New Macbook or used?

[jurbie]

My 18 month old HP Windows laptop whilst fine for day to day stuff has in recent months slowed to a crawl when trying to do anything remotely complicated. Trying to simultaneously run Lightroom, Photoshop, Photo mechanic and an FTP program has become a painfully slow experience which eats the battery life and I've been advised that a Macbook Pro is probably the way forward as it should also last a good few years.

I can get the following brand new for a little over a grand:

MacBook Pro 13.3" (2020) - Intel® Core™ i5, 256 GB SSD or for another £100 or so I could get the same but with an M1 chip.

For a little under a grand I could get the following which I think is a 2015 model:
MacBook Pro with Retina Display - 15.4" - Intel Quad Core i7 2.2GHz - 16GB RAM - 256GB SSD which also gives me a few USB ports which is useful.

I'm leaning towards the second hand 2015 model as everything just seems better but I'm guessing I'll get a few more years usage out of the 2020 model.

Is that it or are there other pitfalls with going down the second hand route?

[rat840771]

You’d be mad to buy a 5 year old MacBook over a new M1 model. Just buy a device to connect USB of Amazon for £20 and you are good to go

[craigjm]

rat840771 said:

You’d be mad to buy a 5 year old MacBook over a new M1 model. Just buy a device to connect USB of Amazon for £20 and you are good to go

They aren’t considering a new M1 model the one they list is the last of the intel

[Fatball]

jurbie said:

My 18 month old HP Windows laptop whilst fine for day to day stuff has in recent months slowed to a crawl when trying to do anything remotely complicated. Trying to simultaneously run Lightroom, Photoshop, Photo mechanic and an FTP program has become a painfully slow experience which eats the battery life and I've been advised that a Macbook Pro is probably the way forward as it should also last a good few years.

I can get the following brand new for a little over a grand:

MacBook Pro 13.3" (2020) - Intel® Core™ i5, 256 GB SSD or for another £100 or so I could get the same but with an M1 chip.

For a little under a grand I could get the following which I think is a 2015 model:
MacBook Pro with Retina Display - 15.4" - Intel Quad Core i7 2.2GHz - 16GB RAM - 256GB SSD which also gives me a few USB ports which is useful.

I'm leaning towards the second hand 2015 model as everything just seems better but I'm guessing I'll get a few more years usage out of the 2020 model.

Is that it or are there other pitfalls with going down the second hand route?

I can’t help but think that the best purchase of that lot would be the M1 model you mention.

[bitchstewie]

Looking at the reviews you might find you don't even need an M1 Pro as an Air might be plenty.

[frisbee]

Alternatively fix your PC, it sounds like the hard disk is full or something.

[xeny]

frisbee said:

Alternatively fix your PC, it sounds like the hard disk is full or something.

That would be my first thought, either add RAM or replace the HD. Not as much "fun" but many fewer £.

[jurbie]

Thanks all much appreciated and pretty unanimous, spend the extra and get the M1.

I'm not sure what the issue is with my current laptop, hard disk is only half full and it appears I can't add extra ram. To be fair the performance was never that great when pushing it but it's really dipped now so planning to keep it for day to day stuff and use the Macbook for everything else.

[cb31]

I've got an M1 Macbook Pro and it's fantastic, however unless you need a brighter screen and a fan, which I've never heard incidentally, just save the cash and get an M1 Air. Same performance for less cash.

The only reason I spent the extra is I want to use it in the garden in summer and the extra cash will hopefully make it a reasonable experience rather than a struggle like my old Macbook, it had a screen that was a bit too dim for bright sunshine and the metal got too hot without the fan in direct sunlight.

[jurbie]

Outside is exactly where I'll be using it so whilst tempting to save a few quid on the Air I might regret it if the screen isn't to great in daylight.

[WonkeyDonkey]

Honestly I'm not a mac fan but the new ARM based Macs are something else. I'd go for a new M1 Air over even the highest i7 MBP.

You are also future proofing yourself as Intel based applications will be slowly phased out.

[xeny]

jurbie said:

Thanks all much appreciated and pretty unanimous, spend the extra and get the M1.

I'm not sure what the issue is with my current laptop, hard disk is only half full and it appears I can't add extra ram. To be fair the performance was never that great when pushing it but it's really dipped now so planning to keep it for day to day stuff and use the Macbook for everything else.

You really want to figure out what the bottleneck is with your current laptop before you spend money.

You’ll feel blooming stupid if the problem turns out your workload won’t fit into say 8GB of memory only after you’ve bought an un upgradeable M1 MacBook.

[stemll]

ThatGuyWhoDoesStuff said:

The M1 MacBook will obliterate the 2015 MBP, and embarrass the new intel MacBook.

If you have £1000 to spend on a laptop, there’s the M1 Apple products, then everything else a good margin behind.

I do wish people would stop pointing this out I had to buy a new MBP at the start of October when my 2012 MBP finally went to silicon heaven. Whilst I love my 2020. Intel, I was not amused when the M1s were released so soon afterwards as I was holding out for them only to have my hand forced early. Only saving grace was it being a refurb so cheaper than the equivalent Air and only compromise I had to make was the colour.

