Top 4 Macs you can buy for UNDER $200!

Over the past few weeks we've been talking a ton about new MacBooks and it's for good reason that the m1 max has been amazing. However, today I want to take a break from that and talk about something a little more achievable. I basically started here on YouTube talking about the low end max, so what I wanted to do is give you the best max that you can get on a very low budget, under 200, so without further ado, let's go through the list of the best Mac that you can buy on a budget, so when I chose the maximum for today's video I established a couple of criteria number one, all of these must be able to be purchased for 200 or less, no, oh, it's 199, but there is no hard drive , so you have to do it. buy one, these are computers you can buy and use for 200 or less with upgrades like older Macs usually have, you'll be able to upgrade them in the future and we'll talk about that on a case by case basis or I guess mac by mac, but the second criteria is that They should be able to run modern versions of mac os so you can easily find a 2006 macbook pro, but that won't do you much good because it's so old. very slow and does not run modern versions of mac os and then the third criterion is reliability.

I don't want to recommend a computer that is going to break down all the time and has a lot of known problems, taking the number four spot. On the list we have the 13-inch MacBook Pro from mid-2010. These computers are everywhere and as a result of that, if you run into any problems, parts are widely available and very affordable if you were to break the screen. one of these costs 50 dollars to replace, so they are very simple machines that will do the job and can be had at relatively affordable prices now for under 200, which is easily achievable.

You'll probably find these computers with four gigabytes of RAM and a 250 gigabyte mechanical hard drive, that's definitely usable, but it's definitely worth upgrading the RAM to eight gigabytes if possible and putting in a solid state drive, luckily it's actually It's pretty easy to find these things for 150 or less, so with that little bit of margin, you could upgrade this and stay under the 200 budget. My particular mid-2010 MacBook Pro here has the 2.4 Core 2 duo gigahertz. There are a few different variations on processors that, as you will see, are also very similar. until mid 2009, 13 inch macbook pro, but the 2010 ones have slightly better graphics processor wise on these low end core 2 duo max processors, they are about 10 years old, you wouldn't really put too much stock in it right?

You won't notice the difference between the 2.4 gigahertz Core 2 duo and the 2.66 gigahertz Core 2 duo, but you will notice a difference between a 250 gigabyte hard drive and a 250 gigabyte solid state drive, so So if you're looking at these things and I'm trying to figure out which one to buy buy by RAM and storage, not buy by processor. Coming in at number three is the mid-2012 Mac mini. Now, for the bonus material in this section, I'm actually going to use images of the new one. m1 mac mini because they look exactly the same. What if this is an eight-year-old computer that costs like $200 and looks exactly like a new one?

Anyway, the 2012 mac mini is interesting because inside it's basically a macbook pro just without a screen, while the new mac mini shares its processors with the macbook air and macbook pro, so did the old mac mini eight ago years, this particular mac mini has the 2.3 gigahertz quad-core i7 that you would find. on a mid-2012 15-inch unibody or retina macbook pro and the low-end configurations, which is what we're focusing on here, which have a 2.5 gigahertz dual-core i5, those are the same processors as you would find on a mid 2012 13 inch macbook pro Now this computer is by far the most expensive on this list and it was actually a challenge to find one that cost 200.

You can get in that ballpark and you can probably get one below 200 if you send some. deals, but this one will definitely be the hardest to find, um, but the reason I chose the Mac mini over the 15-inch and 13-inch unibody MacBook Pros is that you tend to save a little bit overall. money for the mac mini even though they have the same processors and more importantly will run mac os catalina natively no need to use any patch now the only other thing you need to keep in mind with the mac mini It's if you're spending $200 and you get the base configuration with the 2.5 gigahertz dual-core i5, 4 gigabytes of RAM, and a 500 gigabyte hard drive.

You'll need a few extras if you want to have a really good experience, for example upgrading the RAM to 8 gigabytes. SSD storage and then of course you'll need a screen, keyboard and mouse so there are some additional expenses and if you're trying to buy a Mac from scratch to 200 you'll definitely want to go for the MacBook Pros with these 2012 processors, but if you already have a PC lying around and are thinking about adding a Mac to your life, this is pretty easy because all you have to do is add another HDMI cable and then you can. change the input on your monitor and use the same peripherals you already have, then you will get the features of having Mac OS without having to change anything or hackintosh your PC or anything like that, so this is definitely a number one option two very convenient. the late 2008 15 inch macbook pro, now I know what you're thinking, a 2008 on this list of the best

macs

to buy, why would you buy one of these?

