M1 air, 16gb, second hand, 200 bucks, 200+ tabs in brave, photoshop, illustrator and premiere and kicad and sublime and chrome with one tab watching a youtube live stream. Plus text edit, notes and prolly some more apps. Works fine, zero hitch.. maybe too good for my own good.
When I spec'd a M1 air for my partner back in the day, even though she didn't really need it, I made sure to get the 16gb model for the longevity. Devices shouldn't be disposable toys. Apparently I had better foresight than expected...
I replaced my 10 years old macbook with a 10 years old macbook. 8 gigs. Good battery. A screen that is not broken. 80 bucks! I really don't see why I should upgrade. Need more compute? Rent a machine on vast.ai. Also I still use my old mac via screen sharing to run servers/databases/etc that tend to eat up RAM.
Yea Apple has been fighting themselves to upgrade to new Mac’s in so long that they had to start being competitive in price but even this isn’t an upgrade path for people and more a driver of sales in education.