Cheapest mac for repairs?

[MobileTechie]

What's the cheapest mac or macbook to get that would be useful for repair jobs e.g. burning mac compatible CDs and Target Disk and so on?

 

[14049752]

You can get a Mac Mini for peanuts, if you shop around

 

[MobileTechie]

Any idea what sort of spec one needs. I seems to remember reading on here someone saying it was best to get a certain CPU or better for some reason - maybe to run later version of OSX or something.

 

[anonymous Mac Tech]

Any idea what sort of spec one needs. I seems to remember reading on here someone saying it was best to get a certain CPU or better for some reason - maybe to run later version of OSX or something.

Maybe a Mac Mini (Early 09) model or later model that can go up to 8GB of RAM or more. More than adequate processing power and who cares that it doesn't have any high end graphics. Just food for thought, but the newer Minis don't have an optical drive. You'll need an external.

 

[JustInspired]

My mini is aging a bit now but has served well for all of our Mac stuff.
It came with two 500gb drives, no optical drive and Snow Leopard Server. I installed the desktop version of Snow Leopard and now it's running Lion. I have no reason to change it at the moment as it does everything we need.

 

[MobileTechie]

What processor has that got?

 

[johnrobert]

I just got an early 2008 mac book pro dual core to get into mac repairs.
I put mountain lion on it, runs great
you can pick one up for around $300-350 really solid laptop

 

[JustInspired]

What processor has that got?

2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 4GB DDR3.

 

[MobileTechie]

I just got an early 2008 mac book pro dual core to get into mac repairs.
I put mountain lion on it, runs great
you can pick one up for around $300-350 really solid laptop

Those go for more like £500 in the UK

 

[Markverhyden]

As mentioned, a MacMini mid '09 or later. Depending on what pricing you find you might think about just buying a new one. The logic boards are not cheap since they are proprietary. Not sure about the UK but Apple Care is relatively cheap in the US - $149.00 for 3 years. Once you have that all of the other stuff is generic, RAM, USB opti drive, KB, mouse, various adapter cables, etc, etc.

 

[MobileTechie]

As mentioned, a MacMini mid '09 or later. Depending on what pricing you find you might think about just buying a new one. The logic boards are not cheap since they are proprietary. Not sure about the UK but Apple Care is relatively cheap in the US - $149.00 for 3 years. Once you have that all of the other stuff is generic, RAM, USB opti drive, KB, mouse, various adapter cables, etc, etc.

It's an idea

Is there a reason why 09+ is best, other than performance?

 

[Markverhyden]

It's an idea

Is there a reason why 09+ is best, other than performance?

You want to give yourself some room for growth with the OS's. If I remember correctly 10.8 is good back to '07. But Apple intentionally deprecates hardware in it's OS's. So if you use that as a rough guide an '09 may not be compatible with what ever they have in '15-'16

 

[trevm999]

It can be handy to have something that will boot to 10.6, that's why I would't get a new Mac Mini. However, I've also found it handy to have a PowerPC mac around, so you have to put an end to keeping up with backwards compatibility somewhere.

 

[Digital Sage]

Mac Mini. I Run a 2011 model which has a main SSD Drive, & a secondary 1TB. It screams... it's small... it works Got it for about $650 AU

Suits me well, and i run my business from it. I have dual boot windows 7 on it, which i can either boot into directly or access from Parallels in OSX. Best of both worlds...

 

[JustInspired]

Mac Mini. I Run a 2011 model which has a main SSD Drive, & a secondary 1TB. It screams... it's small... it works Got it for about $650 AU

Suits me well, and i run my business from it. I have dual boot windows 7 on it, which i can either boot into directly or access from Parallels in OSX. Best of both worlds...

Parallels and Bootcamp can use the same Windows installation? I always thought it was one or the other.

 

[Digital Sage]

If you install windows under a seperate partition using bootcamp, you can then tell parallels to use that partition as the virtual machine. Only restrictions are you can't suspend the virtual machine. I just leave mine running in the background... With 8gb ram it's fine!

 

[Markverhyden]

Parallels and Bootcamp can use the same Windows installation? I always thought it was one or the other.

Yes Parallels does read the other partition. Personally though I would rather leave the entire partition intact and just run it as with a virtual disk.