Upgrade or keep MacBook Pro

[beerglass007]

I currently have a Mac Book Pro 2.53 Unibody and was thinking of selling for a Imac 3.0.6 2008 because I don't ever use the laptop as a portable device.

Then I would buy a cheap white macbook secondhand just incase i needed to take a laptop anywhere.

So how much more powerful is the Imac 3.0.6 ?

I do use windows xp in bootcamp and play the odd game of quake live. But after that its all Ilife and email, firefox


Thanks

 

[miles01110]

Trading one computer for 2 is usually not a good idea, it just means that you'll want/feel like you have to replace both of them at the same time. For your uses it doesn't seem like the iMac would make a huge difference anyways.

 

[Nukemkb]

Why not get a nice monitor, keyboard and mouse and use yours as a fixed unit. If you need a mobile, just unplug and go!

 

[DoFoT9]

definately get the iMac 3.06. the increase will be quite noticable, not to mention the 4580 GPU.

 

[J&JPolangin]

...what size UMBP do you have?

 

[DoFoT9]

...what size UMBP do you have?

15inch, the 17inchers start at 2.66ghz

 

[bcburrows]

Cost benefit analysis

Have you priced up your switch?

What could you sell your MBP for? Could you improve that with a cheap applecare ebay purchase?

How much for the iMac?
Have you checked prices of macbooks that would suit your needs?
How much cash do you have available to inject into this exchange, or do you think you will make money?

As someone else stated, what about wired/wireless and mouse/keyboard and cheap external monitor? That way you would still have a very powerful laptop that would also have a large work surface area - dual monitor display - lots of internet/ilife real estate, and portability....

Surely the graphics cards of the MBP (is your 9600) powerful enough, and surely when snow leopard comes out you would want it on both machines whitebook and imac - and that is prob just not going to be a good move.

So I would suggested
External monitor and input devices
Keep MBP

 

[beerglass007]

Hi all

My MBP is Oct 14th 2008
2.53 with 4GB ram, 320 GB HDD 15"

It does have apple care and would think it would go for £1300-£1400 on flebay hopefully.

The 3.0.6 isn't the very new version but a refub I found on apple store which is going for £1149. It has the 8800 card in it.

So could pocket the cash and try and land a cheap white mac book for about £400

But is the 8800 card in the Imac and the extra CPU power a better package than the 2.53 and 9600 in the MBP ?

Hmmmm

 

[clyde2801]

Get an external monitor and a 7200 rpm drive for your mbp. I doubt you'll tell much of a difference between the imac and your system doing consumer iStuff.

 

[beerglass007]

Get an external monitor and a 7200 rpm drive for your mbp. I doubt you'll tell much of a difference between the imac and your system doing consumer iStuff.

Does the 7200 make a big differnce then ?

 

[clyde2801]

You'll tell a noticeable difference doing anything that's disk intensive, such as booting up, file transfers, application cold starts, software updates, etc. You'll tell a bigger difference with the right SSD, but IMO the 7200 drive update is the best value for the money. And with a unibody, it's surprisingly easy to do.

 

[DoFoT9]

Does the 7200 make a big differnce then ?

it will make about a 10%-15% difference in read/write speeds. start up time will drop by a few seconds. application launching will drop by a bit. the computer will feel 'snappier' overall. but not by THAT much.

i personally go for size over speed.