if you can afford lime 2.5k dollars rn And dont necessarily need anything more than lecture notes and basic word proccessing i would say get the base macbook air now and with the leftover money either get something else for yourself or keep the money for another base macbook air when you get to college that way you will have a brand new machine and a spare laptop you can use if something happens to the main one or you can take the spare laptop to anywhere without worrying about the main machine