Ask HN: Apple Store advised (my mom) M3 MacBook Air over the M2. Ideas/Advice?
So how true is that? This salesperson has brilliantly/unwittingly struck at my mother's pet peeve, since her previous 2011 MacBook with outdated Safari and Chrome can no longer display online banking webpages properly.
I'd think that the M2 and M3 being the same family would still have roughly the same long-term lifespans, for the sort of light home-office work of the sort my mom needs at least 5+ years. Is the M3 really more future-proof as the Apple Store salesperson claims?
The other issue I have is the small nonupgradable 8 GB memories in both base models. Curiously, the base models are $100 different, but the M2 + 16 GB upgrade costs even more than the base M3. Maybe the pricing will change again in a few months, but my mom needs a replacement computer this month!
28 comments
[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 77.0 ms ] threadYour mom will do Word and Facebook on an M2 happily for five years, but you knew that.
My MacBook air will probably last 14 years and my mother's has lasted 13 years. That's the timescale I'm interested in.
Regardless, the salesperson (BTW not a "he") said obviously said it to my mother, so why would they advise about general longevity for a use case context most likely to consist of banking/email chores? Is it possible they see something that we do not? E.g. future software upgradability? Or are they blindly repeating what the management told them to say?
Hell my Macbook Pro from 2017 was fine for this.
It seems the answer is M3 by 2 years, because yesterday's Ars Technica review says Apple phases out its OS/browser upgrades by model year, so the M2 would lose upgradeability 2 years earlier if purchased today versus the M3. The article ends recommending the M3 for this reason. It's not a great reason IMO but the one that makes sense to me.
> why would they advise about general longevity for a use case context most likely to consist of banking/email chores?
Because their job is the upsell. They're trying to sell your mother on an M3 because it is the most recent one, and they (Apple, not the individual, but they incentivize the individual) want the sales numbers to reflect a high degree of uptake in the market for the newer devices. Don't trust sales people. Just examine the devices yourself, their prices, their suitability for your uses, and their capabilities. Or not, and do trust salespeople but then you're going to spend most of your life being upsold and scammed.
I am interested in if there is a valid argument, which entails the last bit of what you yourself said:
> Just examine the devices yourself, their prices, their suitability for your uses, and their capabilities
Their "capabilities" include the capability to be future-proof. To the extent that a salespersons asserted the future-proofing issue, even though they did not explain their assertion, is what begs me to ask the very reasonable question as to how to critically analyze this particular capability.
You can help the other commenters dodge this question or not, I don't care if the salesperson is trustworthy or not, because that was not the question I care about.
Banks and many other companies have moved on from 2011-era web standards. 13 years seems a good run for a laptop — cars and washing machines rarely last that long.
> The other issue I have is the small nonupgradable 8 GB memories in both base models.
Macs manage memory efficiently. 8Gb should be more than enough for web browsing and typical work.
In fact I have the exact same model as her, a MacBook Air 2011 and I am still using it. I am typing on it right now. It has 4 GB RAM.
8 GB is considered unacceptable on a current Windows machine. The fact that Macs have unified memory or "better managed" (how? in software?) memory hardware/OS, while partly true, nevertheless is on the balance a less plausible an argument than the fact that Apple consistently, knowingly underspecs base model RAM (and overprices the RAM upgrades) for casual consumers. There's an argument for planned obsolescence here, if not at least identifying RAM to be the weakest part of a well-rounded system spec.
Besides, if Macs manage memory efficiently then please explain why is Apple online store pricing the M2+16 GB > the M3 base model? That's $70 more just for ram on an otherwise 2022 model. Is there a technological justification for that value? Or just the vagaries of supply and demand?
I use Apple products. I upgrade every two or three years (taking advantage of the generally excellent resale value) because I use my laptop all day long for work (web development). Right now I have a 2022 M2 MacBook Air with 8gb RAM. I have never experienced any memory exhaustion or performance problems.
It’s possible your mother needs an M3 or 16gb RAM, I can’t say for sure, but I doubt it unless she has an intense workload like video editing, in which case the Macbook Pro will work better.
