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Back in the spring I posted my 2007 "Compleat Guides" to Low End and High End Apple notebooks. Determining the cutoff threshold between high end and low end is always shooting at a moving target, and especially with the proliferation of iBook and more recently MacBook models, the ranks of mid to even high performance sub -$1,000 low-end machines have swollen substantially, with the early to middle aluminum PowerBooks and refurbished MacBooks currently spanning the threshold.
With the base, 2.0.GHz MacBook selling for $1,099, and handily outperforming all Power PC Mac portables save you can buy a brand new, very powerful 'Book, for not that much above our arbitrary $1,000 "low end" mark, and then there are a bunch of Apple Certified Refurbished MacBooks selling for well-under $1,000. This is one of the biggest changes since the original Compleat Guides were first published in 1999, at which time the cheapest new PowerBook you could buy was the 233 MHz WallStreet LE for $2,195.
I thought about dropping the borderline between low end and high end to $800 for these editions, but I've decided to stick with a threshold of $1,000 for continuity, and because it is a nice, round number. Instead, I introduced a third category in 2002: " Antique And Collectable Macintosh Laptops." These are Apple portables that are no longer up to snuff as work machines, and with the release of OS 10.5 Leopard their ranks are about to swell substantially
For serious work I would no longer recommend any of the pre-G3 Macintosh portables unless your computing needs are _really_ rudimentary, or you are a collector, and the WallStreet and early clamshell iBooks are not really up to more than the most basic wordprocessing/email/surfing tasks nowadays either, and the Lombard is marginal as well uinless it has Daystar's 433 NHz G4 processor upgrade installed. Which makes the PowerBook G3 2000 Pismo, a 466 MHz FireWire or 500 MHz dual-USB iBook probably the minimum practical Mac portable for doing any sort of production work on or using as an only computer - the Pismo preferably with a 550 MHz G4 processor upgrade and the RAM maxed out at 1 GB. Thus, the latter machines are now the basement of "low-end", with a caveat that none of them will be officially supported by Leopard, which requires a minimum 867 MHz G4 processor.
The Lombard and early clamshells now fall into the "Antique And Collectable Macintosh Laptops" category - Apple portables that are no longer really up to snuff as front-line work machines (although if a WallStreet or Lombard or clamshell still will do the job you need it to do, more power to you, so to speak).
However, the older 'Books are still interesting machines, an important part of Macintosh history, and some of the rarer models especially should increase in value with time.
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