The drawbacks were the smallish 80GB hard drive (but she uses external drives for all her photos anyway), the smaller screen (so far, no complaints from dropping down from a 17″ PowerBook), and the paucity of ports (turns out she’s not even bought the USB hub we thought she’d need, and her peripherals don’t require FireWire). Performance is plenty snappy for her needs (mostly photography) so it seems like a good choice for her particular needs and a nice price break.
The only problem is that I now have a serious case of Air envy! What a beautiful machine, and the 2 lb. weight difference between it and my MacBook makes more of a difference than I’d imagined. I console myself with the knowledge that I got a similar price break on my black MacBook when I bought a previous generation model last year, and it’s more than adequate for my needs.

The Gen-4 MacBook is plenty portable speed for me. Now, you want to choose between a Gen-5 and the latest Gen-6 MacBook with supposedly 5-times the graphic speed.

I guess you need to ask yourself whether the applications you do are graphic intensive.

If the answer is no, I would go with the black Gen-5 MacBook and invest the price difference on maxing out the memory from 2GB to 4GB.

BR,

George Lien

Although you’ll be impressed with the performance and battery life of any of the Intel Macs, you will notice a difference with the PowerPC generation. They were a lot more stable IMHO. Better firewire chips/design and stability (especially for my audio interfaces), less USB driver problems (again: audio interfaces), more consistent sleep behaviour, generally more stable in general but that may be a Leopard thing.

They’re still solid laptops, but my powerbooks were absolutely rock-solid in every way, but I couldn’t stand their performance after I bought a Mac Pro last year.

Maybe Apple’s plan was to have us to buy more MacBook Air and less MacBook?

I don’t know.

What do you think?

BR,

George Lien

I’m a purchasing offiser for a small company that just bought 7 Macbook Pros and just after a year we had to send 4 back to Apple for mother board replacements. The other 3 had small minor QC quirks like the keyboard letters rubbing off, the lid wraping and random heat problems.

You have me nailed temperamentally as far as cars go. I’ve owned over 50 in 41 years, and the newest was three years old when I bought it. My current rides are a 1990 Toyota Camry and a 1994 Mazda B-4000 4×4 pickup. I do like driving Mercedes and BMWs, but never found the right deal.

A former neighbor of mine always drove used Cadillacs. He said it amused him when folks would make comments like “must be nice to be able to afford a car like that,” then drive away in a new econobox that had cost them two or three times what he paid for his current used Caddy of the day.

CM

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You are like a used car buyer. You are the type that always drives a Mercedes or a BMW, but it is always purchased used.

The world needs someone to help with recycling, and you are doing a good job of it, and you are making a market for the earlier Macs.

About four months ago, I needed a new laptop to replace a borrowed one aluminum MBP I had to return to its owner. I bought a brand new, next to the last MPB for about the same price as a the top of the line MBs at the time. Got a great deal and it’s an awesome machine. I keep my Macs about 8-9 years before replacing them, so I’m good for a while.

But, if I could have waited until today to buy, the temptation to come up with a few hundred more would have been too great. I absolutely love the idea of the billet aluminum chassis. And that graphics card has got to be sweeeeet.

So, yeah. Buy the last gen, knowing that on your next go around, you can get the newest config at a discount.