Decisions ?

[smallzoo]

I have two 'broken' early 2015 Macbook 13" retina pro's. Both have screens broken. One mine and other given to me by my son. They work fine with external monitors but its a pain.
My plan was to sell one of them for spares and repair on eBay ( I guess I will get about £100 ) and then out another £150 to getting the other screen repaired
OR
I sell them both as spares and repair and but a used Macbook Air
I am a software developer so mainly use the mac to logon to a server to do coding, use the browser and occasionally garageband

Would a newer or better Air be mich better value ?
cheers

 

[Brian33]

It seems like your decision will need to be based largely on how much you want to spend and the cost of any used MacBook Air machines near you.

If I could afford it, I'd probably try to sell both and try to buy an M1 or M2 MacBook Air, maybe used or refurbished. People generally seem very happy with them and they should be usable (and updated with security fixes) much longer into the future than your 2015 MBP. Plus they reportedly have great performance! If you are in the habit of plugging external devices in to your MBP, you might need to buy adapters or dongles due to the port changes.

As it happens, though, I'm writing this on a 13" Early 2015 MBP like yours. I tend to keep our family computers for as long as possible, and since it works just fine for our laptop needs I'm not planning on replacing it anytime soon. It's running Monterey fine, though that's the last macOS version it will run standard, without using unofficial modifications like OCLP.

Monterey still gets (probably) most security-related fixes, and probably will until Fall 2024. However, in the past Apple has sometimes patched a vulnerability in the current macOS version without supplying the equivalent fix for older macOSes. The significance of OS-related security support is highly variable, according to one's usage patterns and tolerance for risk, of course.

The good thing about our 2015s is that they do not have the very problematic "butterfly" keyboard which was used on 2016 (to 2019, maybe?) MBPs. So we have less to worry about keyboard failure.

 

[Yebubbleman]

I have two 'broken' early 2015 Macbook 13" retina pro's. Both have screens broken. One mine and other given to me by my son. They work fine with external monitors but its a pain.
My plan was to sell one of them for spares and repair on eBay ( I guess I will get about £100 ) and then out another £150 to getting the other screen repaired
OR
I sell them both as spares and repair and but a used Macbook Air
I am a software developer so mainly use the mac to logon to a server to do coding, use the browser and occasionally garageband

Would a newer or better Air be mich better value ?
cheers

I'd cut your losses with both machines, get what money you can get for them and then buy some form of Apple Silicon MacBook Air. The performance is night and day better than the Early 2015 13-inch MacBook Pro, even at its highest end configuration, let alone ANY Intel MacBook Air. The Early 2015 13-inch MacBook Pro has a special place in my heart, but broken ones in 2023 just aren' worth it. Similarly I wouldn't buy any MacBook Air that isn't Apple Silicon at this point; the 2018-2020 Intel Airs were utter garbage while the 2017 Air was effectively a spec bump of the 2015 Air, which is capped at macOS Monterey.