Buying a Mac on eBay?

Posted on Sunday, July 4th, 2004 12:48 PM

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I want some advice. After playing with PearPC on my laptop, I'm now seriously jonesing for a Mac. (Yes, even after my anti-Apple rant last Monday, you should've seen the zealot emails). However, portable Macs are just too expensive from the Apple store. I just can't justify $1500 for a middle-tier laptop. So I went perusing on eBay and saw a bunch of different options for much less, which is good, but I don't have a clue which, if any, will get me by.

So I need advice from the Mac-heads out there. I want a laptop that can run the latest version of the OS, but I'd like to play with development tools like XCode and Java, so it can't be soooo sluggish as to be unusable (I've got PearPC for that). Any thoughts? I saw an older 400Mhz TiBook for $600 "Buy Now". Was that a good deal? Should I look at G3s or only stick with G4s? What's the minimum Megahertz to run decent apps? How hard/expensive is it to get Macs repaired?

I'm actually thinking that maybe I could buy it for home use (for me, Ana and Alex) so maybe an eMac might be an option as well (and cheaper). Anyways, if you've eBayed a Mac Notebook before, drop a comment here.

-Russ

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