If you don’t like Apple’s specs, pricing, upgrade options, or think they engage in conspiracies against their customers you can find lots of alternatives. Chromebooks offer great value, for example, with lower prices and better upgrade options. I wonder if Google will still support ChromeOS in a decade, whereas I have more confidence in MacOS.
My parents struggled with Windows laptops for years. I switched them to iPads, which they have successfully used for more than four years now, including mobile banking and web browsing. Maybe look into that.
No need to wonder, Chromebooks get a decade of updates nowadays (previously Google delivered on 8 years of updates). And Chromebooks are used in plenty of companies too, so they won't backpedal on that. Plus they heavily use them internally.
What I am interested in is whether the M3 or M2 is better future-proofing option even for casual usage, on a 5+ year timescale. Imagine using a 2011 MBA today, is the kind of scenario I have in actual practice. Apple is known for making computers that last.
It also turns out that Ars Technica suggests an answer to the above, they recommend the M3 because it offers 2 extra years of future-proofing over the M2 due to Apple's OS update practices. It was in their Friday's review article. That's an acceptable enough answer for me for now.
I am secondarily actually curious as to the performance of an M2+16GB option over the M3. That, I don't have an answer to. But it also happens to be a good example to work over for anyone who asserts Macs have better memory management than Windows, since that depth of understanding implies - to me - the ability to explain the role of an extra 8 GB of M2 apparently being more valueable than an M3. It's a technical question but an interesting one purely for understanding purposes.
You can go to an Apple store and run benchmarks yourself. They only put base models on the floor, though.
I use an M2 8gb Macbook Air all day long for work. I have yet to run out of memory or experience any performance issues. It’s way faster than I can type or switch applications, the only performance that matters in actual usage. If I did video editing for example I would want more memory.
If she'd preferred not to spend money on the laptop, or is just angry about Apple's planned obsolescence, you can always install another OS on the machine for her. I'm running Win10 on a 2013 Macbook Pro, and it supports Chrome just fine.
These will offer the latest software, and will be able to do Internet banking without any issues, obviously.
Intel MacBooks from that era tend to pose very few problems, except for Broadcom wireless cards, which have relatively low performance.
The base model is a great machine (and I just got an M2 base model this week having seen the M3 doesn’t add anything I care about)
I don't agree. Even on my 32GB MBP I sometimes get a frozen screen due to "not enough RAM" issues and I have to hard-reboot.
Depending on how much fiddling you/she wants to do with it, you may be able to use OpenCore Legacy Patcher to install a newer version of macOS on her 2011 machine, and keep using it. It can breath some new life into an old MBP or MBA.
Most people do prefer all in one's of course. I stopped using the 2010 or so MBA. Still works. The iPad Pro is my laptop, with keyboard, trackpad and third party mouse. I use it for musical scores and showing off photos from the Nikons pretty exclusively. Size and portability matter. For these two uses, a laptop configuration is less suitable for me.
Desktops and laptops are still hundreds of times more efficient and useful to me than any mobile OS.
Even with the gamut of goodies.
If your mom upgrades so infrequently, it's like cars. The newer model will obsolete later.
My phone and some other systems fell off support, and can't get software upgrades. (Other than Linux, of course)
I suspect that's the rationale, even if the M series all seem interchangeable. Or maybe it will run out of horsepower later, as software gets even more demanding.
I doubt that she'll need to count cores and GPU's.
Normally this is just an upscales tactic, but I'd be inclined to believe it this time.
Of course Apple don't make any guarantees about how long they support products, so you never know. My 2017 iMac Pro still gets the latest OS whereas my dad's 2017 iMac does not. But looking at the iPhones, where the iPhone X lost support one year before the iPhone XS, which was very similar, I think it's a reasonable bet to say the M2 will lose support a year before M3.
They’ll both easily get 5 years, but no computer is “future proof”, especially not ones using an SOC that can’t be upgraded over time. It might be good for a decade, but eventually a future will come that will demand an upgrade for one reason or another, unless she uses it offline (making security a non-issue) and gets very lucky with it never having an issue once parts are no longer available.