If you want a cheap mac then check out your local university. I got mine through my ex (he teaches stage 3 comp sci) & the dept sell off it's computers once they've finished wth them. They don't advertise though. The techies all give them a clean bill of health first.
My lappy is the first comp I've ever bought new... ouch. Was when i was setting up my info research bizz so I expected to be able to claim part of it back in tax. It was, after all, the most essential piece of equipment for the business. But the car accident sort of put paid to all that.
Was $4000 ($NZ, about half the value of the £) new, cleaned out my bank account totally, can buy the same machine (or better) off Trade me for about $1500 now. Don't think I would bother buying new again.
Both my kids have G3 ibooks, got both off trade me.
My daughter's has bulk extra RAM & an Airport card (my son's has to use LAN) & works excellently (I spent the last 3 days checking it out & setting it up... although only time will tell for sure). It cost me $400 Last week (used the money from my painting, she's busy shifting all her stuff over to the new comp right now). Only thing wrong with it was one of the wee rubber footpads was missing. Reckon I can live with that
They aren't state of the art obviously, but they do excellently for their homeschooling & entertainment needs... My daughter is heavy into pixel art & runs a graphics forum so she demands a lot from her computer but even the G3 (running panther) seems to handle it just fine.
John's comp is a PC running windowsME & he is a real technophobe & is always asking me to do stuff on it for him. I have to admit that over the last couple of years I have really come to hate the system. It is so clumsy & so inefficient (things I can do in one or two steps on my mac take 5-6 steps on his windows system) that I'm afraid that it drives me potty.
I can understand that people would want to be able to run windows on their comp in order to take advantage of the number of games etc available, & indeed mac are missing out on a huge share of the market at present because, as you said bex, at the moment gamers will just go out & buy a PC, whichever system they prefer for day to day use, simply because most of the games they want to play don't run on Macs (I wouldn't mind being able to run windows just to use that flight simulator chris showed me a few months ago
). But even if I could do so you couldn't pay me enough to use windows for all the rest of my daily use. The system is just too frustrating
& I'm too fond of my hair
So... have I p*ssd everyone off yet?
