Agreed. I’m going to be buying a new laptop sometime this summer, because my 2011 Air is completely unsupported and Firefox is going to stop supporting it in October.
Although the cheapest model sold would be just fine for my purposes, I plan on buying a new M3 Air with 24 GB RAM. Mostly because I want to keep using it for over 10 years, just like my previous one, and I think I have a better shot of it lasting that long if I start with a new model and have enough RAM to accommodate what might be required in a decade.
I realize that this means I’ll be spending about $1700 for a computer when what I need could be purchased for about $750. But if I go cheap today, I would expect to need to replace it in 3-5 years and then again in another 3-5 years. So it may not actually save that much in the long run.
Circumstances may end up proving me wrong, but that’s my reasoning.
I agree with the last several posters regarding supported lifespan.
I have an M1 MacBook Air (16 GB / 2 TB), I am absolutely delighted with it, and I expect that I will get quite a few more years of service out of it.
For the types of uses mentioned by the original poster, @janesprando, there won’t be a very noticeable difference between comparably equipped M1, M2, and M3 machines. Consequently, I wouldn’t have any hesitation recommending the almost four-year-old M1 Air to someone who tends to get a new machine every three-to-five years.
However, for people like Jane (or me!), who tend to keep machines significantly longer, I think a more recent M2/M3 model would a much better fit.
While I would not be the slightest bit surprised if my M1 Air remains a completely satisfactory computer for another ten years, I would be surprised if Apple were still providing it with software updates at that time.
PS. Regarding the notch on the newer machines, I purchased my M1 instead of an M2 specifically because I did not like losing menu bar space to the notch, even though I was aware of the menu bar utilities that allow you to rearrange/display menu bar widgets otherwise hidden by the notch.
If you’re interested in quantifying the decision, a time-honored method is comparing an outlay of $1,700 now with the net present value of an immediate outlay of $750, an outlay in Year 4 of $750, and an outlay in Year 8 of $750.
If you don’t have a financial calculator (long live the HP 12C!), it’s simple to do in a spreadsheet:
Of course, deciding the appropriate discount rate/interest rate to use is more of an art than a science…
:-)
Of course, a computer is not a financial vehicle (even though it has a resale value). And financial calculations don’t include the cost of my work and aggravation having to set up a new computer and migrate all my stuff to it.
Work and aggravation is one way to express the cognitive load I suffered when making a “clean” upgrade to a 16" M1 MBP a couple of years ago.
That experience motivates me to keep using this MBP as it works safely for me!
I can empathise with that sentiment: I used to look forward with glee to getting a new Mac, knowing it would be palpably faster than the last. But now the incremental speed increases are too small to notice, so the hassle of transferring apps and docs (so much worse since the arrival of the T2 chip!) have made me look at a new Mac with dread rather than delight. I reached that point with iPhones after the 5, when they became larger, heavier and harder to use, so I have no plans to ever go beyond the SE as long as it is available. I suppose Apple is aware of this and it explains their switch to subscription services where possible.
My wife is considering a new Mac. She is currently using an M1 MBA, but intends to retire shortly, and feels she should get a new machine to last her as long as possible whilst she can justify to the taxman having her company buy it. I shall point her at this discussion.
The tax write-off is an important consideration, especially for those, like my wife and me, who retired or will do so soon. Future-proofing, being as well equipped as you can get for you future needs, means the price difference between your ideal Mac and one less capable is quite a bit smaller.
Just a quick thought: one’s time and effort can be treated as a cost when doing a NPV comparison. In any case, when interest rates are relatively high, as they are now in the US, the current “costs” of the future years will be lower than when interest rates are near-zero or effectively zero.
So from a finance perspective, the “savings” from making a large purchase today instead of spreading out a number of smaller purchases over time decreases as interest rates rise. But having said that, my actual usual behavior is to buy the highest specs I can afford in order to get the longest possible service life from my Macs.
I prefer to have my cake and eat it too. My strategy for a long while now is not to transfer anything to a new computer, but only install and copy data for what’s needed on that mac. I keep my old ones as is so I can always run what I need regardless of what things upgrades break. This is easiest to do with minis and laptops since they don’t take up much space.
