First Mac in twenty years. (since silver door G4) Please help me decide on what macbook

[JM]

Hello,

Can anyone please give me some guidance and/or help me decide which macbook to buy? Asking questions, please, to help direct towards Pro or the Air. I haven't had a Mac since the silver door G4 back in 2004... Used it up till about 2012 off and on.

E.g. What it's like living with only two USB3 ports is like. Do I need 16 ram or can I live with 8GB. Screen quality. long term investment type concerns.... basically I need to have a back and forth with anyone willing to dispense good buying advice.

Thank you

 

[ChrisA]

Can anyone please give me some guidance and/or help me decide which macbook to buy?

What are you doing to use this computer for? If just general web browsing, Youtube and email then even the low-end "air" is overkill. But maybe you have a ton of 4K video to edit.

Seriously, any current Mac is more than enough for light productivity work and entertainment, and you only need to move up if you have a specialized need, or extra cash you don't need.

About budget. You will need a large disk of some kind for Time Machine backups and if you need a larger monitor for desktop use. I would not want to have to use a 13" screen full time.

 

[antiprotest]

Get M2 MBA 16GB RAM 512GB storage.

 

[bradl]

Hello,

Can anyone please give me some guidance and/or help me decide which macbook to buy? Asking questions, please, to help direct towards Pro or the Air. I haven't had a Mac since the silver door G4 back in 2004... Used it up till about 2012 off and on.

E.g. What it's like living with only two USB3 ports is like. Do I need 16 ram or can I live with 8GB. Screen quality. long term investment type concerns.... basically I need to have a back and forth with anyone willing to dispense good buying advice.

Thank you

I'm going to take you back to 2011, when I bought my first Apple computer in 30 years (I first got an Apple IIe when I was 8, used Macs at school, then bought a PC and was using Linux ever since until 2011).

For the cost that you're putting out for a Mac, one would expect that longevity would be a concern; it was for me. I didn't know if I was going to go full on for it being my main productivity driver at that time, so I went with the MacBook Air...

I didn't know how much I would be depending on it that it became my main driver, which hamstrung me a little bit due to how much it had or didn't have. I was restricted to WiFi only without some sort of adapter, and 2 USB-A ports. At that time, I only had 4GB of memory and 256GB for the drive. I made it work, but definitely needed more, because what I needed to do with it left the MBA underpowered.

But it has lasted me 11 years. That Mac has been rock solid despite being marked as "obsolete" 4 years ago. Adding more to that, not a single piece of maintenance has had to be done on it. Nothing wrong with the screen, Drive, memory, chassis, the entire lot. I only just jumped to a 16" MBP with M1 Pro in April.

With that MBP, I have 3 USB-C ports, the SD card port, 3.5mm headphone jack, and HDMI port. My concern is that most lightning cables for iDevices are USB-A on the other end, so you'd need some sort of adapter or dongle for that, or you pay a bit more to get Lightning to USB-C cables. In my case, I'm using my MBP at my desk to connect to monitors being shared with a PC via a KVM, so I was going to need something anyway, so I went with a full on USB-C dock that has 3 USB-A ports (USB3), 2 USB-C ports (one providing power delivery), 2 more HDMI ports, an additional headphone jack, and Gigabit Ethernet. I get all of that at the cost of 1 USB-C port being used on the Mac.

So I'm using a 16" screen (HUGE jump from the 13" I had in the MBA), along with 2 other monitors. And despite what people are saying about size (I debated between the 14" and 16"), it is very portable. It isn't as bad as people think it is, and I can fit it into the backpack I was using for my MBA.

With how well this is performing so far, and given the longevity on the mid-2011 MBA, I'm expecting this to last just as long as my MBA. If Apple keeps to their roadmap for sunsetting old hardware (they generally keep to a 5-7 year window before marking it as obsolete), I'd expect that long at the very least. In crunching the numbers, if I spent $2150 for that MBA and I'm at 11 years with it now, that's 132 months with it. Doing the math:

$2150 / 132 months = $16.28/month.

At that point, it's served me well. So I'd expect similar to the same with anything new now, and that's not taking into account if Apple Silicon has a longer use date than anything Intel was 11 years ago.

BL.

