Best time to buy?

[BCiné]

Hey there...

I have been a life-long mac user and will be heading off to university next fall. I plan on buying an iBook (since it seems to be the choice for education) but want to know -- what is the best time of year to buy it so that I am 'most up to date'?

Also -- would anyone recommend leasing, using the 'education' discount they offer or just plain purchasing?

Any input is much appreciated!

 

[DigitalN.]

personally, I would buy now and get a G4. the new intel iBooks will have many bugs, and I would rather have something rock stable for school or anything.

 

[radarbob]

www.macrumors.com is an excellent site for seeing the release history on mac hardware. They also have buy recommendations based on release history.

At the momement, wait if you can. MacExpo is the biggest Macintosh thing of the year - and it happens mid January. There is typically significant new / hardware upgrade announcements during MacExpo.

What you want to do is go to apple.com, quicktime tab and see what it says about MacExpo. You can watch the keynote by Steve Jobs on live streaming video over the internet, he makes all the announcements.

Rumors are everywhere about the new intel-based mac, maybe iBook, maybe PowerBook, and maybe announced during MacExpo.

 

[mynameis]

the new intel iBooks will have many bugs

I wouldn't assume that.

I would wait till right before you started to get it, since the last 2 years in the fall they have offered special student discounts that were better then regular student pricing(last year $100 off, this year free ipod mini).

I have never heard of any computer leasing programs from Apple.

 

[lil]

Hopefully the first Intel iBook/PowerBooks won't be anything like the 5300 (which was in fairness not really to do with it being the first PPC PowerBook)...

The thing that is keeping me on the PowerPC camp for now is the fact that when you get rid of all the hype and the hysteria, the PowerPC will be an emulated chip on the Intel processors, and no matter who says it is really fast; we will have a situation like we have today with Virtual PC; perhaps not as slow -- but my expectations are not high. I would seriously doubt to see decent G4 speed with Altivec emulation, I could well be very wrong and actually - let's hope I am.

But I have a lot of experience with emulation techniques, and whilst JIT (just-in-time) dynamic recompilation techniques have advanced well in the past five years, we're not going to buy a 1.8GHz Yonah PowerBook and have the speed of a 1.8GHz G4 from it, nor even a 1GHz G4, I'm expecting somewhere in the 400-500MHz range...

Of course, as software is ported it will help matters, and then things will run at native speed. Until the intel Mac platform has more native software than PPC, I will switch over, which is a few years yet as all my software that I have bought is PPC.

The fact remains though, there is no good time to buy a computer, something will always come along and supersede it. But that doesn't make what you bought out of date, redundant, and a relic of the past, just because Steve Jobs this is the latest greatest thing that he is thrilled :flower: to present -- does not mean you absolutely must have it.

The fact remains at the end of the day that any new Mac bought today will continue to serve you well into the future; and that will a considerable amount of time. My PowerBook for example, I just know that I will get up to a good 5 years use out of it; as some of the tasks I do have not changed significantly since my first Mac in 1995 which was a IIfx...

So I suggest when the time comes, don't wait and think but oh no something new may come out soon. Fact is something will and there is nothing you and I can do about that, so it's best to just jump in if it's what you want and enjoy it :flower:

Vicky