box, and it has a newer battery. Anyway, I was the top bidder at $165 until the very last minute, when someone bid above me. I bid all the way up to $285 and then won the bid.

Then I look at Mac2Sell, and apparently it's worth a hundred bucks?! Lol, did I just spend too much money? :eek:
Click to expand...
 
MacHamster68 said:
i agree there to a extend if its a MSI WIND as its white and as easy to install osx snow leo as it is on a MPB, and even snow leopard things its a MPB :D
but a ibook is a real Mac and not a intel pc with a apple on
Click to expand...

I haven't followed the MSI Wind scene since a former female friend "borrowed" my Wind... But I have since purchased a Dell Mini 10v and installation of Snow Leopard on that was incredibly easy. No more difficult than installing on a real Mac.

It's ironic that there are OS X apps that can run on these Hackintoshes that will not run on PowerPC based Macs.
 
You're only an idiot if you're unhappy with your purchase. Personally, I wouldn't -buy- any PowerPC mac aside from a Powermac G5 anymore (and even that comes with the caveat of knowing precisely what you want to do with it/limitations etc). With that said, I understand the draw to the older PPC machines. The iBooks--especially the early G3 white ones, to me, are some of most aesthetically-pleasing laptops Apple's made in the past 10 years or so...and I *may* just be getting a free G4 tower that I have no use for tomorrow :p
 
You're not an idiot, but I think there's some room for improvement in your bidding strategy. Set a price in your mind beforehand that you are willing to pay. Not a price that you like, but the absolute maximum that you would still accept. Then enter a (maximum) bid with that price right before the auction ends and just stand by and watch whether you win or not.
 
wordoflife said:
Personally, I feel that anything lower than a Core 2 Duo (yes, even a Core Duo) isn't worth much.
Click to expand...

A Core Duo is still a huge leap from a G4; Core Duo Macs have hardware h.264 decoding and can smoothly watch fullscreen Hulu and navigate Flash-heavy sites. I only mention this because my wife has a 2.0 GHz Core Duo Macbook, and in real-world application it performs WAY better than my 12" 1.33 GHz iBook with 1.5 GB RAM, which I constantly used until I got my iPad.

So yes, OP, I think you overpaid for your iBook, but on the bright side, the 12" iBook was a great laptop (I adored mine) and is still powerful enough for some web browsing and light productivity work.
 
I still use my old 14 inch iBook G4 1.2 Ghz-1,25 GB RAM-Leopard everyday and it works fine as long as I don´t care about having the very last version of every software.
It still works nice enough with serious soft like Avid XPress DV, Adobe CS3 or Logic Express 8, wich still do almost everything I need today, though I must admit that I wouldn't be able to do it without the help from an external firewire hard drive that I use.
 
It sounds like you were using ebay. The trouble with ebay is you don't know if somebody has set a snipe bid for a few seconds before the auction closes. To use ebay properly, don't sit there watching the item close. Set your bid either as a normal bid or as a snipe and walk away. If you don't get the item so what, there will be another one. If you are bidding on something and just have to have it, expect to overpay if you sit there and watch the end of the auction.

There is a local computer store that is selling used lease turn-in iMacs for $800 for Intels and $500 for G5's. I would take Intel over PPC. I have a netbook and I haven't bothered hackintoshing it. I have Ubuntu on the thing. But if I only had $300 to spend, I'd be more inclined to get a new netbook than a used PPC based Mac because I prefer Intel. We still use an old G4 Mac Mini around here but it's the only machine in the house not running Snow Leopard. We don't use it much but haven't yet encountered software that won't run on the thing.
 
Xeem said:
A Core Duo is still a huge leap from a G4; Core Duo Macs have hardware h.264 decoding and can smoothly watch fullscreen Hulu and navigate Flash-heavy sites. I only mention this because my wife has a 2.0 GHz Core Duo Macbook, and in real-world application it performs WAY better than my 12" 1.33 GHz iBook with 1.5 GB RAM, which I constantly used until I got my iPad.

So yes, OP, I think you overpaid for your iBook, but on the bright side, the 12" iBook was a great laptop (I adored mine) and is still powerful enough for some web browsing and light productivity work.
Click to expand...

I know they aren't bad at all, and a huge jump for G4, but like I said, personally, they aren't worth much for me.
 
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