 

[JM]

What are you doing to use this computer for? If just general web browsing, Youtube and email then even the low-end "air" is overkill. But maybe you have a ton of 4K video to edit.

Seriously, any current Mac is more than enough for light productivity work and entertainment, and you only need to move up if you have a specialized need, or extra cash you don't need.

About budget. You will need a large disk of some kind for Time Machine backups and if you need a larger monitor for desktop use. I would not want to have to use a 13" screen full time.

General web browsing,

work from home through Team Viewer occasionally (so need capability for two external monitors plus the laptop monitors, I.e. three total screens in use). Microsoft Teams for video calls.

Occasional Photoshop, Indesign, Premiere for portfolio work, or general interest personal work.

That’s about it. I’m only cautious about the “one additional monitor” in the Air I thought I read about? And cautious about the only two thunderbolt ports on the air (which is it usbC or not? Can’t tell)

But I don’t want to spend $2000 for machine I really don’t need most of the time, and the Air price is more likely the budget… and certainly don’t want to wish later I’d gotten the Pro because of some bottleneck or inability to upgrade the Ram or performance.

 

[JM]

I'm going to take you back to 2011, when I bought my first Apple computer in 30 years (I first got an Apple IIe when I was 8, used Macs at school, then bought a PC and was using Linux ever since until 2011).

For the cost that you're putting out for a Mac, one would expect that longevity would be a concern; it was for me. I didn't know if I was going to go full on for it being my main productivity driver at that time, so I went with the MacBook Air...

I didn't know how much I would be depending on it that it became my main driver, which hamstrung me a little bit due to how much it had or didn't have. I was restricted to WiFi only without some sort of adapter, and 2 USB-A ports. At that time, I only had 4GB of memory and 256GB for the drive. I made it work, but definitely needed more, because what I needed to do with it left the MBA underpowered.

But it has lasted me 11 years. That Mac has been rock solid despite being marked as "obsolete" 4 years ago. Adding more to that, not a single piece of maintenance has had to be done on it. Nothing wrong with the screen, Drive, memory, chassis, the entire lot. I only just jumped to a 16" MBP with M1 Pro in April.

With that MBP, I have 3 USB-C ports, the SD card port, 3.5mm headphone jack, and HDMI port. My concern is that most lightning cables for iDevices are USB-A on the other end, so you'd need some sort of adapter or dongle for that, or you pay a bit more to get Lightning to USB-C cables. In my case, I'm using my MBP at my desk to connect to monitors being shared with a PC via a KVM, so I was going to need something anyway, so I went with a full on USB-C dock that has 3 USB-A ports (USB3), 2 USB-C ports (one providing power delivery), 2 more HDMI ports, an additional headphone jack, and Gigabit Ethernet. I get all of that at the cost of 1 USB-C port being used on the Mac.

So I'm using a 16" screen (HUGE jump from the 13" I had in the MBA), along with 2 other monitors. And despite what people are saying about size (I debated between the 14" and 16"), it is very portable. It isn't as bad as people think it is, and I can fit it into the backpack I was using for my MBA.

With how well this is performing so far, and given the longevity on the mid-2011 MBA, I'm expecting this to last just as long as my MBA. If Apple keeps to their roadmap for sunsetting old hardware (they generally keep to a 5-7 year window before marking it as obsolete), I'd expect that long at the very least. In crunching the numbers, if I spent $2150 for that MBA and I'm at 11 years with it now, that's 132 months with it. Doing the math:

$2150 / 132 months = $16.28/month.

At that point, it's served me well. So I'd expect similar to the same with anything new now, and that's not taking into account if Apple Silicon has a longer use date than anything Intel was 11 years ago.

BL.

Thanks didn’t know about external dock that gives more ports that connects to one USBC. That would help with connecting multiple monitors? But I see that Air only allows one additional external monitor? Is that right?

 

[JM]

Dang. I was right. Only one monitor on the air

Sigh. That’s enough for me to have to spend extra for to get the Pro 😩

 

[darkanddivine]

I have just been through a similar quandry, although my use case is somewhat different. I'm looking for an all round machine that can handle daily stuff as a family computer and double as a hub for me to get back into music production. I've had 2 iMacs and a Macbook Air over the last couple of decades. My range of ownership is anyting from 7-10 years per machine.

