considering buying used from ebay or refurbished from apple store, help please

[bender o]

Hi, so I've been looking for a new notebook for a couple of weeks now and have almost settled for a dell vostro 1320 or 1220 but yesterday I went to a friend's house and fell in love with his new macbook pro.

I don't have that much money to buy a new macbook pro, my budget is $1.000 tops, so first I went into the apple web page and found this macbook http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macbook/?aid=AIC-WWW-NAUS-K2-BYO-WHICHMAC-MACBOOK-13-INCH and I was like wow this would be great, but then I started thinking well what's the difference between this one and the macbook pro which if I select it with the same HDD goes to $1.249. So i started looking in the refurbished section and found this macbook pro for $999 http://store.apple.com/us/product/FB990LL/A?mco=MTA4MzIzMzA and finally to get all of my options I went into ebay and found this macbook http://cgi.ebay.com/APPLE-MACBOOK-13-3-CORE2DUO-2-16G-2G-250GB-WF-BL-DVDRW_W0QQitemZ160375127909QQcmdZViewItemQQptZApple_Laptops?hash=item25571a3f65

So my questions are:
1) I know macbook exceed in performance a normal laptop, but will I notice the difference between one of the dell notebooks with 4gb of ram and one of the macs with just 2gb?

2) I remember reading somewhere that you could buy a new trackpad and put it in the old macbooks in order to get the 4 finger gesture feauters (which btw I would really love) Is that really possible or did I misunderstand? Oh and in the same topic how do I know if those I posted have the 4 finger function?

3) My main reason into upgrading my notebook is to connect it to my Sony 32" LCD and watch 720p movies, what cable should I need to buy in order to do that? And will display better or worse than if I moved the files to my PS3?

4) Oh and finall I almost forgot, what's the main difference between a macbook and a macbook pro?

What would you guys recommend me to do? I dunno if to trust much the ebay seller but I think I won't be hving trouble with an apple refurbished one right?

Sorry for the long story but I wanted to give you guys as much details as I could.

Thank you so much in advance.

 

[thegoldenmackid]

Get the refurbished MacBook Pro, that full 365 day warranty and not having to deal with the risks of eBay is a good idea.

 

[bender o]

Oh and one more question, is it possible to upgrade the 160gb hdd of the macbook pro to a 250gb or 320gb?
Thanks..

 

[Primejimbo]

Did you see this:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/816313/

Also I haven't heard swapping out the track pad at all. I don't think it can be done at all.
I would also go with a refurb from Apple like the others said and you can upgrade the hard drives yourself.

 

[boston44]

Oh and one more question, is it possible to upgrade the 160gb hdd of the macbook pro to a 250gb or 320gb?
Thanks..

If you buy new from apple, you can get it done online. If you buy refurb, you have to buy a stock model but you can change it out yourself..

 

[umiwangu]

So my questions are:
1) I know macbook exceed in performance a normal laptop, but will I notice the difference between one of the dell notebooks with 4gb of ram and one of the macs with just 2gb?

I don't know if a laptop with 4 GBs of RAM would be faster than the MacBook with 2 GBs (since you need to add in other factors, such as processor, bus speeds, etc.), but I would just go with the MacBook anyway. You can add more RAM down the road.

2) I remember reading somewhere that you could buy a new trackpad and put it in the old macbooks in order to get the 4 finger gesture feauters (which btw I would really love) Is that really possible or did I misunderstand? Oh and in the same topic how do I know if those I posted have the 4 finger function?

Just get a MacBook/Pro with the multi-touch trackpad. Much less hassle. 4 finger function is called multi-touch (anyone else?).

3) My main reason into upgrading my notebook is to connect it to my Sony 32" LCD and watch 720p movies, what cable should I need to buy in order to do that? And will display better or worse than if I moved the files to my PS3?

I'm not sure on this one...

4) Oh and finall I almost forgot, what's the main difference between a macbook and a macbook pro?

Have you looked on the Apple Store yet? Apple have finally finished their product transition and all of the aluminium MacBook's are Pro's (even the 13"), and the white plastic MacBook is missing some features of the Pro, such as Firewire (800 in the Pro), backlit keyboard, etc.

What would you guys recommend me to do? I dunno if to trust much the ebay seller but I think I won't be hving trouble with an apple refurbished one right?

Get the refurbished MacBook Pro, that full 365 day warranty and not having to deal with the risks of eBay is a good idea.

Did you see this:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/816313/

Also I haven't heard swapping out the track pad at all. I don't think it can be done at all.
I would also go with a refurb from Apple like the others said and you can upgrade the hard drives yourself.

Ditto. Don't mess around with eBay. Just get the 13" Pro refurb.

HTH

Seth

 

[clyde2801]

Macworld put 4 gigs in the 13" 2.26 macbook and couldn't find any appreciable performance difference after the upgrade. Only install the 4 gigs in either model if you truly need it. Use activity monitor while you're normally using your machine to see if a) you're using all of the ram, and b) you're incurring page-outs.

 

[bender o]

Thanks you guys. I'm still wondering about the 720p and LCD tv thing.
Also, I wanted to buy the mb pro from the online store, my aunt (who'll be buying it for me) live in Houston, how much is the tax there for such transaction?
Thanks again

 

[cfitz7111]

It would be the sales tax for where you live.

 

[davwin]

Thanks you guys. I'm still wondering about the 720p and LCD tv thing.

The unibody MacBooks and MacBook Pro's use miniDisplayport now so you will need a miniDP adaper to output content from your Mac to the TV. As far as image quality, it should be noticably better through the Mac. Playing files directly from the PS3 limits the codecs available to you (to decode), the file types and file sizes it will recognize and the software scaler they use is not as good as a native image from your mDP output directly to the TV.

As far as the adapter itself, you can choose from a few different types but, for this setup I would recommend the miniDisplayport to HDMI adapter from monoprice. This gives you HDMI out from the Mac so you just need a standard HDMI cable to go from the adaper to the back of your HDTV. this only covers picture though... For sound I would recommend a miniTosLink to standard optical TosLink cable, again from monoprice. Really, any decent length audio cable will work but for watching HD movies you'd want 5.1 sound so you should go with the optical cable (assuming your HDTV/receiver/speakers support it).

 

[bender o]

The unibody MacBooks and MacBook Pro's use miniDisplayport now so you will need a miniDP adaper to output content from your Mac to the TV. As far as image quality, it should be noticably better through the Mac. Playing files directly from the PS3 limits the codecs available to you (to decode), the file types and file sizes it will recognize and the software scaler they use is not as good as a native image from your mDP output directly to the TV.

As far as the adapter itself, you can choose from a few different types but, for this setup I would recommend the miniDisplayport to HDMI adapter from monoprice. This gives you HDMI out from the Mac so you just need a standard HDMI cable to go from the adaper to the back of your HDTV. this only covers picture though... For sound I would recommend a miniTosLink to standard optical TosLink cable, again from monoprice. Really, any decent length audio cable will work but for watching HD movies you'd want 5.1 sound so you should go with the optical cable (assuming your HDTV/receiver/speakers support it).

Great info I'll keep that in mind. Thanks