Buying a Mac on a Budget

[1] Your friend who works at Apple may be able to get you a discount. However, Apple employees are inundated with such requests from their friends, and they have a limited number of discounts to use, so employees usually reserve the discounts for their family members.

[2] Don't be afraid to buy a refurbished Mac. Apple sells them for about 15% less than list price. A refurbished computer has been returned to a tech who checks everything and fixes what may be broken, so it has been checked a second time beyond the normal factory testing. But be careful: you may be buying last year's model.

Go to http://store.apple.com, scroll to the bottom, and look for "Refurbished and Clearance."

[3] There are also educational and military discounts. The discount is about 10-15%. You can get the discount only on Mac Books and iMacs, not on Mac Minis or Mac Pros.

[4] You can buy online, but buy only from trusted sources, such as Tech Restore, www.techrestore.com, in Concord,Small Dog Electronics, www.smalldog.com, on the east coast, and Mac Connection. www.macconnection.com.

[5] Do not buy from Ebay or Craigslist. The conventional wisdom is that any laptop being sold on Ebay has been dropped.

[6] Memory. You want your Mac to have as much memory as possible. It used to be possible to upgrade memory yourself, but this is no longer a viable option since around 2013. The Macs are sealed and can't be modified.

[7] Processor. You probably want to have a computer running Mojave (10.14+) so you can run the version of Xcode we're using in the class (Xcode 11). So get an i5 processor at least. You probably can't run Mojave on any Mac older than 2013.

[8] Upgrades. On most recent Macs, it is not possible to upgrade the processor chip. On many of the Macs released since 2013, it is not possible to upgrade anything at all inside. The recent MacBooks of all types are not user serviceable at all. You cannot upgrade the RAM, disk, battery, or anything else inside. If the upgrade you'd like to do is not available on www.macsales.com, then it is not possible to do that upgrade.

[9] To order any upgrade, you have to know your Mac's model identifiers. If you already have your Mac in hand, do this:

Apple Menu -> About This Mac -> System Report

or

⌘-Space --> System Information

Then look at the Model Identifier. An example is "Macmini6,2."

You can look up the tech specs on any Mac model on the Every Mac web site.