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I'm about to buy a MacBook Pro Customized Model, its model name and number is MD831/LLA. When I google it, I couldnt find anything from a trusted apple source. Specifications of the model is as follows;

MacBook Pro 15" Retina, 16 GB Ram, 768 GB SSD, 2.7 Ghz i7

I'm buying it from a local shop which imported the computer from US and itself is not a official Apple distributor or something.

What I'm afraid of is; that what if model turns out to be an older version or something. Because price of the device is considerably low and almost identical to Apple Store. When I configure a machine as proposed above; price on store.apple.com is ; 3749 $ Local shop sells the same configured computer for 3800 $.

So how can I get detailed information by model name and number proposed by the seller: MD831/LLA

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That is a nice computer. One thing working for you is that the Retina MBP is technically a 1st generation product - so it would be hard to get an older version. – bassplayer7 Feb 9 at 16:24
You should get the latest one, as @bassplayer7 said MBP Ret. is on his 1st gen yet. And about the price.. maybe the want to earn some bucks for the risk of buying a none "commercial" config. just to have it in stock. – Luis Feb 9 at 16:32
I probably would be more worried about the computer being stolen, especially if the price is significantly lower than on apple.com. – patrix♦ Feb 9 at 16:55
it's not lower but i think +50$ profit is too low. That being said some say they get tax discount on export from US. – Ahmet Yıldırım Feb 9 at 19:24
So with tax discounted while getting it out of US, it might be cheaper than what it says on Apple Store website. – Ahmet Yıldırım Feb 9 at 19:25

2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

I've been an Apple user for the past 20 years. The absolute best way of finding information about a product before you buy it is from the serial number. You can ask your vender to give you that from the box (or note it down yourself.

Once you have that, there is this really awesome site that decodes your serial number and gives you detailed information about specs, year/month/date of manufacturing, OS, hardware, software, etc. The link to the site is below ::

http://www.appleserialnumberinfo.com/Desktop/index.php

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up vote 1 down vote

The Apple Specs database isn't always complete -- I think this is the relevant entry, but it doesn't list the model number so it's hard to be sure. I tend to use third-party sources for this sort of thing: I've found EveryMac.com to be reliable, and if you already have a Mac, Mactracker is excellent.

BTW, if you have the computer running with an internet connection, you can get it to look itself up: Pull down the Apple menu, select "About This Mac", then in the info box that opens click "More Info", then in the expanded info window click Support near the top right, then the Specifications link below.

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You need an internet connection to access "About this mac"? That's insane. It's a local hardware inspector. – Fake Name Feb 11 at 6:28
@FakeName: No, you need an internet connection to use the web links under the Support and Service tabs in System Information. You can view all of the computer's locally available stats -- including the full system report -- without an internet connection. – Gordon Davisson Feb 11 at 6:36

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