which laptop/macbook to buy?

either a second hand :
Apple MacBook Pro 16 8 Core i9 2.4GHZ 5500M 8Gb 16GB RAM 1TB SSD 64 CYCLE COUNT
it costs £1350
OR
a new 2021 14 inch macbook pro base model.
£1574
Or
a 13 inch macbook pro 2021 m1
£1,274.00
thank you :smile:

Reply 1

Callicious

Never buy used unless it has a warranty that you can trust- sage advice.

Reply 2

beforeu

Original post by Callicious

Never buy used unless it has a warranty that you can trust- sage advice.

thankyou!

Reply 3

Dunnig Kruger

I always buy (or get given for free) used. For me myself personally, for members of my family, for friends, for small business associates.

It's only large businesses where it makes sense to buy new. Because you want standardisation. And it's impossible to source batches of 100 to 10,000 used laptops that are all the same. As well as the corporate image of equipping your executives with new laptops every 3 to 7 years.

Laptops are commodity items. And premium business laptops are engineered to last in ways that consumer grade laptops often aren't.

Plus there's usually only 1 part in a business laptop that's not economically replaceable. That's the mother-board.

Last week I was at my local garage for a pair of tyres. The owner was having problems with his main office laptop. He'd wasted a few hundred quid buying a new laptop that wasn't suitable for his needs.
I fixed his 5 year old HP 250 G4 laptop by buying a used mouse button switch off ebay for £2.95 and fitting that with 40 minutes screwdriver work.
He was delighted. And will now carry on using his old laptop. It would have been a shame to landfill it for the sake of a £2.95 part.

If you google "laptop buying advice" the first 3 pages of results does tend to throw up a lot of samey articles where they pretend that used laptops either don't exist or where they scare-monger against buying them. These articles are advertorials with an agenda to sell new kit. Or are written by people that don't have clue what they are talking about when it comes to real world IT purchasing.

As for which of those Apples to buy from the original post. It all depends.
It all depends what you will be using it for. What applications you will be running and whether there's anything special about how you will be running them.
EG if doing spreadsheets will they have 500,000 lines and will you be doing number crunching on them?
It also depends on whether you've used Windows or Macs or Linux before?
Plus where you stand on the size vs portability compromise?
The 16" Macbooks are big heavy slabs to carry around. OK if it will sit on a desk almost all the time and be carried from the desk to the boot of your car only. If you will be using the bus or walking to campus with it, it will be a millstone to carry around. Unless you're a 6'5" rugby prop forward.

Edit: If you've used Macs before and like the Mac environment, and if it's just for general use supporting your studies and for web browsing, watching videos, video conferencing. And you want something pleasantly portable then deals like this make more sense than the 3 mentioned in the opening post:
£650 for a Macbook Air M1 with a small dent in 1 corner that doesn't affect functionality. With a leather sleeve thrown in: