Advice on 2nd hand Macbook Air

[RobDee]

Hi,

Long time no see!

Looking for a 2nd hand Macbook Air for basic use and study. I want to avoid the butterfly keyboard because of reported problems. Apart from which, is the Macbook Air 2015 regarding as good?

I've tried to find old reviews for this model but it's proving very difficult.

 

[topgunn]

It would have to be free, or close to it, to consider going with a used 2015 MacBook Air seeing as how the FAR superior M1 MacBook Air can be had for $799 or so.

 

[helgea]

if you can get a good price, those machines are quite good. there are still a couple of things on those old macbook airs that are better than the current generation; keyboards are better, more travel. magsafe is really nice. sd card reader, very practical. the old usb-a ports are nice if you have old dongles. the processor is fast enough for light office use, the gpu however isnt great, I think this mba was the first to support 4k over displayport, but it was sort of experimental. I had the 2013 that was slightly slower that didnt support 4k. the screen on these macbooks are not retina, so if you have become used to retina resolutions or similar from the pc world, it will be a step back. but, the apple logo does light up!

 

[xboxbml]

Hi,

Long time no see!

Looking for a 2nd hand Macbook Air for basic use and study. I want to avoid the butterfly keyboard because of reported problems. Apart from which, is the Macbook Air 2015 regarding as good?

I've tried to find old reviews for this model but it's proving very difficult.

That's what I have. This was my first Mac and I've had this model for about 3 years. Works well for my use case. Light office, big movie library, and I have big photos library so I have a 2TB NVMe SSD in it.. I have all my purchased movies onboard and full size photos/vids for trips etc. No internet needed. Yeah, it's not a Retina display, but it works well. I believe the 2017 MBA does not have butterfly, so you might even want to go there if so. I forget what specs are on that year. Might just be a little faster processor. Good luck finding what you're looking for. I got mine for 430$.

 

[DenisK]

For what its worth I use a 2012 MBA with i7 and 8 gigs of ram as a daily driver. It supports Catalina and interacts with IOS no problem, gives me no issues whatsoever. On teams it does start to whine a bit, but I can hear the fans even on my 2019 MBP on Teams. My use case is content creation, word and pages, PP and excel, Slack, lots of tabs in Safari and photo and video, I did cut a few HD vids in Final Cut with no issues either - its not capable of playing a raw 4k content, but Final Cut allows to use proxies, which I haven't tried since I have a much better tool for that. I did update thermopaste and replaced a battery - all good. I say look for the i7 and 8 gigs of ram (its maximum) for this lineup, new thermopaste is an easy thing to do. I am thinking of upgrading to the M1 MBA or 13 MBP - but frankly, still didn't come to a solid reason to do that, it just does what I need it to do on the go, and often at home, connected to an HD monitor too. Its a solid little machine, I would steer clear of the ones with 4gigs of ram though, just because I am on heavier user side.

 

[EugW]

Looking for a 2nd hand Macbook Air for basic use and study. I want to avoid the butterfly keyboard because of reported problems. Apart from which, is the Macbook Air 2015 regarding as good?

I've tried to find old reviews for this model but it's proving very difficult.

I just bought a mint condition MacBook Air 2017 13" with 1.8 GHz i5, 8 GB RAM, and 128 GB SSD for about US$325. Performance is more than fine for basic use.

A good condition MacBook Air 2015 13" with 1.6 GHz i5, 8 GB RAM, and 128 GB SSD is less than US$300.

I personally wouldn't go with less than a 2015 these days since the previous models do not support Monterey, and the older models don't save that much money, considering these things are relatively low priced already. Plus, the older you go, the slower they get.

If you add about $75-ish, you can get a decent 2015 MacBook Pro with Retina screen and faster performance. And the MacBook Pro has a smaller footprint than the Air too. Those bezels on the Air are huge.

BTW, you might want to check out my 2017 MacBook Air vs. 2015 MacBook Pro as gifts to family thread.

 

[xboxbml]

I just bought a mint condition MacBook Air 2017 13" with 1.8 GHz i5, 8 GB RAM, and 128 GB SSD for about US$325. Performance is more than fine for basic use.

A good condition MacBook Air 2015 13" with 1.6 GHz i5, 8 GB RAM, and 128 GB SSD is less than US$300.

I personally wouldn't go with less than a 2015 these days since the previous models do not support Monterey, and the older models don't save that much money, considering these things are relatively low priced already. Plus, the older you go, the slower they get.

If you add about $75-ish, you can get a decent 2015 MacBook Pro with Retina screen and faster performance. And the MacBook Pro has a smaller footprint than the Air too. Those bezels on the Air are huge.

BTW, you might want to check out my 2017 MacBook Air vs. 2015 MacBook Pro as gifts to family thread.

Nice! That's what I would have gotten had a held out for one available in my area.. I settled for the 2015 air.. good machine.

 

[Jack Neill]

For what its worth I use a 2012 MBA with i7 and 8 gigs of ram as a daily driver. It supports Catalina and interacts with IOS no problem, gives me no issues whatsoever. On teams it does start to whine a bit, but I can hear the fans even on my 2019 MBP on Teams. My use case is content creation, word and pages, PP and excel, Slack, lots of tabs in Safari and photo and video, I did cut a few HD vids in Final Cut with no issues either - its not capable of playing a raw 4k content, but Final Cut allows to use proxies, which I haven't tried since I have a much better tool for that. I did update thermopaste and replaced a battery - all good. I say look for the i7 and 8 gigs of ram (its maximum) for this lineup, new thermopaste is an easy thing to do. I am thinking of upgrading to the M1 MBA or 13 MBP - but frankly, still didn't come to a solid reason to do that, it just does what I need it to do on the go, and often at home, connected to an HD monitor too. Its a solid little machine, I would steer clear of the ones with 4gigs of ram though, just because I am on heavier user side.

You should give Big Sur or Monterey a shot, my 2012 i5/4/1TB Air is on 11.6.2 and is just as smooth if not more than 15.x.

 

[DenisK]

You should give Big Sur or Monterey a shot, my 2012 i5/4/1TB Air is on 11.6.2 and is just as smooth if not more than 15.x.

Cool, thank you! How is this working out? Patching is required, correct? My idea is not to fix stuff that ain't broken, so, for now, both my MBA and 2019 MBP both run Catalina. Stuff just works, which is what I like. I see people have all sorts of issues once they go on or past BigSur, peripherals like monitors etc. so I will probably wait out a bit more till things are more stable.

 

[EugW]

I just bought a mint condition MacBook Air 2017 13" with 1.8 GHz i5, 8 GB RAM, and 128 GB SSD for about US$325. Performance is more than fine for basic use.

A good condition MacBook Air 2015 13" with 1.6 GHz i5, 8 GB RAM, and 128 GB SSD is less than US$300.

On eBay there was a recent mint condition MacBook Air 2015 13" with 1.6 GHz i5, 8 GB RAM, and 128 GB SSD for sale. It was a poorly written listing, so I figured it might go for cheap. It ended up selling for less than US$250, plus about US$20 shipping. Great deal for the winner.

BTW, the reason I thought it would go for cheap was because the listing had a bunch of errors, but anyone who knew anything about these would know it was a 2015 with i5, 8 GB RAM, and 128 GB SSD. Also, it wasn't a US sale, so outside the US, there sometimes are better deals available.

Granted, this was a bit of an anomaly, but what I'm saying is that are deals to be had out there. It's not that difficult to get decent machines under US$350, at least if you're OK with a 128 GB SSD, and if you're willing to consider eBay and Kijiji.

M1 Airs are awesome, but they are in a totally different price class, and are overkill for @RobDee's usage.