My trusty Intel Air is the early 2015 version, so it is at least eleven years old and with 4GB of RAM is not suitable for upgrading from OS X Catalina. Software upgrades are a thing of the past as almost everything requires at least OS X 12 or later. What I have still works, but when the Apple website won't run on the Safari version Catalina supports, it's time to upgrade.
What do I need it for? Running the latest browser versions; light editing of small numbers of photographs; writing in Notes and TeXShop; opening and light editing of spreadsheets from National Statistics; running utilities like HX Edit and Focusrite Control; and Apple Music, Sonos and Qobuz. Those utilities run just fine on my old Air. I am never going to do AI, gaming, video editing, RAW processing, music production or anything that needs serious machinery, and if I do, there will be a solid business reason behind it that will probably justify buying a suitable laptop.
The nice man in the Covent Garden Apple Store said that a) if I did need a Macbook Pro (starting at £1,999), I would already know I did; b) if I promised to stay in my low-compute mode, the Neo (£799 for 512GB) would be just fine, c) but the moment I stepped into higher-Compute mode, I would curse myself for not getting the Air (starting at £1,299).
He's right about the Pro. 14" screen, 16GB RAM, 1TB storage, three Thunderbolt 4 ports, MagSafe, headphone jack, HDMI port and SDXC card slot, latest Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, for £1,999. The Pro has fans for cooling and other such touches. That matters, because modern chips are designed to slow down when they get hot, and if your laptop is how you make money, you don't want it doing that. You're not paying for the specifications, you're paying for productivity. That's not me. Unless I just want to treat myself.
The base-model M5 Air is a full-featured laptop. Sky-blue for preference. 512GB storage, 13" screen, 16GB RAM, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, MagSafe, headphone jack and the latest Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, for £1,299. It's way more than I need, but that's not a reason for not getting one.
The Neo is. It is a considerable upgrade over my Intel Air, which is what I am looking for. A nice Indigo Neo with 8GB RAM, 512GB storage, A18 Pro chip, 1 USB-C 3.2 and 1 USB-C 2 port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and 512GB storage. It lacks some of the refinements of the Air, but none that I will ever use or miss.
The use-issue is not performance, but storage. How much, and how reliable is it?
Let's do "how much" first. My usage is roughly: Photos Library: 17GB; CD rips and downloads: 33GB; iCloud: 1.1GB on drive; Other: 1 GB. Apps, Mac OS, OS 'Other' and my ~/Library come to about 35GB. An OS update can need 3-4GB plus working space while it is running. Apps bloat over time; and some apps give themselves as much cache as they can get, often without asking, because it reduces their streaming costs. AI will want lots of RAM and memory-swap if you don't give it enough, so allow 8GB for that; while the EU and UK Government will be installing client-side snooping and heaven knows what-all else in the near future. Say 15GB free at all times just for the system to work properly, and another 5GB for app cacheing. That comes to 107GB, 55GB of which is for operations.
I will not be ripping or downloading any more CDs, and text takes minimal amounts of storage. The future space-hog is Photos. I shoot JPEG when I get out at all. That 14GB Library is about 1,000 pictures taken and kept over the course of 17 years (! I said I don't get out much). My shooting ratio is about 12:1, so in a regular year I will take about 750 pictures occupying 15GB at current average size. Over a 5-year period, that's 75GB and easily held on a 512GB drive. Even if I went out twice as much, it would not cause a problem.
So the 512GB Neo it is.
I get away with this because I do not take lots of pictures of my family, cats, sailing boat, holidays and the like, and I don't take hundreds of RAW files, let alone 4K video, nor do I want to run lots of AI tweaks, and I have given up any ideas of producing music tracks. If wanted to do any of that, I would get the M5 Air, and look at external SSD drives vs internal storage upgrades.
To no-one's surprise I have been thinking about this for a while. The answer kept coming out as the M5 Air, whereas my intuition said the Neo was fine. It wasn't until I realised that I was looking to upgrade an 11-year old laptop, not a more recent one, that the arguments changed. When I looked at how much storage the photos would take that I realised what my intuition had grasped that maybe I didn't want to recognise: photography is not even a once-a-week hobby for me. Especially when it gets too damn hot.
