Score one of Apple’s lightest laptops for its lowest price ever Need to eventually replace my Acer Laptop. No great rush and I do not want to spend much. Stumbled upon the MacBook Air above. Been about 20 years since I used a Mac.... The refurbished bit bugs me a little.
Pends on where you get it. If you get one refurbished from the mother-ship they are indistinguishable from new and carry the same warranty as the new stuff. HOWEVER (comma!) you're not going to score one of their yester-boxes for less than 200 bones. More like 650. Closer to 400 for an Amazonian refurbed - albeit with a pretty good return policy. First - you have to determine if you want to play in one of their walled gardens. If so - you're going to have to pay now - or pay later by buying a Wintel box and being EOL'd in 5 more years. I'd pay $650 just to avoid being married to Edge - but I avoided both issues by buying a used i7 notebook on Amazon for $175 and loading Linux Mint onto it. My CFO has used an M1 MacBook for the last 3 years and I haven't looked back OR been asked to perform any tier-1 technical support.
The M1 Macbook is pretty old; but if it does what you need it to do - that's fine. I believe they're up to M4 or M5 processors now - don't know, not an Apple person. I'm guessing you want to get out from under the Acer because it isn't win11 compatible. You can install it using method #3 attached. You'll need someone that already has a win11 computer and an eight gig thumb drive. Run the media creation tool to make a Win11 general backup; then proceed as instructed below on solution #3. I'm actually typing this out on a X220 thinkpad with 16GB of memory. It's been running like this for a few months now. I don't need any of that AI garbage slowing me down and spying on me and it hasn't slowed this laptop down. I do a weekly optimization and housekeeping. Doing a Win11 overlay, won't automatically install the AI bells and whistles; but you can install them after the fact - probably slow that old computer down. Tip: How to Install or Upgrade to Windows 11 on Unsupported PC – AskVG Hope this helps...... PS; once you get everything running; download the media creation tool on your Acer with win11 and do a specific win11 recovery drive. This will preserve all your current drivers, in case something craps out on you. High likelihood with an old hard drive and power supply.
The kick in the head for replacement of the Acer was WIN 11, but the Acer has been on life support for a year or so It is a 2017 E15. Whenever I start it in the past year, it immediately searches fotr updates, which takes a couple of hours. If it finds any, it takes SEVERAL HOURS to download & install. Also, battery life is short nowadays and apparently it cannot be replaced. Finally, telling it not to look for updates is ignored.
The 11" macbook at 2.38lbs was my daily driver from 2016-2022. my last Intel setup. Phenomenal machine; I still own it but it has been relegated to simpler occasional use. I've been thinking about blasting it with Windows to run techstream.
If that E15 has an I5 8th generation processor in it with at least 4Gb of memory; it should be directly compatible with Win 11. Sounds like it's caught up int one of Microsoft's infamous update loops. A clean windows reinstall will usually clear that up.
Wow, Priuschat keeps going ballouie this evening. Anyway, decided NOT to replace an 8 year old laptop with another. Although, if the economy wasn't so....at the moment, i might of bought the Mac for the grandkids to mess with. Thanks for the reponses.
In 1985, I prepared the plant and equipment budget for my GE facility: 2 - Macintosh for the word processing group 6 - luggable Compaq PCs for engineering developing circuit board based products 2 - desktop PCs for accounting When the budget went to headquarters, "No Macintoshes and only IBM branded PCs." They changed it to their choice with three times the budget. Then I learned that 1985 PC support department had more than three times the staff of the single Mac support and the 'light came on.' In GE, a supervisor's pay and grade was a function of the number of direct reports. PC support back then was nearly five times, half an order of magnitude, greater than Apple Macintosh support. Bob Wilson
