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Revisions and Decisions - Choosing A Notebook System Upgrade

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

by Charles W. Moore

Computer ownership and use being the merry-go-round that it is, the abiding conundrum for many of us is what are the ideal points to climb on and off, and this dynamic seems especially acute for laptop fans.

Some folks are inclined to surf the bleeding edge and buy whatever is the latest and greatest. Others operate on a “never buy Revision A of any computer” maxim and prefer to invest in mature, debugged technology, often also saving significant capital outlay in the bargain. I generally inhabit the latter camp. I bought my first PowerBook, a 5300, as a leftover just as the PowerBook 1400 was introduced. Actually, that wasn’t the wisest call I ever made, but I did get a deep discount off the 5300’s list price.

I bought my 233 MHz PowerBook G3 WallStreet in January, 1999, well into the Revision B (PDQ) model run and it was a far superior machine to the Revision A 233 MHz Wallstreet, which sold for the same price but had no Level 2 processor cache and a passive matrix display as opposed to the Revision B’s 512 Mb of cache and TFT screen.

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My next PowerBook, a G3 Pismo, was a year old when I acquired it, albeit in pristine condition, and at less than half what it had cost originally. That was over seven years ago and it’s still in daily use.

I bought a 700 MHz G3 iBook just before New Years 2003, which was about half way through the G3 dual USB iBook’s model evolution and the middle of five different G3 processor clock speeds that were built. That was an instance where buying a later revision wasn’t necessarily the best call either, since the 700 MHz iBooks were statistically one of the least reliable and durable Apple laptops ever. I happened to luck out, and that iBook is still in daily use as well, these days by my wife, running OS 10.4.11 Tiger very happily and never having given any significant trouble in six years of service.

I replaced the iBook with this Apple Certified Refurbished 17” PowerBook G4 I’m typing this column on, at less than half the price that model sold for originally, albeit nearly two and a half years after the Revision B, 1.33 GHz 17-incher was introduced, and it’s on track to rival the Pismo for long and trouble-free service.

Of course there is no ironclad, fail-safe, perfect time to buy or upgrade but for those of us who at least provisionally try to keep our main computer in frontline service for at least three years and hopefully longer, making a bad call can result in a long stretch in the penalty box.

The equation has gotten more complicated in recent years with a robust market in refurbished Mac notebooks, and serial revisions of each particular model over rather longer production runs. Even if you decide that going refurb. is for you, there is the question of which revision to go for. As a refurb. fan myself, I’ve been on the horns of that dilemma since October, or really all this year.

My current workhorse, the 1.33 GHz 17” PowerBook G4, purchased refurbished just short of three years ago, has been such a satisfactory tool that it’s hard to move on from. I would love to have a 17” Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro, but I really can’t justify the price of even a refurbished one, especially in this economy, so for me it’s boiled down to a refurbished Early 2008 15” MacBook Pro, vs. a refurb. 2.4 GHz plastic MacBook, and this week the first unibody aluminum MacBooks have entered the Apple Certified Refurbished channel, so they are in the mix as well. Decisions, decisions.

It used to be a lot simpler. Back in the early PowerBook years, there was usually only one revision of each particular model, usually with a relatively short production life before the next model was introduced at intervals of about a year, sometimes more - sometimes less. I don’t doubt that there were running changes made over the span of a production run of these machines, but there was only one revision of the 1994 PowerBook 500 Series, the 1995 PowerBook 5300, and the 1997 PowerBook 3400c and 2400c. The revision motif began to be applied with the 1996 PowerBook 1400, which was introduced with the 117 MHz Power PC 603e processor carried over from the top-of-the-line PowerBook 5300ce, but subsequently 133 MHz and 166 MHz models were introduced over the 1400’s longish production run by the standard of the day.

The 1998 PowerBook G3 Series WallStreet got a fairly major revision in September of that year, with the system bus dropped from 83 MHz to 66 MHz and faster processors to compensate, however the PowerBook G3 Bronze (“Lombard”) that followed it had no formal revisions over its nine months in production, nor did the almost identical-looking but substantially different-under-the hood-PowerBook G3 FireWire (“Pismo”) that followed.