The thing I've learned in my research is that M1 has put us in a new territory in terms of computing. It used to be that there was a very clear line in the sand between portability, power and price. Apple's work on the M1 chip has firstly raised the bar for what entry level machines can do, but also they've equalised the performance and price to some degree across the range.

If you need more than two displays including the one included in your iMac/Macbook (and I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong) but I think you have to go up to the M1 Pro chips to get more than that. There could be some workaround here depending on how you define monitor. You could use an iPad as a small additional monitor (if you have one already of course.) You mentioned the Macbook Air, but if size matters, you could apply the same thinking to an iMac, which has a nice display - plus another nice external one and the iPad on top of that. But if you just want the extra connections for proper monitors then Pro and upwards looks a better bet.

I nearly swung for an MBP, but like yourself I doubted whether I truly needed that power. That said, given the price point of the M1/M2 machines if you spec them up, you land in Macbook Pro territory quite quickly, which as I found is very tempting. Even though I didn't go for it, I did feel that the price of the M1 Pro was an excellent bang for buck combination of power and price.

 

[JM]

What are you doing to use this computer for? If just general web browsing, Youtube and email then even the low-end "air" is overkill. But maybe you have a ton of 4K video to edit.

Seriously, any current Mac is more than enough for light productivity work and entertainment, and you only need to move up if you have a specialized need, or extra cash you don't need.

About budget. You will need a large disk of some kind for Time Machine backups and if you need a larger monitor for desktop use. I would not want to have to use a 13" screen full time.

I'm going to take you back to 2011, when I bought my first Apple computer in 30 years (I first got an Apple IIe when I was 8, used Macs at school, then bought a PC and was using Linux ever since until 2011).

For the cost that you're putting out for a Mac, one would expect that longevity would be a concern; it was for me. I didn't know if I was going to go full on for it being my main productivity driver at that time, so I went with the MacBook Air...

I didn't know how much I would be depending on it that it became my main driver, which hamstrung me a little bit due to how much it had or didn't have. I was restricted to WiFi only without some sort of adapter, and 2 USB-A ports. At that time, I only had 4GB of memory and 256GB for the drive. I made it work, but definitely needed more, because what I needed to do with it left the MBA underpowered.

But it has lasted me 11 years. That Mac has been rock solid despite being marked as "obsolete" 4 years ago. Adding more to that, not a single piece of maintenance has had to be done on it. Nothing wrong with the screen, Drive, memory, chassis, the entire lot. I only just jumped to a 16" MBP with M1 Pro in April.

With that MBP, I have 3 USB-C ports, the SD card port, 3.5mm headphone jack, and HDMI port. My concern is that most lightning cables for iDevices are USB-A on the other end, so you'd need some sort of adapter or dongle for that, or you pay a bit more to get Lightning to USB-C cables. In my case, I'm using my MBP at my desk to connect to monitors being shared with a PC via a KVM, so I was going to need something anyway, so I went with a full on USB-C dock that has 3 USB-A ports (USB3), 2 USB-C ports (one providing power delivery), 2 more HDMI ports, an additional headphone jack, and Gigabit Ethernet. I get all of that at the cost of 1 USB-C port being used on the Mac.

So I'm using a 16" screen (HUGE jump from the 13" I had in the MBA), along with 2 other monitors. And despite what people are saying about size (I debated between the 14" and 16"), it is very portable. It isn't as bad as people think it is, and I can fit it into the backpack I was using for my MBA.

With how well this is performing so far, and given the longevity on the mid-2011 MBA, I'm expecting this to last just as long as my MBA. If Apple keeps to their roadmap for sunsetting old hardware (they generally keep to a 5-7 year window before marking it as obsolete), I'd expect that long at the very least. In crunching the numbers, if I spent $2150 for that MBA and I'm at 11 years with it now, that's 132 months with it. Doing the math:

$2150 / 132 months = $16.28/month.

At that point, it's served me well. So I'd expect similar to the same with anything new now, and that's not taking into account if Apple Silicon has a longer use date than anything Intel was 11 years ago.

BL.

I have just been through a similar quandry, although my use case is somewhat different. I'm looking for an all round machine that can handle daily stuff as a family computer and double as a hub for me to get back into music production. I've had 2 iMacs and a Macbook Air over the last couple of decades. My range of ownership is anyting from 7-10 years per machine.