Do not buy the 2015 if it's almost the same price as the 2020. Big Sur dropped 2012 machines from support so I'd guess you'd have a max of 3 years OS updates on a 2015.

OP, are you sure you want a Mac? While I love mine and wouldn't go back to Windows, no-one else in the house will entertain the idea of one and are all on Win10 as is my work machine. In most cases you will have to rebuy your software for MacOS.. Cost-wise I don't see Macs as that expensive if you compare them to "nice" Win machines like the Lenovo X1 or a Surface Pro. Yes there are cheap Win machines which my Mrs insists on buying only to replace them every 2 or three years rather than the 8 my Mac lasted

[Sonie]

Problem with Mac is being locked down and unable to update the OS when your device stops being supported.

If you are happy with Windows, buy a top spec Windows laptop for the same money, if you want a Mac, buy new. Would you buy a 5 year old Windows laptop?

[Phunk]

Used vs new?

I just sold my top spec 2016 MacBook Pro i7 and bought a brand new M1 MacBook air for the same money.

The MacBook air is soooooooooo much faster.

It might even be quicker than my £3600 2019 i9 16" MacBook. It's incredible for the money

[stemll]

ThatGuyWhoDoesStuff said:

Sonie said:

Problem with Mac is being locked down and unable to update the OS when your device stops being supported.

If you are happy with Windows, buy a top spec Windows laptop for the same money, if you want a Mac, buy new. Would you buy a 5 year old Windows laptop?

Show me any windows laptop that hasn’t completely st the bed by the time a new MacBook has stopped being supported and I’ll show you a dancing unicorn.

Top spec windows laptop for the same money? Lol. You can’t get anywhere near a MacBook Air M1 with £1000 to spend on windows.

Edited by ThatGuyWhoDoesStuff on Friday 25th December 22:13

My 2012 MBP was updated until Big Sur this year. MacOS is not locked down as much as people think (and nowhere near iOS), I have stuff from outside the App Store and stuff that is not notarised still running under Big Sur (MakeMKV for one). Perfectly possible to run stuff from outside Apple's store just need to right click to run it and enter an Admin password (assuming you're not running as an admin as you shouldn't be in MacOS or Windows).

[jurbie]

xeny said:

You really want to figure out what the bottleneck is with your current laptop before you spend money.

You’ll feel blooming stupid if the problem turns out your workload won’t fit into say 8GB of memory only after you’ve bought an un upgradeable M1 MacBook.

You are right although even when new I was disappointed with how little the performance improved over the laptop it replaced. It has 8gb RAM and a Ryzen 5 processor so I did wonder if an MBP with similar specs would be any quicker but when asking the question amongst my peers it seems most of them are still using 2012 MBPs and claiming it was the best investment they ever made.

[survivalist]

jurbie said:

xeny said:

You really want to figure out what the bottleneck is with your current laptop before you spend money.

You’ll feel blooming stupid if the problem turns out your workload won’t fit into say 8GB of memory only after you’ve bought an un upgradeable M1 MacBook.

You are right although even when new I was disappointed with how little the performance improved over the laptop it replaced. It has 8gb RAM and a Ryzen 5 processor so I did wonder if an MBP with similar specs would be any quicker but when asking the question amongst my peers it seems most of them are still using 2012 MBPs and claiming it was the best investment they ever made.

Wholeheartedly agree with this. I bought a new iMac this year as before enforced WFH my wife and I shared our existing iMac. Used it to edit a small video for my sons homework and couldn’t work out why it was so laggy. Used my 2014 iMac and it flew through it, then remembered that the. 2014 had 32 (or maybe even 64) GB RAM.

The M1 has unified memory and a very fast SSD, which will give it an advantage, but you really don’t want memory paging to disk.

[xeny]

Looking at the OP, that's a lot of workload for 8GB of RAM - what's the model of laptop, just to be utterly certain it isn't possible to just add some memory?

[Phunk]

survivalist said:

jurbie said:

xeny said:

You really want to figure out what the bottleneck is with your current laptop before you spend money.

You’ll feel blooming stupid if the problem turns out your workload won’t fit into say 8GB of memory only after you’ve bought an un upgradeable M1 MacBook.

You are right although even when new I was disappointed with how little the performance improved over the laptop it replaced. It has 8gb RAM and a Ryzen 5 processor so I did wonder if an MBP with similar specs would be any quicker but when asking the question amongst my peers it seems most of them are still using 2012 MBPs and claiming it was the best investment they ever made.

Wholeheartedly agree with this. I bought a new iMac this year as before enforced WFH my wife and I shared our existing iMac. Used it to edit a small video for my sons homework and couldn’t work out why it was so laggy. Used my 2014 iMac and it flew through it, then remembered that the. 2014 had 32 (or maybe even 64) GB RAM.

The M1 has unified memory and a very fast SSD, which will give it an advantage, but you really don’t want memory paging to disk.

Ram doesn’t make a huge difference in most video editing on Mac, the biggest thing is GPU.

My 8GB Ram M1 MacBook Air is very similar and in some cases faster than my 2019 i9 32GB Ram MacBook Pro for editing 4k footage.