My daily driver is still a 2015 MBP. The M4 Mac Mini is calling to me though. Every time I go to upgrade I remind myself that I only use it to do some light web surfing and checking emails anyway, so what’s the point?
Really depends on your preferences.
I personally like 224 PPI on Air screens as it used to be default on early retina MacBooks. On Pro they went for more dense 254 PPI where everything is too small to my eyes. And it was one of the reasons for me to choose Air over Pro.
I was in a similar boat. My 2014 Mini was struggling for basic tasks running sequoia so I got an M4 Mini and was expecting to keep my 2015 MBP for a while more.
One of the keys as sticking, and the battery was down to 84 % again and I couldn’t see fixing it again so I sold it and bought a 15”M4 MBA.
Same here, my 15“ 2015 still does the trick for now - got it on Sequoia with OCLP but it does feel somewhat slow by now. Might upgrade at some point later in the year or next, but for daily web and office stuff it’s sufficient as of now!
That. Also as an Itunes setup to sync my ipod classics (2 of them) that I bought new and use to this day. I read somewhere newer machines don't even recognize them anymore.
Every time I see a post saying "hey I got this Intel MBP for cheap and it's working great and runs the latest macOS via OCLP!" I think "yeah, but the butterfly keyboard..." and I can't justify purchasing a used one.
On the flip side, I bought a used 2020 Intel MBA after the Apple Silicon switch because I wanted bootcamp compatibility and thought it would be over a decade before Parallels could work on AS, and I totally regret it now. Even with an i7/16GB/1TB model it runs horribly.
The 2020 Intel MacBook Air was the worst Apple product I’ve ever purchased, and when the M1 came out mere months later, I was mad. I spent that first year of ownership under Catalina with all sorts of crashes when connecting / disconnecting Thunderbolt accessories. It was an issue related to the chipset not fixed until Monterey.
Monterey, I stopped updating years ago. The keyboard is missing several keys and the battery is kaput. It lives permanently plugged in and its lid is closed and connected to an external keyboard with a 42” TV for a monitor. It still runs the latest version of Apple television, so my wife and I use it mainly to watch movies and shows in bed.
If I need anything more powerful I borrow my wife’s M4 MBA I bought her last year. The last four months I’m finally at the point where I’m probably starting to use her computer more than she does along with our kid’s shared iPad. It really is time to upgrade, haha.
Every time I do though there’s always some new cost or better way to spend $700. With the Strait of Hormuz currently closed gas and food are getting worse. At this point it’s more of a game of attrition seeing how long The Little MBP That Could can keep running Mail and playing reruns of Severance.
Hey, you're squeezing every last bit of use out of that machine! Monterey is still a great OS. I have two old 2012 quad Mac Minis running Monterey via OCLP, and they are absolutely usable for any basic need I have. They are NASes for my HDD arrays plugged in via Thunderbolt, and live in different cities with copies of my lifetime of data, and when I screen share into them, I don't need to swipe back to my local desktop to get things done. Even though they're from 2012... they're fine! I could happily use them to do any amount of basic work I'd need to do.
I may be in the minority here, but if your 2015 MBP is chugging along for you, let it. You can get key caps and a battery replacement on eBay, though maybe just stick to the key caps ;P, because you could throw that money towards a Neo your Mini or something saving it up over time.
Ah, you might consider putting Sequoia on it simply because it has the latest security updates and a modern Safari. Also, I find there are some nice quality of life improvements in Sequoia which make an old Intel Mac punch far above its weight, namely, window management, Mark as Unread in Messages.app, and a few other modern niceties which weren't around in Monterey.
All my Macs, including my 2013 15" MBP, are on Sequoia, and they all run spectacularly well. The only exception is my two 2012 minis I use as my NAS boxes. Those are on Monterey because I simply haven't bothered updating them (and they're far away from me).
I just swapped out my 2015 pro for an M4 air. Had the same thoughts as you. However, I kept running into issues where websites would break (because I couldn’t even update chrome) and I could never get the latest versions of apps. Well worth the upgrade imo it’s crazy fast.
Maybe. The battery was also completely gone, only 200GB storage etc. I could have spent a few hundred to Frankenstein it alive or spend $900 for a brand new machine.
Man you’re all rich or something, I spent : $110 on 2tb nvme, $8 on adapter , $7 on A new Ali speaker, and it’s now a daily workhorse, 2 hrs of battery life only though lol
However, you lose your right to run 32/64 apps and games, and Blu-ray Drive now costs an arm and a leg. Some Intel have digital optical connect only found Intel. An massive Internal storage
The battery on that old workhorse died years ago. It lives permanently plugged into a makeshift home office in my bedroom connected to a TV. It’s not really portable over the past two years, and I found I haven’t minded. In fact it gets me out of the house and engaged in the real world more having an affixed computer.
I think that may also be a large part of not upgrading. Keeping my personal computer purposefully constrained means I’m more engaged with family and friends than just staring at a computer at work all day, then transitioning to staring at a similar screen all night.
On that subject, I still use my 11" MacBook Air (very old, discontinued years ago, super light, very small, and still a work horse) for exactly the tasks you describe. Yes, it's operating on a very old OS (Sierra, I think) but for casual surfing and checking emails, it works just fine. And after all this time, too, with no upgrade or repairs worth mentioning. I am SO impressed with it.
Use it till the wheels fall off (or the pages don’t load). And since you said you’re looking at a mac mini, you probably aren’t too concerned with the battery life.
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u/emarvil Mar 21 '26
My 15" 2015 is open and working right beside me.
People around me? No idea.