The thing I've learned in my research is that M1 has put us in a new territory in terms of computing. It used to be that there was a very clear line in the sand between portability, power and price. Apple's work on the M1 chip has firstly raised the bar for what entry level machines can do, but also they've equalised the performance and price to some degree across the range.

If you need more than two displays including the one included in your iMac/Macbook (and I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong) but I think you have to go up to the M1 Pro chips to get more than that. There could be some workaround here depending on how you define monitor. You could use an iPad as a small additional monitor (if you have one already of course.) You mentioned the Macbook Air, but if size matters, you could apply the same thinking to an iMac, which has a nice display - plus another nice external one and the iPad on top of that. But if you just want the extra connections for proper monitors then Pro and upwards looks a better bet.

I nearly swung for an MBP, but like yourself I doubted whether I truly needed that power. That said, given the price point of the M1/M2 machines if you spec them up, you land in Macbook Pro territory quite quickly, which as I found is very tempting. Even though I didn't go for it, I did feel that the price of the M1 Pro was an excellent bang for buck combination of power and price.

I guess I could get just one big-a** monitor to connect to the air when I WFH every once in a while. 🤣

 

[GMShadow]

If you decide to go with the Air, go with 16 or 24GB of RAM for your use case. You may not need it all of the time, but when you're running Teams or Adobe CS you'll be glad to have the extra breathing room.

 

[nothingtoseehere]

I guess I could get just one big-a** monitor to connect to the air when I WFH every once in a while. 🤣

In that case, the Air should be appropriate. If it is for budget, I would recommend M1/16 GB over M2/8 GB. Why? I got a M1 Mac mini 16 GB with similar usage as yours, and it is perfectly fine, and it feels like it would last several years. No shortages of memory of any kind.

 

[mectojic]

You had a MDD G4 Power Mac? Go check out the PowerPC forum. That G4 could still work for a ton of different uses.

 

[JM]

In that case, the Air should be appropriate. If it is for budget, I would recommend M1/16 GB over M2/8 GB. Why? I got a M1 Mac mini 16 GB with similar usage as yours, and it is perfectly fine, and it feels like it would last several years. No shortages of memory of any kind.

Yeah the M1 seems plenty good, though with the M2 version it has charging MagSafe so I don’t have to take up a USB port.

But, if the thing lasts super long anyways, I guess it wouldn’t require charging all the time?

And a multiport hook up to one usb is possible I reckon?

 

[JM]

You had a MDD G4 Power Mac? Go check out the PowerPC forum. That G4 could still work for a ton of different uses.

Well please don’t make me feel bad, but recycled it at an Apple Store back in 2013 because the motherboard had some red light error and it would mean an all new computer. Some issue… can’t remember specifics.

It would have made a great tinkering shell, but I wasn’t in that mind frame and I didn’t consider eBay until much later.

 

[bradl]

Yeah the M1 seems plenty good, though with the M2 version it has charging MagSafe so I don’t have to take up a USB port.

But, if the thing lasts super long anyways, I guess it wouldn’t require charging all the time?

And a multiport hook up to one usb is possible I reckon?

Officially, Apple says that the M1 MBA can use one monitor.

However... There are people out there who have said and shown otherwise. Found this for you with a quick search:

M1 MacBook Air handles dual external monitors [Setups]

One of the downsides you hear about the M1 MacBook Air and the M1 MacBook Pro is that they officially (natively) support just one external display in

www.cultofmac.com

M1 Mac trick lets you use up to 6 external displays at once

A newly discovered M1 Mac trick lets you use up to six external displays simultaneously. It is simple to set up, and a YouTube video by an M1 Mac owner

www.cultofmac.com

This might help you. The drawback is that with the chassis using native Thunderbolt/USB-C and the adapter he used was USB-A, I don't know what else may be needed, especially as you may need to use DisplayPort for this. It was this that made the MBA a pass for me. But it does appear with a harmless hack that it is possible to have more than one monitor connected to the M1 MBA.

BL.

 

[JM]

Officially, Apple says that the M1 MBA can use one monitor.

