That's a great deal, but whoever sold it to you for that cheap is a moron.
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In my haste, I bought a 2013 MBPr, good buy or bad?
- Thread starter vahdyx
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$550 is an okay price.
You can also get a refund and just upgrade your wife's computer with a 480GB SSD for ~$100.
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Here is another data point: when Apple sells this model on their online refurb/outlet store, it goes for $879 + tax. Not saying that's an awesome price, either, but it's something to keep in mind.
-- Nathan
Yeah...that's definitely not normal. You got lucky. If everybody were buying second-hand 15" Retinas with these specs for $400, then this might actually be relevant to the conversation.
IMO, the display is worth it, as is the build quality. It is not an M.2 drive (proprietary connector), but rather than using some of the funky and limited after-market drives for this interface, you can also buy an adapter that lets you fit an M.2 drive inside. You do have to be careful about selecting a drive, though: it needs to be PCIe AHCI "M-key".
OS X is known to cache as much stuff as it can. If you have available RAM, it will find something to do with it. The more RAM you have, the more it will use, regardless of what you are actually doing. I suspect 4GB is probably going to be fine.
-- Nathan
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See even the friend knew that wasn't totally fair lol. $550 is better. Anything less than $500 is a slickdeal.
Which of course is irrelevant to whether or not the machine meets his wife's needs. Safari's memory use depends a lot on what is open in the tabs, I have 8 open and am using 500MBs or can have 1 open and also use 500MBs. Anecdote is not data, 100 Safari sessions could have 1000 different levels of memory usage and none are the definitive representation of what most users will experience.
Don't get all caught up in the spec sheet, especially when comparing to Windows machines since the OS's are different so a direct comparison is meaningless. 4GB is plenty for most users, more is nicer but often will make no difference in the day to day performance of the machine. Same thing with HD space. How much non-program space does she use now? That tends to be the biggest space consumer, so unless she has tons of photos, music, and video already chances are 128GB will be fine, and you can always add a fast USB3 external dive if you ned space for things like video and photos.
vahdyx, ultimately it is your decision about what to do. You've bought a good machine at a fair price, so if your wife likes it it was a good deal. If you truly feel bad about it, look around to see what else is available at what price to see if there is something you like better. Having AppleCare is definitely a plus since if you run into a problem it's still covered.
It sounds like your friend is putting friendship ahead of money. In fairness to your friend, if he takes it back and sells it of less I'd offer to make up the difference.
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The bit about OS X running better than win is an opinion, as I pointed out.
However comparing PC N.1 running Win with PC N.2 (a Mac) running OS X is a pointless exercise.
The biggest difference between the two will not come from the different specs of the hardware but rather from the difference in the intrinsic performance and usability of the OSs.
Going back to opinions, I'd personally rather have a 4gb Mac than an 8gb win10 any day of the week.
Don't you? ;-)
Windows has come a long way.
I know some people have preferences for either Mac or Windows and I respect that, but Windows 10 can definitely measure up to El Capitan.
Windows 10 is also more conservative in its use of memory than is El Capitan.
The biggest difference in performance that a normal user would notice is having an SSD versus a HDD.
That said, to answer your question, with all else being equal, I would rather have Windows 10 with 8 GB memory than El Capitan with 4 GB memory. I have found El Capitan to be uncomfortable sluggish with only 4 GB of RAM.
I have no idea why people are over-reacting saying you got ripped off. They seem to be going anywhere from $600-750 on eBay. It's not a horrible deal at $700 with AppleCare. I'm very surprised the dude offered you a full $150 discount after you had agreed on $700. Guess that's what friends are for.
If it does what you expect of it, sweet….. Don't fret over specs is doesn't have, that you don't really need.
Meh thats a wrong assessment and I have 3 laptops... 2 Windows and 1 Macbook Pro and all have 8GB of RAM.
Also I wouldn't suggest hacking your way into adding OS X on a Laptop that is obviously dying ...
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Not really but I'm not an Apple Fanboy so I couldn't care less about the Apple Tax nor the "need" to have a Macbook in my neighborhood Starbucks
I support Windows servers and network equipment for work (along with Macs) and if someone tried selling me a computer that's the first thing I would be looking at...CPU, RAM, Storage.
If it's your "buddy", I'm sure he'll take it back. If not, time to unfriend him.
Haha well I probably wouldn't have bought it if I looked before I leaped. He's an engineer so I didn't really think he'd have such a bare minimum Mac in his possession. Guess you can't assume people with money buy top shelf all the time. I also didn't think a MacBook Pro would be so bare either, but lesson learned.
Anyway yesterday he came over to my house and had some beers and gave me my money back. He left the laptop to me and asked me to eBay it for him. So anyone looking for a $700 MacBook Pro
Not really but I'm not an Apple Fanboy so I couldn't care less about the Apple Tax nor the "need" to have a Macbook in my neighborhood Starbucks
I get you.
Frankly for various reasons (Logic Pro being one of them) all I care for is OS-X, but it am not into all this Hackintosh palaver.
And that is the reason why in my opinion it is pointless to compare the hardware specs of a box running Win with those of one running OS X.
That's all.
Something I've noticed though about my macs (My girlfriend and I have several in the house) is that the one's with 16 gigs of ram seem to suck up the ram more readily, and, like you said, are pretty quickly showing more than 4gigs of ram in usage in Activity Monitor. However, the two we have that only have 4 gigs of ram don't seem to max out very easily at all.
And yes, I watch the page outs, ram pressure, ect.
It's as if the OS somehow 'knows' how much ram it has to play with and uses less ram if there's less installed.
Am I the only one whose noticed this phenomenon?
Just to see what would happened, I took out 8GB RAM and inserted 4GB.
The experience is excruciatingly painful.
Absolutely not! A 4GB Mac with Yosemite or El Capitan is a very frustrating experience. I would take a 4GB W10 machine before a 4GB Mac. Yosemite and El Capitan are heavy pigs.
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Good friend.
He may be able to get 700 on ebay but after selling fees, paypal fees and shipping fees it will end up being around 600.
ebay and paypal fees are 13% which is $91 if it sells for $700.
Ok, so you must have been doing something fairly demanding with it? Video editing? Please explain. For web browsing, word processing, light photo editing you shouldn't have noticed any issue due to only having 4gigs of ram.
Consider this: http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/new-testing-suggests-pc-games-dont-need-more-than-4gb-of-ram/
Here's a quote from the article: "After benchmarking a few PCs, it becomes quite obvious that RAM has far less impact than most people think."