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12 Inch Macbook in 2024
- Thread starter racer1441
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At this point in time you would be better off with an iPad with a keyboard. Not only because most of the 12 inch models are already considered end of life and no longer receiving any sort of updates or security supports, which is not a place you wanna be in 2025+, but the newest iteration of it is also losing support later this year when Ventura becomes end of life. Not only does it become basically a security hazard when it's end of life since you're now running an operating system that is entirely unmaintained, but app supports will also disappear, in some cases within a couple years but in other cases pretty much immediately. You can kind of work around that through using open core legacy patcher to basically trick Sonoma/sequoia into installing on these older units, or abandoning macOS altogether in favor of patched Windows 11/Linux as a longer-term solutions, but that's not the end of the bad news. The 12 inch models are also very prone to reliability problems, not only in the form of the keyboard dying because it's a butterfly keyboard, but also they have a fun nasty tendency of developing all sorts of logic board faults, particularly ones revolving around things like memory failures, graphic related artifacts which usually stem from memory failures, the storage drive just completely vanishing from the system to the point where it's not even seen at a hardware level, as well as the logic board just outright dying rendering the machine completely dead. Once this happens, there's really not much to do since replacement logic boards all come from other 12 inch MacBooks meaning its equally susceptible to the same problems, if the butterfly keyboard experiences a problem there is literally nothing you can do since another replacement butterfly keyboard will also fail in the same way, pretty much any cost of repairs on these units already exceeds the value of the computer, and the odds of hardware failures is simply gonna go up and up and up since we are talking about computers that are somewhere between 7 to 10 years old at this point.
An iPad with a keyboard running modern day iPadOS would not only be a faster device than what these 12 inches were, usually by orders of magnitude, but they will also be substantially more battery efficient, come in a wider variety of configurations ranging from bigger nicer devices all the way down to the iPad mini which is even smaller and even more portable, they will be maintained substantially longer in terms of hardware support and software support and security support, they will run much cooler, they will have none of the reliability problems the 12 inch models have, and modern day iPadOS is already capable of achieving a lot of these basic tasks like word processing and checking emails and work resources and such, and there's even a decent amount of professional level apps that exist for them which are in some cases decent substitutes for the full desktop version depending on what level of work you do. Beyond that, an M1/M2 MacBook Air is marginally bigger and marginally heavier, but we have even more benefits on top of the iPad and also none of the problems of the 12 inch
As much as I loved my 12 inch, and a lot of the people that used to come to my store as well, they just have way too many problems and are way too old to realistically justify maintining at this point for most users. Even if you put in the time and effort and energy to deal with the end of life operating system problem by virtue of patched Windows 11/Linux/OCLP, the hardware reliability problems and the sheer fact that they are substantially slower than even the cheapest iPad sold three years ago just makes them a bad recommendation and just puts you at unnecessary risk using one in multiple ways.
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'Security' updates are totally overrated, IMO.
Edit: that's how they sell you
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It's about as overrated as Covid vaccines are overrated to a medical professional. I know its hard for a lot of people to grasp the severity, since its the type of issue that's more abstract and removed from peoples daily life stuff, and behind layers of knowledge and in some cases technobabble that a lot of people simply dont understand (and in fairness isn't fully their job to know), so it makes it trivial to not only ignore or pretend it doesnt exist/happen, or downplay the severity, but also even develop bad habits and nasty ideas about it. On top of that, some past things like Microsoft hiding things within security updates with Win 8/10 days has eroded peoples trust even further which is sad. It's becomes like a magical black box type problem, where the lack of understanding and transparency with how things work leads to all sorts of misguided and nasty ideas. For example, with an old school calculator theres no real room for ambiguity, its relatievely clear how it works so theres no room for conspiratirial or nasty ideas to form. Now we jump up to a cell phone from 2002, less understanding about how it accomplishes its tasks, so more room for misunderstandings about things and more room for bad ideas. Now jump to full-on smartphones, everything is so obfuscated behind buttons and pretty UI's and such that to many its effectively complete mystery, a magical box that takes in finger input and spits out doomscrolling. This gives us so much space for bad ideas to fester, since who knows whats happening now. Relating back to the covid analogy, the lack of understandings of the vaccine and how it works led to all the problems and nasty ideas that sadly screwed over prople unnecessarily. same concept.
