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new mac advice

 
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My Mac is a little over 4 years old. It is starting to get old. (I"m seeing minor slowdowns from lack of RAM.) The biggest thing though is that twice recently the screen has gone black while using it and been hard to start up. The internet implies this is an expensive problem to fix, so I might as well start with a new one.

My current computer is a 15" MacBook Pro with 8GB RAM and a 2 GHz processor. I'm thinking to replace it with 15" monitor 2.5GHz Processor 512 GB Storage model. I was on the fence about 256GB vs 512 GB. My current computer is 512GB and I'm using 34%. (Granted I haven't cleaned it out in some time.) But that seems like I'd be memory constrained at some point in the next few years.

I've added more RAM to every computer I've ever bought, but that doesn't appear to be an option here. This is the most expensive machine I've ever bought. But I don't want the smaller monitor. And I do use it a lot.

Questions:
1) There's nothing on the horizon I should know about that would cause me to wait a little longer, right?
2) My choice seem ok? Would you change anything?

 
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Jeanne Boyarsky wrote:My Mac is a little over 4 years old. It is starting to get old. (I"m seeing minor slowdowns from lack of RAM.) The biggest thing though is that twice recently the screen has gone black while using it and been hard to start up. The internet implies this is an expensive problem to fix



Maybe, maybe not. I've brought computers with display problems to the Apple Store and gotten it fixed for a reasonable fee with one of their "out of warranty programs".

That said, if the specs are getting long in the tooth and you'd like a more modern machine, go for it.

(Might still make sense to check if you can get it fixed inexpensively. That might be worth it for the resale value, which tends to stay high for Macs.)

Questions:
1) There's nothing on the horizon I should know about that would cause me to wait a little longer, right?
2) My choice seem ok? Would you change anything?


1) Nothing that I am aware of.
2) I'd max out the storage and the RAM. If you need to compromise, go for max RAM.
 
Jeanne Boyarsky
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Bear Bibeault wrote:Maybe, maybe not. I've brought computers with display problems to the Apple Store and gotten it fixed for a reasonable fee with one of their "out of warranty programs".


It's not a display problem. The display is fine. I don't want to spend a lot of money to repair a computer only to have something else fail shortly after. You raise a good point though - I should at least have them look at it and see. Rather than assuming the worst case.

I'll need to replace my Mac at some point, but it doesn't have to be right now.
 
Jeanne Boyarsky
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I went to the Apple store. Hardware diagnostics had home showed an error. (Googling the code didn't show anything.) The guy claims those have false positives sometimes. He ran a few scans and didn't find anything. His suggestion is a factory reset. I don't think I want to do that. If I have to go through setting everything up, I want a new computer. And to be able to use the old one in parallel. He also said that he doesn't expect it to happen more frequently. He also said if a factory reset doesn't help, he suggests sending it to offsite repair where they chart $280 flat for any repair. And $0 if they don't find anything.

So I got home today and had another "machine shut down for no reason and was hard to restart". Which is about 50 hours after last time. I'll try a few more things on my own and then decide what to do.
 
Jeanne Boyarsky
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Bear Bibeault wrote:(Might still make sense to check if you can get it fixed inexpensively. That might be worth it for the resale value, which tends to stay high for Macs.)


I checked.The cost of having them fix it (which might be them saying they fixed something, charging me and having something break shortly after) was higher than the resale value of the Mac. I decided to get new computer. Will recycle the old one.
 
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MY recommendation would be to get the 256 Gigabyte model because while you could get that model and save as much money as possible, you could trade that in to the apple refurbishing program and receive approx. 80% of its value back to buy another one with more RAM and storage.
 
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You're making a recommendation to Jeanne on a computer purchase she was contemplating over 2 years ago, when we know for sure she bought a new one because she blogged about it.

Besides, your idea of buying a Mac, selling back to Apple for 80% of its value, then buying another one doesn't sound like a great idea at all. It just doesn't make good sense to me! I dunno, maybe I've misunderstood you.
 
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