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If you were new to Macs desktop and Macbooks laptops which would you buy as your first machine?
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As some would say, it depends. If I just came from the PC world, I might want a Mac Mini because I already have a monitor. If I wanted a fresh start, then the iMac might seem like a great fresh start. Understand, this is about someone new to the Mac world and not someone more aware of better choices.
We have a few dells (latitudes). the keyboards on them are better (than the HPs).
Indeed, a MacBook Air would be a great first Macintosh computer. They're pretty versatile, and they aren't as expensive as the MacBook Pros (being their entry-level model), and when you get an Apple Silicon model with the highest number of graphic cores and the RAM maxed out, it makes a surprisingly great computer for digital media production. Its' Intel predecessors, however, the 2012-2019 models would also make a decent first Mac, though unless they're maxed out they would otherwise be mostly suitable for general computer usage.
Until they were discontinued in 2011, the polycarbonate MacBooks were also regarded as a great "first Mac"; according to Arnold Reinhold in "Switching to a Mac for Dummies," he said "If you can’t make up your mind about which Mac to buy, get a MacBook. Laptops are versatile, and the low-cost plastic model works just fine for most folks. (However, I’d also recommend a look at the 13-inch MacBook Pro, which only costs a little more and features the cool multi-touch trackpad, backlit keyboard, and SD card slot.)" With that mentioned, the 13-inch unibody MacBook Pros made from 2008 to 2016 were also a great choice for a "first Mac", as in addition to still having a built-in SuperDrive and built-in Ethernet and FireWire 800 ports they also had that easy user serviceability I've often raved about.
The polycarbonate MacBook's predecessor, the iBook G4, was also a great "first Mac" in the later PowerPC years. Those polycarbonate iBooks and MacBooks, the 13-inch unibody MacBook Pros, and the MacBook Airs were also very popular with college students, and the current MacBook Airs still are to this day. Heck, even though I've graduated college four years ago with an I.T. degree and am working a computer tech job, my main Mac I use is an M1 MacBook Air, with the 8-core graphics and 16 GB of RAM, and it does everything I need it to do, including fairly elaborate digital audio and video production! And if I need more screen space, it's a matter of hooking it up to my old Apple Thunderbolt Display (though some day I'm looking to replace it with a similarly-sized third-party UHD display with built-in speakers and USB ports, maybe a Dell or Samsung with USB-C compatibility).
Until they were discontinued in 2011, the polycarbonate MacBooks were also regarded as a great "first Mac"; according to Arnold Reinhold in "Switching to a Mac for Dummies," he said "If you can’t make up your mind about which Mac to buy, get a MacBook. Laptops are versatile, and the low-cost plastic model works just fine for most folks. (However, I’d also recommend a look at the 13-inch MacBook Pro, which only costs a little more and features the cool multi-touch trackpad, backlit keyboard, and SD card slot.)" With that mentioned, the 13-inch unibody MacBook Pros made from 2008 to 2016 were also a great choice for a "first Mac", as in addition to still having a built-in SuperDrive and built-in Ethernet and FireWire 800 ports they also had that easy user serviceability I've often raved about.
The polycarbonate MacBook's predecessor, the iBook G4, was also a great "first Mac" in the later PowerPC years. Those polycarbonate iBooks and MacBooks, the 13-inch unibody MacBook Pros, and the MacBook Airs were also very popular with college students, and the current MacBook Airs still are to this day. Heck, even though I've graduated college four years ago with an I.T. degree and am working a computer tech job, my main Mac I use is an M1 MacBook Air, with the 8-core graphics and 16 GB of RAM, and it does everything I need it to do, including fairly elaborate digital audio and video production! And if I need more screen space, it's a matter of hooking it up to my old Apple Thunderbolt Display (though some day I'm looking to replace it with a similarly-sized third-party UHD display with built-in speakers and USB ports, maybe a Dell or Samsung with USB-C compatibility).
The Disk Utilities app (in Utilities folder, in Applications folder) is the tool for anything to do with drives; format, partition, diagnose, create disk images, restore disks etc.
What you should know is that since macOS 11 the architecture of a mac startup disk has changed fundamentally. It will now always consist of two volumes in a disk container; typically called Mac HD and Mac HD - data. The first is a locked read-only volume containing the basic system files. It's known as a 'signed system volume'. The second contains everything else; apps, user data, even kernel extensions. If you run Disk Utilities and select 'Show all volumes', you can see the structure.
The system volume can't be restored from backup, it can only be created by running a macOS installer. Online or with a 'USB bootable installer'. So, it's no longer possible to clone and restore a complete startup disk. You can backup and restore the " - data" volume only.
Lot more to say about this, but I'll leave it there for now.