Need advice. Upgrade 2014 MBP internals or buy M1 macbook Air?

[cookiedough]

Hello,

I am currently a student in med school (still have 2 more years to go). I'm currently using a 13" MBP base model from 2014. I'm currently facing a little slowdown and I'm often running out of space because it is only 128GB. Now my question is: should I spend 150USD to upgrade my SSD and to replace the thermal paste so that I can use my mac until 2023 (when I graduate) or should I just buy a new Macbook Air M1 base model now? Another option would be to save some money by buying a used Macbook Pro or MacBook air (2016-2019). Thanks.

 

[KeesMacPro]

128Gb is very little for today's standards.
Considering the recommended 20% min free space , there's about 100GB left for OS and data....
You could install a 3rd party blade e.g. Samsung 970 EVO etc and enjoy your MBP a few years more with much higher speed and storage capacity (while staying within the budget of 150,- ).

A nice thread about installing 3rd party blades in a MBP:

Upgrading 2013/2014 Macbook Pro SSD to M.2 NVMe

This thread is about upgrading MacBook Airs & Macbook Pros (2013-2015) with new high speed and/or high capacity NVMe SSDs. This thread was one of the first to talk about MacBook Pro NVMe SSD upgrades on Macrumors, and was started by user "maxthackray", which we can thank and give tribute for...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[Amethyst1]

How much RAM do you have?