This 13″ refurbished Macbook for sale on the US store for $999 is a good one. For those readers from Australia, it’s $1139 here from the Australian store. (If it’s out of stock – it’s worth checking back in a few days, they are released a few at a time.) Read on for why it’s so good.
It’s NOT a retina display. (You can get a new retina 13″ macbook for $1599.) So why would you want this Macbook instead of a new retina model? Well…
- It’s the last MacBook to have ethernet.
- It’s the last MacBook to have a built in optical drive.
- It’s the last macbook to have firewire.
- It’s the last macbook where you can upgrade the RAM after purchase.
- Plus it’s still reasonably fast.
- It uses slightly less power than the retina model that came after it. (9W as opposed to 10.5W)
I think this refurbished model is exactly the same as the current non-retina MacBook that’s on the Apple store (AU) for $1349 new.
The other MacBook to consider would be the big brother of this model – the 2.9GHz i7 version. It’s $180 more. But it runs a bit hotter, fan a bit noisier, and check this out. On medium and heavy workloads (watching movies etc) the i7 has less battery life. Yet another reason why the 13″ i5 MacBook is so good.
UPGRADING THE RAM AND HARD DRIVE
If you want to upgrade this 2012 MacBook it you can get more RAM and a faster SSD drive from Crucial. They ship internationally and are cheap but reliable.
Click here to get to the page above then select the second Macbook from the list (MacBook Pro 13-inch Mid 2012) and it will give you a list of compatible RAM and SSD drives for this MacBook.
8G RAM from Crucial will set you back $95 (similar to Apple’s $100) but a 240G SSD is just $160 (compared to $400 from Apple).
You can find RAM installation instructions at ifixit here.
If you want to upgrade the Hard Disk to lightning fast SSD, the SSD drive installation instructions here.
APPLECARE
No matter what mac you buy, I’d suggest you get a 3 year Applecare Hardware warranty. For the MacBook Pro it’s about $279 from Apple or as low as $219 from ebay.
