I was recently convinced that the M1 MBP is one of the cheapest and most cost effective laptops on the market right now. I know it sounds crazy but it appears to be true. You can get a m1 mbp refurbished (sometimes with warranty) for anywhere between $400 - $700. Making it a budget laptop. It also destroys anything in that price range in terms of performance and what you are getting.
We bought ours when it first came out after several terrible windows laptops. It still runs like new and there’s hasn’t been any need to consider upgrading (m1 air in our case). The biggest complaint is once or twice a year I need a usb c to an adapter for an old device or something.
I’m not in the Apple ecosystem but I have a 16" 32GB M1 MBP. It was given to me when I started my job as my work machine and the thing is a beast especially comparing it to all the terrible laptops Apple came out with prior (removal of mag safe, addition of touch bar, the keyboard issues). I still use that laptop for work today and it honestly doesn’t even feel like it’s aged a day. Everything is still extremely fast and I use my work laptop 8 hours a day for extremely demanding tasks (I’m a dev so things like running dozens of docker containers, compilation, Android emulators, multiple IDEs, etc).
Honestly agreed. For the majority of users that just do light office work and browsing it is a great piece of technology. Although i would say it is less about performance (because those people would be fine with even less) and more about build quality, battery life, fanless design and good screen.
The one issue i have with it is the 256gb non-removable storage. More actually than the 8gb RAM, which tbh for many people is enough for casual use.
I am still waiting for anyone not named apple to release a similarly priced fanless laptop with good build quality. With lunar lake it should finally be possible imo.
If you spend a little more (like $700) you can get 16gb ram and 512gb. For performance I think “light office work” is selling it short. It’s more than capable of handling heavy office work IMO.
Yeah, I guess it depends on what kind of work. I thought that for demanding office stuff the 8gb RAM might end up mattering after all.
But your $700 with warranty are an amazing deal that make this irrelevant. That really only leaves the single external monitor (without using workarounds) as downside.
Where I am in Europe however I don’t think I could find the better specced models anywhere close to that price
