Can anyone please advise if it would be better to purchase a refurbished macbook with 2.2 GHz Merom processor vs. a brand new macbook with the upgraded Penryn processor but it's 2.1 GHz?
The refurbished model is cheaper and has a 'more GHz' but older processor?
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I still haven't seen a rigorous battery test comparison between the two, if the Penryn had a feature I would really want, it would have to be the lower heat output. I'm using a 2.16GHz MB now and it can get a little hot doing CPU intensive stuff with the laptop actually sitting on my lap (I wouldn't want to do video encoding wearing shorts).
In case you didn't see the link from the homepage, the guys at Primate Labs ran some Penryn vs. Merom MacBook performance benchmarks for both the top and entry level laptops. Your experiences IRL will obviously be different but its nice to have a direct apples-to-apples (no pun intended) comparison between the different models.
Well personally I think it is better to get a brand new macbook, 2.1 GHz is quite nice also.
For any other product I would agree with you, but the quality on the Apple refurbs is actually quite high. They probably get better QA than the NIB MacBooks you order from Amazon or MacMall or wherever. And they come with the same warranty, the same AppleCare, etc.