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Comment by tower10 | Hacker News Reader

Second hand (or refurbished), last gen 15" Macbook Pro. I use one of these for development, no complaints.

Yes. This (Penryn MacBook Pro) is absolutely the best developer computer available.

Amazon had the 2.5 GHz model (the one Apple was selling for $2500 a few months ago) for $1500, but it looks like that deal ended with December. Maybe it will come back.

You can still get the 2.4 GHz model (orig $2000) for $1400 from MacMall and maybe other places.

Agreed. Find a mac addict on craigslist who bought one right before the new ones came out. Spend 50 bucks at crucial to max out the memory to 4GB. Mmmm. Tasty memory.

Not a bad idea at all, finding one that is affordable is critical. Also, I don't even own a mac other than my powermac G4 and I still check (macrumors is it?) that one site that has a guesstimate on when new models are due to come out. That way if I buy a new one, I don't get screwed.

How much did you pay, and where did you get it from? What do you develop in/on?

I bought mine new a while back (~$3000 AUD) from Apple. Just looking at eBay, they seem to go for a touch over $1000 USD at the moment. I figure they're a bit of a bargain at the moment since they're perfectly capable and have just been replaced by the shiny new model. I mainly develop Ruby Rails/Merb apps with TextMate.

Egads, I love textmate. Another reason I want a mac. That and darkroom and a multitude of other apps. :|

I'll poke around ebay and see if I find anything worthwhile.

Free Darkroom, plus cross-platform. http://www.codealchemists.com/jdarkroom/

It sucks, sorry. :(

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