My primary mac is still my 2017 27" imac, still running Sierra, and there’s no practical possibility of getting an equally good monitor for any other computer. So I screen share to the oldies and the newer 2018 mini (catalina) and to the possible M3 mini in the next few months. I get to keep using the nice display on the same table no matter where the other macs are parked. The iMac acts as a file server, so all of the files are available to be squirted hither and yon as needed.
Note that I mostly don’t use Apple apps other than safari and aperture, and the only icloud feature turned on is find my ithings. But with some care for which things are turned on for which macs (e.g., a designated mac is the one that syncs Photos) normal icloud use shouldn’t be a problem.
Thank you all for the advice. I went to Costco and looked at both the MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs, just to have an idea on size and cost.
I did buy an Apple refurbished 15” MacBook Air. (Thanks for the links!) I did get the 512 gig SSD. Apple did not have the 16 gig RAM in the 15”, so I got the 8 gigs of RAM. I chose the Midnight color cuz I thought it was pretty! It arrived yesterday afternoon. It looks huge to me, but it is not as wide as my MBP and a lot lighter. I haven’t migrated anything yet — I am still deleting stuff off the MBP.
SOOOO … Thunderbolt ports. My mouse needs a USB port, as does the iPad and iPhone. I am thinking there must be some kind of connector that has several ports??
It’s been 14 years since I had to migrate stuff to a new Mac. And going from High Sierra to the latest OS will be an eye opener — not to mention the updated/new Apps I will have to buy! I am so grateful for this group of knowledgeable people willing to help.
If you just need more USB ports, there’s a simple inexpensive solution. This hub supports power delivery so you can hook your charger up to it such that whenever you connect your MBA to it, the Mac gets charged. $25.
@glennf wrote an informative article about USB-C standards in 2021 which might be a helpful reference. The good thing is that there is no need to worry about all the different standards if peripherals are all the devices that will be connected to the Mac.
If all your devices use type-A connections (see also File:USB 2.0 and 3.0 connectors.svg - Wikipedia) and you don’t expect to get any devices with type-C connections in the near future (and you plan on charging via the MagSafe connector), then there are literally hundreds of different kinds of USB 3.x hubs that you can connect (possibly via an adapter cable, since your Mac has type-C jacks). Just be sure you get a USB 3 hub that supports 10 Gbps speeds, in order to accommodate your fastest devices.
But if you want to charge your Mac on the same port or if you have (or plan to get) peripherals with type-C connectors, then a type-C hub (like what @simon suggested) will be your best choice.
If you later want to connect Thunderbolt peripherals, you have at least one more TB port. And you can get a TB4 hub (which will typically include many ports, usually including a few USB type-A, type-C and Thunderbolt ports). But I wouldn’t buy one right away - they can be a bit pricey, so wait until you have an actual need for it first, and then feel free to ask us here if you’d like some specific recommendations.
Hopefully not too many. When I upgraded my Mac mini from a 2011 model (running Sierra) to a 2018 model (running Catalina), I had to pay for upgrades to two apps (which were 32-bit and therefore incompatible with the new system):
FileMaker Pro. This was the expensive one. Hopefully I won’t have to upgrade it again for several more years.
Photoshop Elements.
Almost everything else just worked. Either because I was already running a compatible 64-bit version, or I got an automatic upgrade via subscription (Microsoft Office 365) or the apps were open source and were free upgrades (so, costing only my time).
The MacBook Air has only 2 Thunderbolt ports. What type of peripheral would plug into a Thunderbolt port??? The mouse is a standard USB port. I have an iPhone 15 and an iPad Air 5th generation. If I want to back them up to the MacBook Air, I will need the newer port, too. So I would want a hub with both kinds of ports, right?
