Jen­nifer asks:

This ol’ lap­top (Dell) of mine is slowly dying (CMOS bat­tery, CD drive is dead, other wonky stuff). So, of course, I’m pon­der­ing get­ting a Mac­Book before I head back to Africa in Feb­ru­ary since I’ll be gone for four months. I guess my biggest ques­tion is Mac­Book vs. Mac­Book Pro (I like the glowy key­board in Pro) … but for a basic/average user, do I need what the Pro ver­sion has to offer and is it worth the extra cost? I guess the other thing I won­der is would you rec­om­mend a refur­bished one from the Apple web­site or stick with a new one?

I’d say that most peo­ple really only _need_ the Mac­Book. Espe­cially the new (as of this post­ing, Octo­ber 2008) mod­els. Unless you’re des­per­ate for the larger screen. For the price, I think the Mac­Book is the way to go these days.

The major fea­ture that it’s lack­ing is a firewire port which is what you’d use to hook up older (and some cur­rent) tape-based video cam­eras. Pretty much any­thing else will be able to hook up through a USB port.

There’s this com­par­i­son page Apple has for their Mac­Books. There is also a great guide over at macrumors.com that can walk you through most of the fea­tures on both the Mac­Book and Mac­Book Pro models.

The refurb store is just as good as the “new” store. You get a 1 year war­ranty with most pur­chases and the machine has been checked out by Apple to be good as new. Although I don’t think they have any of the new (Octo­ber 2008) Mac­Books in there yet.