The revision train began to gain traction with the original clamshell iBook of 1999, which got two significant upgrades during its 20 month production run, and with the 2001 Titanium PowerBook G4, which was a substantially different computer when it debuted with a lot of Pismo engineering carried over, than it was when it finished production 31 months later as a 1 GHz DVI notebook with a revised motherboard and a processor from a different Motorola 74xx chip family, as well as many other tweaks that had been done along the way.

My 1.33 GHz 17” PowerBook, a model that was announced at Macworld Expo Paris in September, 2003, was Revision B, the second of four clock speed updates the BigAl G4 received over its 36 month production life. Along the way there were also hard disk capacity increases, a higher-resolution display, optical drive upgrades, and so forth.

The 12” and 15” aluminum PowerBook G4s were also offered in four different processor clock speeds and got a number of other enhancements through their production lives.

As for the contemporaneous dual USB iBook, it had so many revisions I lost count over what stands as the longest production run of any Apple notebook so far, spanning a full five years, eventually being offered in 500 MHz, 600 MHz, 700 MHz, 800 MHz, and 900 MHz G3 versions, and 800 MHz, 900 MHz, 1 GHz, 1.24 GHz, 1.33 GHz and 1.42 GHz G4 iterations, with other updates and tweaks too numerous to list here.

The first generation Intel MacBook Pros and MacBooks nearly rival the white iBook in revision proliferation, with the 15 and 17 inch models both having had six revisions since their respective introductions early in 2006, and the 15” model starting afresh with a complete redesign in October, 2006. There have also been six revisions of the original plastic housing MacBook, although the most recent one was minor, involving an optical drive upgrade and a price cut.

It does make the model choice decision somewhat complex if you’re shopping used or refurbished.

Personally, I wouldn’t likely (never say never) go with anything earlier than the early 2008 revisions, not because the earlier models are bad machines, but because of the Penryn Core 2 Duo processor’s less torrid thermal profile. I hate fan noise, so the cooler-running the better.

Other points to consider are than the May, 2007 15” MacBook Pro revision (Merom Core 2 Duo) got an LED display backlight, and that the Pro models from May 2007 on are potentially afflicted with the defect that has been identified in their the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processor units, although Apple does have an extended service policy on that issue so that If the NVIDIA graphics processor in your MacBook Pro has failed, or fails within two years of the original date of purchase, a repair will be done free of charge, even if your MacBook Pro is out of warranty. Still, I keep my laptops in service a lot longer than two years, so that’s not totally reassuring, especially since that particular glitch is reported to develop over lengthy exposure to heat, so while refurbished Early 2008 MacBook Pros have considerable appeal at the prices they’re recently being offered at, I’m wary.

As far as I know, the Intel GMA X3100 graphics systems in the Early 2008 revision MacBooks have no particular problem issues other than that they’re not very fast performance-wise. However, I’m not much of a gamer and I don’t do any really high-end graphics or video work, so in many respects a 2.4 GHz plastic MacBook, definitely mature technology that should be reasonably bug-free, would be an appealing and logically sensible choice for me, since it has a FireWire port as well, which the unibody MacBook that replaced it does not. One caveat, however, is a question mark over how gracefully those GMA graphics will handle OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, which is anticipated to be quite GPU intensive, and another is that that I’ve gotten kinda’ spoiled by this 1440 x 900 resolution 17” display, and am not sure I would be happy downgrading to a 13” screen, although I’m not yet calling that issue a deal-breaker.

Then there’s the Revision A unibody aluminum MacBooks, Apple Certified Refurbished examples of which are being offered at $1,099 for the 2.0 GHz model (fifty bucks more than the Black 2.4 GHz early 2008 MacBook), and $1,399 for the 2.4 GHz uniBook. These are undeniably seductive, especially at the refurb. prices, but could I grit my teeth and resign myself to working around the lack of FireWire? I’ll let you know.

Merry Christmas!

CM