Submitted by skookin in technology
my current laptop is over ten years old. the hinge is broken, it weighs 1000 pounds, overheats when i play fast graphics minecraft, and must be plugged in at all times.
all i really want to do is play minecraft and run a browser at the same time. maybe an image editing program if im fancy. do i need anything special to do this? what should i expect to pay? do i have to run windows?
Try to get one without a bunch of stickers already, unless of course you really like the stickers
The Macbook Neo is $600, great, will likely last a long time, and you can split the payment over a year or two years with no interest at a lot of places if you think a credit card is okay. You might be able to grab a used M1 Macbook Air for less than $600, but not a whole lot less.
For Windows, used ThinkPads are good buys even when they're old and cheap. Note that when you search for ThinkPads you'll sometimes get other Lenovo brands that aren't as good, stick to ThinkPads. Something like this is probably needs suiting. This is probably what you want to go with, the main reason to go with the Macbook would be some extra battery life, longevity, not having to deal with windows.
Let me know if you have and qs and good luck.
thank u this is really helpful! it just feels overwhelming to get into lol
To second Devtesla, a Macbook is easy to recommend, depending on your budget, country, and willingness to use macOS. (Country mostly impacting how the edu store works, pricing, etc.) Apple makes the best bang-for-your-buck computers now.
Ten years ago, Macbooks had comically poor price-for-performance, so you might have the impression of paying an "Apple tax". But now, that has inverted. Big "gotta hand it to them" moment.
Minecraft Java runs on macOS, but if you got 'Minecraft for Windows' (ie 'Bedrock') then you might need to pay for Java again.
A note on Linux: I'm the kind of person to recommend Linux, but if you know nothing about computers, it might be too much to handle. If you're Linux curious, you can transfer your data off your old laptop and use it to experiment with Linux. Linux is great because some distros can run on a 20 year old laptop.
I'm an incorrigible computer person so I've probably posted many things I dislike about macOS, but that's in comparison to Linuxes. But compared to Windows, there's no contest, macOS is better in almost every way except for some software support, mostly games. (And the long long long animations built into the OS.)
One of the big big advantages of the ThinkPads is that you can also run Linux on them. :D Linux support on the latest Macs varies and is not great.
But there are three important points if you're getting a Mac:
In online forums, Apple engineers love to hint at having crazy magic RAM management prowess, and I'm inclined to believe that's true, macOS might have the most performant memory management. But Apple's PR statement "8GB on a Mac is like 16GB on Windows" is almost certainly not true. If you want to keep your laptop for the next 10 years, I'd strongly strongly recommend at least 16GB RAM.
A side note on RAM, having only 8GB RAM will probably make your drive die faster. RAM is where your computer stores working memory. When your computer needs more working memory than it has, it "swaps" to your storage disk. On old spinning-plate hard-disk drives (HDDs), this used to cause huge slowdowns. When SSDs replaced HHDs, swapping became a lot faster, and the slowdown from swapping was less. But this caused a new problem, because swapping on an SSD kills it quickly. This is called "disk thrashing". Apple users on 8GB RAM find themselves swapping a lot, as indicated by reading disk "SMART data", but they don't notice because the SSD is just so fast. Unless Apple has magic tricks up their sleeve to prolong SSDs under thrashing conditions, their 8GB Macbooks will die faster because of this thrashing. This was anticipated since 2020, and judging by Reddit posts, the bell is tolling for users with 8GB RAM after 6 years. This Reddit user had 1 petabyte read and 885 terabytes written, which comes out to about 400GB written per day. This is only explained by heavy swapping.
The Macbook Neo only comes with 8GB RAM, and IMO $700 for a new Neo is not great if you can get a Macbook Air used/refurb.
But the problem with the used/refurbished market is that you need to have a high risk tolerance for getting scammed or a defective product, and this market is increasingly tight. The economy's gone to shit, and consumer electronics are becoming appreciating assets, as everything goes up in price. Apple hasn't raised prices like consoles have, but the used market seems tighter than I've seen it before.
I'd look for an Apple-official refurbed Macbook from their official online refurb store, which are considered as-good-as-new, or a good deal on a used Macbook (which you might find at other retailers like Best Buy). Right now, the cheapest refurb Macbook is $1360, but you get 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, and a nice M5 chip.
Apple's higher-ed store offers similar discounts as their refurbs, but with their usual selection of laptops. You can get the latest Macbook Air with the same specs as that Pro (16GB/512GB/M5) for $1000.
Right now getting 16gb macbook basically doubles the price, so I'm not gonna recommend it to someone for light use. You definitely get into swap mode with 8gb way easier, but I'm not sure if every user is going to stay there most of the time.
Going from a base Neo to a base Air does go from $600 to $1100 (albeit you get more with your cash for that) but when you compare to the used/refurb market it's not as large a gap. (At least until used/refurbed Neos hit the market).
I also think you'd get more problems with low RAM when you also have a 256GB SSD (unless it's overprovisioned to account for that). I have ~40GiB of mysterious system data I can't clean off my Mac, and it's a problem all the time for me at 512GB, I'd love that 40GiB back. You can pay $100 more to go from 256 to 512GB on the Neo (and you get the fingerprint scanner) at least.
I also have a lot less faith in Apple after all the Liquid Glass stuff, it really raises the ceiling with how much an update can compromise even the most basic parts of using the computer. Apple could unilaterally say "macOS 27.4 fixes a zero-click RCE that makes your battery explode into a fireball, also it bundles 30GB of the latest Apple Intelligence models. Get fucked."
And at least for me, every time I take a look at the RAM on my Macbook Pro I'm using almost all of my 16GiB, with high memory pressure, even though I usually only have a browser and text editor open.
That said, "8gb won't be enough" makes the assumption that (1) apple hasn't found a way to solve disk thrashing, but they might have and (2) RAM usage won't constrict in this Leslie's Law (opposite of Moore's Law, i am very funny) environment.
Both assumptions could be wrong! Maybe Apple has crazy good wear-leveling algorithms on overprovisioned chips with some kind of heuristic magic putting the least important pages on the weakest blocks, and maybe devs start being more respectful of RAM given the existence of the Neo and the RAM shortage.
(there's also the third assumption of "you might want to use this laptop for 10 years", i bet it would work just fine for five years)
I guess it also bears going over all the nice-to-haves you get from a Neo vs an Air vs a Pro. They're all really things that you don't need. Plus you can get what is IMO the nicest perk (the fingerprint scanner) on a Neo too
Apple has a helpful comparison site but Apple does the Starbucks thing of making up a whole vocabulary of new names for things, like "TouchID" instead of their fingerprint scanner, or "Liquid Retina XDR" instead of "high resolution HDR display". It's really confusing
Anyways, going from the Neo to the Air, you get
From the Air to the Pro, you get
These are all just Nice Things To Have tohugh
flabberghaster wrote
Go to a coffee shop and if you see one you like grab it off the table and run away really fast