I am a designer by trade and use photoshop almost exclusively. I currently work on a g5 PowerPC 1.6 and am looking at a used MacBook Pro 2.6. I'm looking for the mobility of a laptop and more speed. Also price is important which would explain the choice for about $500 used. Will the MacBook Pro be the laptop I'm looking for or are there any other suggestions? Thanks for your time... New here.
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Goodness you're going to see a ridiculous speed bump when you upgrade
I don't know what model you're referring to, there was a 2.6ghz MBP in 2006 which would certainly be faster than your current system but that seems like a pretty old machine to be spending money on for any sort of useful purpose.
I don't know what more used machines are going for but I'd think you could get something more recent in a MacBook Air or 13" MacBook Pro that would be faster overall for a similar price or maybe a hair more.
The math doesn't work out that neatly unfortunately, the original Airs were rather underpowered then they turned into capable little machines with one of the updates a year or two ago.
If you're looking at an '09 MBP that's probably not a bad deal, the model I turned up was an older one. And as much as people love to talk about all this horsepower they need, I work as a professional designer/developer in Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, and various web dev programs and get by just fine on a 13" MBP that's several years old (and I'm sure you can relate).
Unless you're working with some really high res/complex files most folks don't need as much machine for graphics work as they seem to think they do.
If you can get it for that price that would be a pretty solid machine for you, it's a bit newer than the laptop I'm currently running and it handles most of my graphics work comfortably.
The only thing I'd be concerned with is the hard drive, if it hasn't been replaced on a machine that's 3 or so years old it's just a matter of time before it dies. That's easy to replace though, and if you can scrape together the cash for an SSD you'll see a great speed increase.
Just be careful about scams, especially from eBay and if the price seems too good to be true. You might want to try Craigslist so you can actually make sure the machine exists and is in good condition. I got a used Macbook that way, met them in the food court of a local mall...