Help buying a new MB Air for a heavy Microsoft Word user

[Steve121178]

Word is no longer updated for hardware that old, so you are forever stuck with obsolete software. When Sonoma was released then Microsoft dropped support for anything running Big Sur & below which I assume you must be running on a 2013 MBP. The last few updates for Office on my old 2013 MBP were horrible. Word/Office 365 is so much better on my M1 & M3 hardware.

Essentially any Apple Silicon based machine will do the job for you, but as others have said the 15" MBA would be the best choice. If money is tight then the 8GB baseline version will be more than fine.

 

[arcite]

Your ancient Macbook can‘t even run the latest OSX. You’ll notice a huge upgrade in performance. Check out the 15 inch too.

 

[monokakata]

I do wonder why more Mac users don't gravitate towards Scrivener (which has been my friend for nearly 20 years) or Ulysses for full-fat word processing. Generally speaking if there is a Microsoft option for a piece of software it is often the worst of its kind. Compare Publisher to Pages for example.

As for the OP? If you can afford it get 16gb for future proofing but 8gb will do.

I love Scrivener and use it all the time for long-form work.

But the OP is an editor and like it or not, the publishing world is a Word world. I've turned on a lot of writers to Scrivener but we all know that when it's time to send stuff out (or take in work by someone else for editing or book production) Word is the only way. In this context, Pages is useless.

 

[SjoukeW]

My dad is an office user who uses a lot of Excel files and Word files. The files are small but he opens 20 Excels and 20 Word files simultaneously next to Outlook and some Safari. He has the base 15" air.
The machine flies and the memory pressure is always green. For his usage 8GB ram is more than enough.

For your current usage 8GB is enough.
I have no clue about the future though, can't look into that yet.