However... There are people out there who have said and shown otherwise. Found this for you with a quick search:

M1 MacBook Air handles dual external monitors [Setups]

One of the downsides you hear about the M1 MacBook Air and the M1 MacBook Pro is that they officially (natively) support just one external display in

www.cultofmac.com

M1 Mac trick lets you use up to 6 external displays at once

A newly discovered M1 Mac trick lets you use up to six external displays simultaneously. It is simple to set up, and a YouTube video by an M1 Mac owner

www.cultofmac.com

This might help you. The drawback is that with the chassis using native Thunderbolt/USB-C and the adapter he used was USB-A, I don't know what else may be needed, especially as you may need to use DisplayPort for this. It was this that made the MBA a pass for me. But it does appear with a harmless hack that it is possible to have more than one monitor connected to the M1 MBA.

BL.

Whoah, thank you very much 😮

 

[nothingtoseehere]

Yeah the M1 seems plenty good, though with the M2 version it has charging MagSafe so I don’t have to take up a USB port.

But, if the thing lasts super long anyways, I guess it wouldn’t require charging all the time?

And a multiport hook up to one usb is possible I reckon?

Indeed MagSafe sounds good. As @bradl mentioned, if you keep the machine for a long time, the higher price doesn't count that much... But financial situations are individual.

The battery life is great, yes, and dockingstations of all kind can be used. This forum is full of reports about battery as well as USB hubs, have a look!

 

[Fishrrman]

Get a MacBook Pro.

Either 14" or 16", your choice.

BE AWARE:
NEW MBP 14/16" models with the m2 CPUs are due to be released before the end of the year, probably November. Coming very soon.

Either wait for one of those
or...
You might be able to find the current versions (with m1 CPUs) right now for a substantial discount (up to $400 off in many cases).

So your choice might be:
"Last year's tech" at a good discount
or...
Latest and greatest, but at full pricing.

The base models of the MBP 14" are quite well equipped, 16gb of RAM and a 512gb SSD. You can spend more, and get more. Again, your choice.

AN IMPORTANT WARNING ABOUT BUYING MACS WITH AN M-series CPU:
DO NOT buy an m-series Mac with only 8gb of RAM.
It will not be enough.
Get a MINIMUM of 16gb of RAM.

 

[bradl]

Get a MacBook Pro.

Either 14" or 16", your choice.

BE AWARE:
NEW MBP 14/16" models with the m2 CPUs are due to be released before the end of the year, probably November. Coming very soon.

Either wait for one of those
or...
You might be able to find the current versions (with m1 CPUs) right now for a substantial discount (up to $400 off in many cases).

So your choice might be:
"Last year's tech" at a good discount
or...
Latest and greatest, but at full pricing.

The base models of the MBP 14" are quite well equipped, 16gb of RAM and a 512gb SSD. You can spend more, and get more. Again, your choice.

AN IMPORTANT WARNING ABOUT BUYING MACS WITH AN M-series CPU:
DO NOT buy an m-series Mac with only 8gb of RAM.
It will not be enough.
Get a MINIMUM of 16gb of RAM.

I agree with most of this.

The part I don't agree with (and it is a very VERY minor gripe) is the debate between 14" and 16". Not because of the screen size, but because of the reports of the fans under load on the 14". I never tested that, and even while they changed the bezel since the mid-2011 MBA to give the 14" extra space from a 13" that had a smaller screen size in comparison, the 16" showed the most real estate for me, as well as stays cool. I haven't heard the fans come on on my Mac since I started it.

I do agree with getting 16GB of RAM. The reason for that is because you aren't buying a new Mac for the here and now, with having money to burn 2-3 years down the road to do it again. You're wanting to future proof, so while you may take a bigger hit with getting higher specs in your Mac, it's worth it. I paid more for the M1 Pro 10/16/16 (I didn't want to go M1 Max), but did go 16GB RAM and 2TB for the SSD. I came from a Core i5-2100, 4GB RAM, 256GB memory, and that lasted me 11 years. This should last me just as long, if not longer, as my disk space footprint has severely shrank (I threw everything that was non-essential onto my NAS).

But definitely future proof for what you need, and if you can go for the Pro, go for that. I agree with waiting to see if any MBPs get released with M2. In fact, I highly suggest that. If they do, and are not to your liking, you'll gain the advantage that the M1 Pro/M1 Max will drop in price, and you can still customize those.

BL.