A friend in Alaska is looking to replace her old Apple laptop with a newer model. Hers is apparently old enough that it can't be updated to the newer operating systems. She would prefer a year or two old used computer.

I know virtually nothing about Apple products, so am probably a bad person for her to ask.

She is not a heavy user -- mostly email, Facebook, uploading and downloading a few photos. She travels between Alaska and Florida with the computer, so something like a 17" MacBook Pro would probably be too unwieldy.

What should she be looking at, and where should she look?

Also, she wants an All-In-One printer. Again, I am not a good one to ask as I have possibly unreasonable and definitely strong biases against All-In-Ones and inkjets.

All-In-One printers IMHO do several things marginally, and nothing well. And inkjets... don't get me started about fantastic cost per page and unreliability. Of course, her print volume is staggeringly low, maybe a couple dozen pages per month, so she might be happy with a less expensive printer than I could live with. On the other hand, an ink jet that sits unused for weeks (and in the winter, for months) at a time is a recipe for trouble to begin with.

For this lady, color would be nice but not essential, so a monochrome laser would be sufficient. Reliable wireless connectivity would be preferable, and a footprint not much larger than 12 x 18 inches is a necessity. After spending an hour and a half reading the one-star reviews on Amazon, I would be afraid to recommend any All-In-One printer

Can anyone suggest suitable devices for her?

tanstaafl.

Since she is a long term Mac user, stay with that. Given the age of the current CPU it's time to splurge on a new Mac.

13" macs are great travel companions. Either a MacBook Pro or a new Air. With drive space of 250G or more.

A good place to start on the machine side would be Apple's refurbished store. All these machines come with the same warranty as a new machine, and can be extended to 3 years with AppleCare. They are "used" but reconditioned by Apple to ensure no issues exist.

http://www.apple.com/shop/browse/home/specialdeals is the refurb/clearance part of the store. Inventory changes often, and for her use, a MacBook Air 13 inch would likely be ideal.

One thing to be careful of is that laptops (macs included) have been removing CD/DVD drives from recent models for the last several years. If her current model is old enough to have a built-in CD/DVD drive, and she depends on it (for instance, maybe she likes to watch DVDs on her flights to Florida), then she should know that none of the newer models come with one, and she'll have to get a cheap external (~$30.00) USB-based CD/DVD/BD drive to take with her.

The essential decisions with Mac laptops these days are:
- physical size (13", 15", etc.)
- amount of RAM (typically the limiting factor in upgrading to newer OS versions)
- amount of SSD (or HD, but Apple is rapidly phasing out spinning disks)

My advice: minimum 8GB of RAM and minimum 256GB of SSD. Double both to get some headroom for the future.

On the list of things that she uses her computer for, you notably did not include photo management; hauling around videos, BitTorrented or otherwise; having a huge library of music; etc. If she's using any of that stuff, then you really want to spend the extra bucks for 1TB storage. Not cheap, but far more future-proof.

(Incidentally, the 11" MacBook Air is a lovely little machine. I personally have the 13" MacBook Air, mostly because I wanted the SD slot for digital camera things. I don't mind its light feature specs, since it's only for traveling. When I'm at home, I've got beefier hardware.)

On the all in one B/W printer - I like my Brother MFC-7840W. Laser (I've banished inkjets from my house!) and solid paper handling for multi-page scanning/faxing. We scan to ftp but it has other options. Fairly cheap to operate.

We have a separate color laser printer - and we discourage the kids from using it until they've printed a few drafts on the Brother...

-jk

After refusing to buy an inkjet for years (from 1995, precisely, since my Epson Stylus 800 failed miserably after only one year od limited use), I got an HP OfficeJet pro almost two years ago now.

Surprisingly, so far so good. We do not print much, so in two years I replaced two black cartridges and 1 entire color set.

But, no problem at all so far.

I mostly use it to digitize docs via it's feeder, and it worked nicely so far. I have scanned documents for up to two hours continuously.

No problem there too.

It prints and scans double-sided documents.

That also seems to work flawlessly.


I'd recommend it, given its low purchase and operating cost.

Print quality is only decent, though, for both text and images. And, it is noisy compared to a good laser.