There's good reason its very heavily pushed by everyone, both by companies, institutions, workplaces, organizations, and general people who work in in cybersecurity space and pretty much every tech adjacent fields (IT, Developers, DevOps, network Engineers, etc). It has nothing to do with selling new stuff, especially since there are solutions (OCLP to a supported MacOS, Win11, Linux) that don't involve a new machine, though a new machine is definitely the easiest solution by far and a proper long term fix though far from mandatory in some cases. Modern day cybersecurity stuff has gotten to the point where, as an end user, only real thing you can do for systems that are end of life is just stick them on a separate Virtual LANs (which most consumer grave network gear doesn't properly support) and minimize usage of anything account/PII (personally identifiable info) related, or airgap them (keep offline) altogether. Past strategies from the 90's and 2000's, like AntiVirus software, "dont download garbage", etc have not guaranteed safety for many many years now, most if these vulnerabilities and exploits are far more sophisticated now. There can be all sorts of stuff stuff that requires little to no interactions with end users to do, or een usage of things like web browsers to begin with, and in some cases doesnt even remain isolated to the machine itself. Theres also situations where you can do everything right on the machine but still end up in a bad spot, like if some internet of things baby monitor with a webserver protected by an admin password of "admin" gets compromised and then is used as hopping off point to other devices, or the actual ISP equipment provided gets compromised which unfortunately happens super often since the equipment they provide is usually bottom of the barrel stuff, etc. very routine occurences with a ton of past security conference talks about the topics. Since majority of people arent OS developers, they effectively cant do much if a nasty problem is found other than defer it to people whose job it is to deal with like cyberseccurity exprts and OS developers. YOu're exclusively at the mercy of varios devs, paid or otherwise, and they all have incentives to patch this **** ASAP to avoid the rabbit hole of consequences thatncan happen if they dont. If your system becomes end of life and unmaintained, well then too bad basically, hope to god you dont get screwed. In many cases you wont even see signs of something to begin with given the fact that malware showing signs its there defeats the entire purpose of it. On top of that, the number of vulnerabilities that get discovered has been rising year over year, and alongside that, the number of ones chassified as fairly severe and up have also increased in number on all the various security problem tracking sites like https://cvedetails.com across every OS, macOS included. Plus, newer MacOS versions implement more sandboxing and secutiy mitigations to prevent stuff. Sealed system volumes, segregation of System and Data volumes, immutible MacOS system volume by virtue of it just being a read-only APFS snapshot, Rapid Security Response feature implementation, etc etc. Security is about being proactive, not reactive, and building up layers is how you do that, with updating/staying on a supported OS being the single biggest thing and ned user can do to protect themselves for minimal effort, or with some effort in the case if units that are old but thats the price you pay for the upkeep of old hardware. Failing to keep up on updates, or staying on an end of life system in general, not only gives you and your device no benefits, but also gives no benefits to your other devices on your network as well as your own stuff online, and its not getting better with time at all. Having an Apple logo on your OS doesnt make you immune to the realities of the modern tech landscape, but the effort it takes to mitigate a lot of these problems in many cases is minimal at best
There's good reason its very heavily pushed by everyone, both by companies, institutions, workplaces, organizations, and general people who work in in cybersecurity space and pretty much every tech adjacent fields (IT, Developers, DevOps, network Engineers, etc). It has nothing to do with selling new stuff, especially since there are solutions (OCLP to a supported MacOS, Win11, Linux) that don't involve a new machine, though a new machine is definitely the easiest solution by far and a proper long term fix though far from mandatory in some cases. Modern day cybersecurity stuff has gotten to the point where, as an end user, only real thing you can do for systems that are end of life is just stick them on a separate Virtual LANs (which most consumer grave network gear doesn't properly support) and minimize usage of anything account/PII (personally identifiable info) related, or airgap them (keep offline) altogether. Past strategies from the 90's and 2000's, like AntiVirus software, "dont download garbage", etc have not guaranteed safety for many many years now, most if these vulnerabilities and exploits are far more sophisticated now. There can be all sorts of stuff stuff that requires little to no interactions with end users to do, or een usage of things like web browsers to begin with, and in some cases doesnt even remain isolated to the machine itself. Theres also situations where you can do everything right on the machine but still end up in a bad spot, like if some internet of things baby monitor with a webserver protected by an admin password