Refurb now or New later?

[dball4]

I'm looking to buy my first Mac and I'm a college student. My current laptop which was provided to me by my university is falling apart. It's a Dell latitude from about 2 years ago. I do tech support for my university so I plan on putting windows 7 and Ubuntu on it as well. So my question is should I buy the refurb at$759 or a new MB? I was looking at the pro's and at this moment I decided against it. The only 2 modern games I play are Hearts of Iron 3 and the sims 3. I'm assuming both would play ok. What is your advice on what I should do? I can buy the refurb now or I can wait until my first paycheck to come in later in June to buy a new or wait until August and buy a MBP. So basically I am asking for your advice.

 

[aiqw9182]

I say go for the new MacBook over the refurb. For 190 more bucks you get 3 more hours of battery life, a faster processor and 2x better graphics performance.

Differences:
MacBook (refurbed)
2.26GHz Core 2 Duo
NVIDIA 9400M
7 Hour Battery
$759

MacBook (new)
2.4GHz Core 2 Duo
NVIDIA 320M
10 hour battery
$949 with a student discount

 

[Guiguiga]

If you can wait a little more, wait until they put the NEW models in the refurbished store. It should take less than a month.

 

[HuggyLowDown]

I think you should go for the new MacBook. For just a couple hundred more dollars you have more battery life, faster processor, and better graphics. Go ahead and buy it, you won't regret it.
___________________________
13" MacBook Pro (2010) 2.4 ghz

 

[lcseds]

I'm looking to buy my first Mac and I'm a college student. My current laptop which was provided to me by my university is falling apart. It's a Dell latitude from about 2 years ago. I do tech support for my university so I plan on putting windows 7 and Ubuntu on it as well. So my question is should I buy the refurb at$759 or a new MB? I was looking at the pro's and at this moment I decided against it. The only 2 modern games I play are Hearts of Iron 3 and the sims 3. I'm assuming both would play ok. What is your advice on what I should do? I can buy the refurb now or I can wait until my first paycheck to come in later in June to buy a new or wait until August and buy a MBP. So basically I am asking for your advice.

New Macbook for $949 and then get the free 8GB iPod Touch. Sell that if you want and your cost will be less than the refurb.

 

[dball4]

I'm so conflicted now if I want to get the MBP? I already have the adaptor for an SD card and I have no use for FireWire, is the extra 2 GB of ram worth it if I buy new and the backlit keyboard? If I get the MacBook I would upgrade the ram myself later.

 

[alust2013]

I've got the original aluminum MB, and it's got basically the same guts, save the nicer GPU, but plus the aluminum/backlit keys, and it plays sims3 and portal fine, so you would do fine with it, even without the extra ram. I'm going to buy the 4 gigs for mine though, simply because 2 gets pretty tight when I am running iTunes, Firefox and other stuff all at the same time.

So I think I would wait a little while until the newer MBs appear as refurbs, and go for that. That way you get the newer hardware at the lower price. Shouldn't be too long before they have refurbs.