Reading the 1-star reviews at Amazon on the MFC-7840DW (the 7840W is no longer available), I see a common complaint about all the different Brother All-In-One models: Setting up wireless is difficult, and about twice a week it will lose its wireless connection and you have to do a complete reinstall of the wireless setup.

Also, this particular model does not seem to be Macintosh friendly, lacking USB drivers and having other Apple compatibility problems.

And nobody seems pleased with Brother's technical support, hours-long wait times and generally unable to solve problems.

I'll talk to my friend some more and see if she really needs all those functions. Maybe just a printer and a standalone fax machine is all she needs. That would make things a lot easier.

tanstaafl.

I really don't think an ink jet is going to work for her. There will be times when that printer sits unused for four or five months at a time, and ink jets don't deal well with that sort of inactivity.

tanstaafl.

Your idea of not printing much is different from mine. My "not printing much" is one cartridge every two years. Not counting when I need a new cartridge because the old one got gummed up because it was never used.

I buy laser printers now. I've got a Brother HL-2250DN connected to wired Ethernet. Works fine from Windows, Mac and Linux. I have a separate USB flat bed scanner (Canon LiDE 110), which usually sits on the shelf between the rare occasions that I need it. That also works fine in Windows, Mac and Linux.

I have never found that to be true of my HP printers. I've owned three HP inkjet printers in the last 25 years. They all got very infrequent use and despite it worked when I needed them. The first two survived about ten years each, the third is still going strong.

I was concerned that the latest one, where the print heads are a permanent part of the printer rather than part of the print cartridge would deal less well with infrequent usage, but my fears were unfounded.

My Brother printer is wired, so I've never had wifi issues. I've never had to deal with their tech support, either. Obviously I'm a single data point...

-jk

Agreed on the storage, but the RAM I'm not as sure about for her usage scenarios. I've been impressed with how well the 13 inch Air with 4GB RAM runs for a general user. OS X RAM compression, plus swap to a PCIe based SSD seems to keep the system pretty responsive, even with some gaming mixed in. It wouldn't suit my more technical demands of a system, but reading the Apple tealeaves, future OS upgrades for a bit seem aimed at efficiency over bloating up currently.


An alternative to forking out the money for a larger SSD is to invest in Apple's services. The new Photos app can keep all the original quality photos and personal videos tucked away in the cloud, while only downloading smaller versions to the laptop. iTunes Match can store all music in the cloud and stream it down.

Paying for iCloud storage/iTunes Match for a few years may come in well below the 1TB SSD upgrade cost. Definitely worth running the numbers here. The above services have me reevaluating my own storage needs for a future laptop and iOS devices. These do all need internet though, so for Doug's friend, it will depend on how often she's online with broadband quality internet.

If you're not online (or you don't trust the "cloud"), you can always use an external disk for stuff you won't access that frequently. Depends on what you've got.

OTOH, you can use iCloud as a backup, presumably, which is useful for home users.

I recently recommended and installed a Brother MFC-9340CDW for a neighbour.

http://support.brother.com/g/b/manualtop.aspx?c=ca&lang=en&prod=mfc9340cdw_all

It is a rather large unit, but it provided the features they wanted and a configuration I was willing to support.

Software installation was reasonable, as such things go. They have a MacBook Air 2014 model, a Toshiba POS laptop, and two iPhones. All can print directly to the printer.

My experience with WiFi capable printers has led me to NOT enable the WiFi in the printer itself. If I can, I disable the WiFi feature entirely in the printer, rather than just ignoring it. I prefer to use wired Ethernet to connect the printer to the network router. This cuts down on the number of 'things' for which the WiFi must behave. If there is a WiFi problem the diagnostics are confined to the main router (or access point) and in the connected computer, not in the printer itself.

Diagnosing WiFi troubles in a printer tend to cause my head to hurt, so I don't go there if I can avoid it.

In my office, I have a circa 2008-ish Brother MFC-7860DW. It's a b&w laser printer with two-sided printing plus scanning and fax. I've hooked it to my Mac via USB and it's worked without a complaint since the day I bought it.

There isn't anything as sad as an, all in one printer, with a broken function.

Brother b/w laser printers are solid. They sit in the corner and work as needed until the day the feed rollers dry up. And you can buy toner carts that last for an amazing number of pages.