of "admin" gets compromised and then is used as hopping off point to other devices, or the actual ISP equipment provided gets compromised which unfortunately happens super often since the equipment they provide is usually bottom of the barrel stuff, etc. very routine occurences with a ton of past security conference talks about the topics. Since majority of people arent OS developers, they effectively cant do much if a nasty problem is found other than defer it to people whose job it is to deal with like cyberseccurity exprts and OS developers. YOu're exclusively at the mercy of varios devs, paid or otherwise, and they all have incentives to patch this **** ASAP to avoid the rabbit hole of consequences thatncan happen if they dont. If your system becomes end of life and unmaintained, well then too bad basically, hope to god you dont get screwed. In many cases you wont even see signs of something to begin with given the fact that malware showing signs its there defeats the entire purpose of it. On top of that, the number of vulnerabilities that get discovered has been rising year over year, and alongside that, the number of ones chassified as fairly severe and up have also increased in number on all the various security problem tracking sites like https://cvedetails.com across every OS, macOS included. Plus, newer MacOS versions implement more sandboxing and secutiy mitigations to prevent stuff. Sealed system volumes, segregation of System and Data volumes, immutible MacOS system volume by virtue of it just being a read-only APFS snapshot, Rapid Security Response feature implementation, etc etc. Security is about being proactive, not reactive, and building up layers is how you do that, with updating/staying on a supported OS being the single biggest thing and ned user can do to protect themselves for minimal effort, or with some effort in the case if units that are old but thats the price you pay for the upkeep of old hardware. Failing to keep up on updates, or staying on an end of life system in general, not only gives you and your device no benefits, but also gives no benefits to your other devices on your network as well as your own stuff online, and its not getting better with time at all. Having an Apple logo on your OS doesnt make you immune to the realities of the modern tech landscape, but the effort it takes to mitigate a lot of these problems in many cases is minimal at best
TL;DR. Sorry!
Edit: your original post is actually responding to a year-old thread...
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I have a 2017 i7 MacBook 16GB/256GB that is updated to MacOS 15.5 beta 2 with all the current security patches using the recent version of OCLP and use this notebook strictly for web browsing, videos, and emails. These laptops can still be updated and useful as long as Apple continues supporting Intel processors in their future versions of MacOS. For the time being, I am glad I can use my MacBook.
I do have a 4th gen iPad Pro I use as well as a 2024 14 inch MacBook Pro w/ M3 Pro processor if I need to. I just love how small and light my MacBook is so I still use it.
I just bought a 2017 base and incredibly it seems as fast as my macbook air m1. I also have a base 2015 but its somewhat slower than the 2017. They are both great machines.
While the 12” is certainly a fantastic little machine, hence why I still have and use one, it can’t hold a candle to the performance of my M1 Air either in raw performance or in general snappiness.
I love my 12”, but I usually use it for things that are either not demanding or that I don’t mind waiting on. It’s great in the mornings when I’m moving slow too
I have a 2016 12" MB. It was the maxed out version when I bought it, 1.3 GHz m7, 8Gb, 500 SSD. I made it triple boot for Win 11, macOS Mojave (to run 32 bit apps) and macOS Sequoia 15.5 with OCLP. Last year while it was still serviceable by Apple, I replaced its battery. While everything works fine, being Intel, it runs hot and the battery life is 3-4 hours even doing light tasks.
Anticipating Apple will not offer an M version of this machine, I just bought a 13" M4 Air however, I still use my MB12 as a secondary machine. The 13" M4 Air feels larger and heavier compared to the 12"MB but it runs way faster, much cooler and the battery life is awesome.
For one thing, I hate people suggesting iPads as alternative. iPadOS is a walled garden and restricts one to Apple Appstore whereas I can load any app directly from a developer's website. Also most Appstore versions of apps are restricted due to IOS/iPadOS guidelines.
Would I buy a used MB12 these days? I don't think so. Even though a 13" M4 Air is a little larger and heavier than the 12" MB, its performance and battery life alone is sufficient to forgive its weight and size.
Anticipating Apple will not offer an M version of this machine, I just bought a 13" M4 Air however, I still use my MB12 as a secondary machine. The 13" M4 Air feels larger and heavier compared to the 12"MB but it runs way faster, much cooler and the battery life is awesome.
For one thing, I hate people suggesting iPads as alternative. iPadOS is a walled garden and restricts one to Apple Appstore whereas I can load any app directly from a developer's website. Also most Appstore versions of apps are restricted due to IOS/iPadOS guidelines.
Would I buy a used MB12 these days? I don't think so. Even though a 13" M4 Air is a little larger and heavier than the 12" MB, its performance and battery life alone is sufficient to forgive its weight and size.