A thunderbolt port is also a USB-C port. What you need is a powered hub with USB-C cable to the MBA and both USB A and C ports to plug peripherals into. Ypu could Leo get an A female to C male adapter from Amazon for about 10 bucks if you don’t have any other cabled peripherals to connect. Since you have others…a powered hub is the best answer…but don’t buy the cheapest one on Amazon. Get one tha5 has at at least USB 3.1 and preferably 3.2. I personally recommend anker…the 555 will do what you need. There are more expensive docks that connect to the MBA via Thunderbolt for lots of peripherals…OWC makes good ones as does Satechi and CalDigit…but those are more $$ and more than it seems you need at 5his point.
All of your peripherals will connect with just a cable or an adapter. But if you want to use more than two at a time, you’ll need a hub of some kind. @neil1 gave the same advice I would, so I won’t repeat it here.
A simple C-to-A adapter should be enough to connect it directly.
The iPhone 15 has a USB type-C port (carrying USB 2.0 data). So you should be able to use a standard C-to-C cable.
I think the type-C charge cable that came with your phone should work (since the phone doesn’t use USB 3 speeds). If not, these cables are not expensive. I’m a fan of Anker’s cables, which I think cost less and are more durable than Apple’s cables.
To avoid confusion with other C-C cables, I would recommend considering a Thunderbolt 4 cable. The phone will still run at USB 2.0 speeds, but you won’t have to deal with the potential confusion of trying to use the cable with other devices and getting speed-throttled as a result.
This also has a USB-C port. Unlike your phone, it will run at USB 3 (10 Gbit/s) speeds. So you don’t want to use the bundled charge cable for data - it will throttle your speed to USB 2.0 speeds.
So you should get a C-C cable that is rated for 10 Gbit/s speeds. Or get a Thunderbolt 4 cable, which will have no problem supporting the speed.
For these devices, you’ll want a hub with at least three downstream USB ports. At least one should support 10Gbit/s speeds, but the other two can run at any speed, since your phone only supports USB 2.0 (480 Mbit/s) and your mouse is probably much slower than that.
A TB3/4 port is physically the same thing as a USB-C port. You plug in the same hardware. The difference lies in the protocol. Thunderbolt allows for substantially more performance than USB3, but many peripherals like mice, keyboards, or charging an iPod does not need any of that and will do perfectly fine just connected to old USB-A. But better than just that, USB-C (definitely in the Mac’s 3.2 Gen 1 implementation) is perfectly backward compatible with old-fashioned USB-A type connections.
So you can either buy a modern hub (like the excellent model I linked to above) and use a small cheap adapter to connect older peripherals (or, alternatively, just buy a modern cable, like this or this or this). Or you could get an older hub with just A receptacles. I find the modern C-type hub solution to be far superior over buying a hub with just USB-A style ports because that is essentially end of the line and because a modern C-type hub with PD will also allow you to efficiently charge your MacBook thanks to its USB-C/TB4 ports.
You could also buy a hub with both modern USB-C (10 Gbps) and older USB-A plugs in attempt to rule them all. The links below are an example for that. However, such hubs tend to be more expensive and likely you’ll end up paying for stuff that you don’t really end up using, especially in Mac land where it’s all going USB-C.
Me personally, with a modern Mac I prefer to also roll with a modern hub that does it all including power delivery. One cable connection and done. And for those few peripherals that still have an old plug I just take a cheap dongle or better yet, I end up just using a newer cable.
If you have all your peripherals hooked up to such a USB-C hub including your power adapter, that means your MBA still has one TB4 port left open. You could use it to attach high-performance peripherals in the future (think fast SSD) where you actually want TB4/USB4’s superior bandwidth.
It will do data faster than any shipping iOS device (and until iOS devices get TB5 that will remain the case) and it supports charging up to 240W which is also way more than any iOS device (or Mac for that matter) needs. Better yet, if you have two Macs that you want to connect for lots of heavy data transfer (think MA), you can use this cable for the fastest transfer there is on a modern Mac (not even 10GigE stands a chance).
As TidBITS’ @glennf has in the past pointed out on several occasions, don’t bother with cheap USB-C cables. Get one quality TB4/USB4 cable to rule them all. At $24 there is really very little reason to look at anything else.
Stay simple. Just get the cables you need to plug each in. iPhone 15 has USB C so get a USB C to USB C cable. And etc for your other devices. A hub is too complicated.
