Derek Peden

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Summertime question, to buy or not to buy

There is the annual summertime debate over purchasing anything new in the summer or waiting until the next round of hardware releases is announced (hopefully) later in the year.

Specifically I’m deliberating over between

  1. Buying a refurbished MacBook, and getting more for my money than I could for new
  2. Waiting until the next round of Macs are released

There is no urgency in my case, merely impatience as I’ve been putting off this purchase since the M1 and the lack of both hardware and software support for my (now) legacy MacBook is increasingly frustrating. The compromises I’ve made to keep this machine running via a suite of external SSDs and USB hubs has lost its charm. I’ve waiting this long. Can I really wait another 3, 4, 5, maybe every 6 months?

Absolutely.

However I no longer want to wait despite my head telling me that option 2 is the far more sensible thing to do given the potential performance leap in future M4 MacBooks.

Against this is my acceptance that all M4 Macs will probably cost more than the current M3’s. Driven both by Apple’s steadily increasing pricing for new hardware and and the reductions available when considering refurbished Macs.

So I go round in circles, without any decision or progress….