Opinions before I buy MBP

Question

I have a 900 G3 iBook and it runs fine, but I feel it 's time to "move on up" to a 13" MBP. Of course the choice between the two (2.26 and 2.53) has been beat to death but here it goes again. If I was to purchase the 2.26 MBP I would upgrade the memory and probably the hard drive ( approx. 165.00 incl shipping and me doing the install).
Although I've been fine with the 40gig in the iBook.
That would bring the two books closer in specs, except of course the processor bump which is around 10%. so the real price difference comes down to about 135.00 for the faster 2.53 MBP. I was talking to one of the salesmen at the apple store and he kept bringing up the fact that apple would not honor warrantees if the customer installed parts were faulty or if they caused other parts to to bad. it seemed that apple would look for a reason not to cover a problem if they could get away with it. I'm tempted to spend the additional 135.00 and get the 2.53 MBP for the convenience of having everything already in place and no excuses from apple. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Migration from the old iBook to the MacBook Pro will possibly require a piecemeal migration, and won't work with the Migration Assistant:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=435350&tstart=0
Furthermore, the 2.6 Ghz MacBook Pro and faster do offer an added advantage over the slower MacBook Pro and MacBook, and that's an all chip GPU. This means it is more compatible with many more games. The pre-WWDC 15" MacBook Pros all had all chip GPUs.
If you use Classic, or booting into Mac OS 9, moving to the MacBook or MacBook Pro will require kissing those goodbye on the MacBook and MacBook Pro as neither works with them.
There may also be a few Mac OS X compatible drivers that are not universal that don't work with the MacBook or MacBook Pro, so verify all your printers, scanners, etc... have Universal drivers, and plugins for software that you use do too. A few games may not work with Rosetta either. Verify there isn't a Universal update patch for them as well.
The MacBook Pro 17" has an additional advantage and that is Express/34 compatibility. The older 15" MacBook Pro than the WWDC 2009 offers that slot too. The 15" and 13" MacBook Pro offer an SD slot, which is great for flash storage swapping between Macs with USB-SD adapters as well as Express/34 SD adapters, and digital camera card compatibility without USB, if your digital camera supports SD. Express/34 offers external SATA hard drive compatibility via third party addon card, as well as separate Firewire bus compatibility via third party addon card if you do a lot of video capturing.
AppleCare as stated basically is a warranty program, it is not insurance. So be careful with your machine. If it is apparent there is a manufacturer defect, then use it. You also have free 90 day phone calls on Apple software questions, which you can extend to 3 years from date of computer's purchase with the purchase of AppleCare anytime in the first year of ownership (don't wait till the last minute).