Old Laptops

2026-01-07

I usually lean towards buying older or used things and fixing them up. I prefer older houses, they require much more maintenance but are often larger with bigger yards (I also hate HOAs). I prefer older cars, I have yet to buy a new car and some of this is stubbornness but I enjoy (or used to enjoy before kids) fixing up some parts of the car. Also used cars are usually much much cheaper than new cars, you need to be careful though to make sure the previous owner took good care and what not. The final example I will give is with clothes, I no longer do this since it is time consuming but I used to thrift some and it was fun and interesting. Ohh also books, I do not mind second hand books.

I am going to generalize here, I think the pro of used stuff are:

and the cons are:

That is not to say that all of my used purchases have gone well. I did get a used speaker system from my Mom which worked well but I eventually gave up trying to make it work and bought a new wireless speaker. There are a few other such examples but none are coming to me right now. And used stuff has problems generally, we bought an old house in SF (1920s) for our first house and we needed to replace some plumbing and it had really thin walls in some places, definitely a disadvantage of such an old house.

And this brings me to my current dilemma and I am curious about your opinion. In the past I have bought used laptops as well. For non-gaming I use a Mac and right now I am on a 2019 Macbook Pro from Intel. For what I am doing for my job I need an upgrade, sadly, and I am going to get a mac with a new processor. So I feel two good options for me now are:

This is my basic decision. I could tweak the amount of RAM it has or the processor it comes with. I dont mind using used stuff as I have established so the new vs lightly used isn’t that big of a deal to me. I actually think the biggest deal is ‘How long will this hardware last for me?’ and ‘How long will Apple support this computer with the latest OS’. And for these questions I am not sure the answer. I assume that the 2025 M4 will be longer in both of these questions, it has faster hardware and Apple will support it longer.

But my workload is usually pretty tame, I am not running LLMs or anything. The most annoying thing I have to do it simulate an iPhone to develop an iOS app. How long will that last on the M4, or on the M1?

And for Apple support, Apple has designed both the M4 and M1, it is no longer an Intel chip, so will that help elongate support for both of these laptops?

And so my old strategy was to buy the old laptop, use it until it is no longer supported or until the hardware can’t do what I need it to do quickly and then buy a new used laptop. But is my strategy wrong? Should I just buy the newest and use it for longer? Am I misguided?

What would you do?

-Gary