The best computer back then for both was a Thinkpad,an unbreakable brick(trust me I tried)that has the bare minimum to work and play flash games,then the Thinkpad turned less easy to repair,less sturdy,and on the cheaper first computer for kids class the second hand pads were replaced by horrible Chromebooks,(running a custom version of Gentoo funnily enough),and the working computer had a lot of also low quality options competing for the bottom as Apple was the only one making good laptops,that were still terrible in terms of price/quality so no option was really good anyways.

That was until recently,then two things happened,on the free repairable side we got the framework laptops,free as in freedom because they are mega expensive,but having a livetime laptop that’s truly yours makes it worth it,and Apple released the bombshell,the magic piece that they needed to make the stuff they make worth the price,they made their own chip,and it was and still is the best consumer chip out there,the M series of chips.

That combined with the fact that M3 and ownwards discontinued the 8GB of RAM as a baseline made a refurbished Macbook air the best laptop in terms of price/performance by far,and this was before the Neo and the rise of RAM prices with the AI bubble,that eliminated all other options by making them sell the same horrible laptops but at a premium price,the same price bracket that has the air,some of them beating the air in price when they are way worse on everything but disk memory,and maybe more,slower RAM.

So yeah,when it came the time to buy a laptop for my new job there was only two options,the framework and an M3 mac that i found basically brand new by like 650€,when I saw that I had to play double for an Intel i3 chip without shipping it became very obvious…

So,did it succeed?Or did I regret spending money on the fruit?

The actual thing

The unboxing experience is crazy good and beautiful,but I’m a scrapyard racoon so I only care about the thing,the specs are wild on this thing,but the most important part and the one thing that caught my attention is just how well it works in the daily.The absotule silence when it runs,the fact that my room is like 40ªC and I touch it and its cold,and then it runs and it only gets “hotter” after video editing or when I transfer it my body heat when I use it,I am writing this with my Mac on the lap and its still colder than my legs after hours,I have a bunch of stuff running in the background too.

The battery last decades too,I used it several days at work without charging it and it takes several days of daily light use to drop it to like 25%,I never had something that last this long in my entire live,the closest thing was my old Nokia fliphone.

Its amazingly well built,the aluminum exterior is perfect in a way that is almost scary,luckily the fact that its well built means that I wont have to figure out how to open it in a looong time,at least I hope…

The screen is also the best screen I have seen in my live,it looks better than my 60in TV,its almost like a window to real live and watching YouTube video essays with it feels like overkill.

The only negative is the Achilles heel of all Apple products,the memory and RAM,16GB of RAM is not bad but back when it released for that money you could easily get 32GB without having to pay an exorbitant premium,256GB of memory is also livable but for the kind of device this is its horrible,buying an external SSD is still better than doing it the Apple way even with the apocalyptic “new normal” prices.

MacOS

MacOs was a surprise,Not a good or a bad one,It was surprisingly normal and unremarkable.

Finder was surprisingly bad and hard to use,it works but is annoying to use,to the point where I just used cloud services for job and avoided using it,the default behavior is extremely chaotic with files just moving around without a grid to stop them from overlapping,you can change the settings to fix it but the download folder was unsalvageable and I just used the list option instead of icons,that’s something I have never done,not even in windows 11 or the most scuffed Linux version.

Besides that everything works well and its well designed,the system is stable and you never notice anything unless you install something from outside the app store,so most of the times.

All of those notifications are annoying but I think that’s good because the usual Mac user has a higher chance to be tech illiterate,so scaring them is a good way to keep them safe,in terms of security Apple devices are the most secure on a software and hardware level by far,it also comes with good encryption tools and ways to make the device more secure easily so that’s good.

The system is not only powerful on hardware level but the software manages work really well,you never notice any stutter even on video editing,sadly the ways to use the brute force of both MacOS and the M chips are mostly limited to local AI,video editing and maybe a Minecraft world with max settings and mods,you can’t expect to game unless you play certain indie games or whatever is available on on the Apple games thing,where the only intersting games are the SEGA exclusives(Sonic,Puyopuyo),pocket card jockey and hello kitty.

I mostly played Replicube,so don’t expect to play a lot unless your M chip is already supported by Asahi Linux

Working hard or hardly working?

I’m not sure if you remember after 5 million years of reading but i bought this to work,so how is it?

File editing is painful but besides that I was amazed at the ease I had working,one day I needed to record and edit a video as I wasn’t able to be there to show a presentation and I went from not having anything to edit to a complete video in just 2 hours including processing time,I can’t imagine the pain and misery that task could have been if I did it on my Linux desktop so yeah,I already mentioned that I didn’t need to worry about the battery and not only that but everything just worked and went smoothly.

In the end

Yes,the M3 is amazing,I originally wanted to end this with a recommendation but not even Apple is immune to RAM so the prices in non Apple stores and refurbished units just raised quite a lot in the 6 months I had it.

If you are a student or you get lucky and find a good refurbished Mac at a good price is still an easy recommend,but now that the prices are rising again this short era of the affordable Mac might end soon,I’m quite happy with the deal I got but its sad to see Moore’s law dying just like that because of the greed of few.

If you don’t need a Laptop Mac minis are dirt cheap and have the same specs too,and if Apple prunes the tree and support dies now we have Asahi to fall back on so its not an expensive paperweight in the future.