These things are old, they're like 12 years old, but the reason I chose the 2008 in particular is because this thing is kind of a hidden gem that not many people know about and can actually be a really good deal. , so this was the first unibody macbook pro that you can see here on the side, we have a compact flash. slot instead of an SD card reader and if we turn it over you can see that we have the little hatch that allows you to access the battery without having to unscrew the case, as it turns out Apple didn't like it that much so they changed their minds very quickly and removed this in favor of the single panel bottom cover we all knew and loved in 2009, but the most important thing is that when they did it, they didn't change the internal parts at all, so they have almost exactly the same duos core 2 and They have exactly the same graphics configuration, the 9400m and 9600m gt with graphics switching, however, they cost noticeably less than the 2009 variants which will perform almost exactly the same and as a result you can find them for basically a hundred dollars . which is a great deal because for $100 you have a lot of room to add SSD and RAM and really upgrade these things nicely, whereas you might not be able to do that as easily on a 2009 model that might be 20 or 30 more expensive. now there's nothing wrong with the 2009 model so if you find them they're definitely worth exploring if you get a good deal but for a hundred bucks this is a really exceptional value you can see mine runs mac os catalina it works perfectly fine with the 2009 model. patcher, I have eight gigabytes of RAM on this and a 120 gigabyte SSD, obviously you can put more, you could put two drives, there is a lot of expandability for a 100 laptop and honestly the performance is not as bad as you might think. a 12 year old Mac, I mean, it's not great, as you would expect, none of these Macs are really fast, but it will get the job done and everything on this computer if you bought it for a hundred dollars, eight gigabytes of RAM for me.

I don't know, forty dollars for a 128 gigabyte SSD for 20 dollars, you're looking at a hundred and sixty dollars for this computer which is incredible and first of all the best Mac you can buy for under 200 dollars is the 21.5 imac inches from mid 2009. the things are really cool, they're like imac hot rods because you can do a lot of modifications to these things and make them really very, very nice, so the first thing I did with this imac was upgrade the ram and that it's really cool because these things actually have four slots of RAM, there's a little door right underneath and there's four slots, which means that even though this is a 2009 with a 2 core duo, you can run 16 gigabytes of memory, which It's really useful, you can also remove the optical drive. disk, which is what I did because I don't really use it, so what I did was I taped it over the optical drive slot and boom, now you have better cooling for your graphics card, these things tend to have a bit warm now, the full specs of my machine are a 3.06 gigahertz 2 core duo, 8 gigabytes of RAM, i.e. 4 2 gigabyte chips which, by the way, end up being really very cheap and then an SSD of gigabytes, so you can find these things.

I don't remember how much I paid for this particular one, but you can get them for about 150 bucks and then when you've upgraded you'll be looking at about 200, which is pretty good for these things. I have 1080p screens which are actually really nice, great for watching media. Graphics cards from the 2009s are definitely old, I mean, they'll be a bit better than the mobile chips we've been seeing before. on the 2008 15-inch macbook pro, the 2010 13-inch macbook pro, but I mean you're not really going to buy one of these things to do graphically intense things with them, but the interesting thing is that this generation has the fat sides. imac actually have upgradable graphics so it uses a type a mxm card.

I say type a because it's a little different. There are two types of MXM cards. The standard used by other manufacturers is type b. This one is shorter and has a lower size. power consumption, so it's harder to find graphics cards that physically fit this thing. Personally I wouldn't recommend doing an upgrade like that because it's quite practical and can get quite risky with the exposed power supply, but at the very least you have a lot of upgrade options now, this particular model, which is from mid 2009, is not exactly the most powerful, but if you're willing to take a little risk, you can go for the 2011 version of these. which have Core i5 quad core processors and I think they will support up to a core i7 2700s so if you get one of those you can run nvidia gtx 7 series quad core graphics processors with 32 gigabytes of RAM they can get.

Pretty decent, but the reason I recommend this is because, frankly, our budget is 200 and the goal of this is to get a working computer for under 200, so before you start modifying these things, you can buy them. them at 200 bucks or less, the 2011 imax, if you can find one for 200, it will probably have the stock graphics card and they have a known fault, just like the 2011 15 inch macbook pros, they crash all the time so I can't In good conscience I recommend them unless you're willing to get your hands dirty and really open them up, so I hope this list soon expands and becomes more recent because over the past, I don't know about a year or two, these Macs have been around the prices we were talking about today, that's good if you want to buy them and hold them for a year and then sell them because you're not going to find much depreciation, but I hope that with the arrival of Apple silicon, we will finally start to see some of the older retinas go down a bit.

It's been very difficult to find even 13 inch retina macbooks under 500. Let me know in the comments below what you guys think. Are there any Macs that you would have added to the list or one that I had that you would have subtracted from the list. Let me know in the comments below and while you're down there, don't forget to comment and subscribe. Check out my subreddit found in the description below and don't forget to follow me on Twitter at lukemiani and with that I'll see you in the next video so