Can a $300 mid 2012 Air still hang?

[cnev3]

Of course not for gaming. For making Garage Band songs, iMovie video editing, Safari surfing, MS Office, Facetime chats, and playing videos off the external? A model with 4GB RAM, 1.7ghz Core i5.

$300 is within my budget and a way for me to get into these great mac programs, and even it being from 2012, im sure the battery life will still smoke the 90 minutes of battery life I get from my old Toshiba Sattelite. Gotta know because of the inability to expand the RAM, and hard drive, though I would order a 128gb microSD card and move as much data to it as possible.

 

[Buggyflayer]

For making Garage Band songs, iMovie video editing, Safari surfing, MS Office, Facetime chats, and playing videos off the external? A model with 4GB RAM, 1.7ghz Core i5, running Sierra.

Yes, it does that easily.

 

[Boyd01]

It should be fine, I used to have a 4gb i5 2011 MBA and did a lot more than that - used Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, VectorWorks, Photoshop and more. It was a huge improvement over the 2008 15" MBP that I had been using. Just worth noting that there were a few significant upgrades that came along in 2013 however. Arguably, the most significant is much better battery life starting with 2013 when Apple switched to more efficient processors. The 2013 models approach twice the run time of the 2012 in many cases.

I would get around 5 hours heavy use on my 2011 MBA, and I hear you… because I'd be lucky to get and hour and a half on my 2008 MBP, so that seemed great. But buying a 4 year old machine today, you will also be getting an old battery, so the run time might not be as good as you hope. You might also find the battery needs replacement before long, which costs about $130 if you do it through Apple.