Does my situation justifies an upgrade

[IdánShir]

Hi,
So about 2.5 years I ago I purchased the 13inch 2017 MacBook Pro base model without a Touch Bar.
While the experience has been good, there were glaring flaws that were present in everyday use:

—The abominable butterfly switch keyboard would sometimes requiere more force due to dust.
—Heating issue
—sometimes slow performance while using basic applications like Safari.
—Battery was overall underwhelming coming from a MacBook Air.

My battery seems to be enjoying its last cycles and I'm in need of a replacement. Also I'm almost out of internal storage is in use (128gb). However, now that the new M1 MacBooks are out, and given that it seems to solve all of the aforementioned issues and appears to be really future proof, I'm really tempted to get the Air.

Should I replace my Pro's battery and keep it going, or just go for the M1 Air?

P.S
I'm a literature student and requiere very little out of my machine.The most intensive app I use is Zoom, which hopefully will be unnecessary in a few months.

 

[chscag]

Welcome to our forums.

Sorry for the late reply, just came across your post.

Your MacBook Pro with the infamous butterfly keyboard is covered by a special Apple warranty for 4 years from your date of purchase. (The warranty is for the keyboard only.) However if the battery needs replacement and you're running out of drive space, it may be time to think about a new machine.

The M1 MacBook Air is a new machine and the first of its kind. There are growing problems with that entire line of new M1 machines. It's up to you of course, but my opinion is that I would wait until the second generation of the Apple new architecture machines are released.

So, if you can hold on to your current MacBook Pro for a while longer, we believe Apple will be releasing new machines sometime this coming year. May be around 6 months though.

You can always add external storage to your MacBook Pro. Portable SSDs are now inexpensive and might be a good way for you to go.

 

[IdánShir]

Welcome to our forums.

Sorry for the late reply, just came across your post.

Your MacBook Pro with the infamous butterfly keyboard is covered by a special Apple warranty for 4 years from your date of purchase. (The warranty is for the keyboard only.) However if the battery needs replacement and you're running out of drive space, it may be time to think about a new machine.

The M1 MacBook Air is a new machine and the first of its kind. There are growing problems with that entire line of new M1 machines. It's up to you of course, but my opinion is that I would wait until the second generation of the Apple new architecture machines are released.

So, if you can hold on to your current MacBook Pro for a while longer, we believe Apple will be releasing new machines sometime this coming year. May be around 6 months though.

You can always add external storage to your MacBook Pro. Portable SSDs are now inexpensive and might be a good way for you to go.

Thank you for the reply!
Could you please specify what sort of problems?

 

[Lifeisabeach]

Thank you for the reply!
Could you please specify what sort of problems?

I can't speak for what chscag is referring to specifically, though some brief googling shows complaints of intermittent bluetooth issues with the M1 Mac minis in particular. I have an M1 MacBook Air and I had a pair of problems early on. The first was that one of my Thunderbolt ports would suddenly stop working (no charging, wouldn't recognize a connected drive) but rebooting it solved it. I've had this MBA since a few days after first released and it's happened to me perhaps 3 times, and not at all recently. The second problem was when I tried to boot into the Diagnostics mode to see if any hardware issues could be detected to explain that port failing. For some reason, it wouldn't connect to my wifi, apparently timing out. What's really weird is that when I switched my default wifi network when logged in normally from my main SSID to my guest SSID, I was then able to get into Diagnostics just fine. That was baffling, but both of these problems suggested a firmware update may needed to fix them. I just tried Diagnostics again and had no trouble connecting to my main wifi SSID, so that much has resolved. I also haven't had that port go dead on me in 3 weeks or so now. I'm thinking Big Sur 11.1 may have come with some fixes for those issues.

Otherwise, my personal experience has been utterly fantastic. You can read my comments in this thread here about my early experience and observations. This includes a brief debunking of some claims made by a Forbes writer who wrote what obviously is a hit piece riddled with blatantly inaccurate assessments.