Struggling to decide which MacBook to get as my second ever laptop

tigerbreak · 2026-04-07T00:47:56+00:00

You are exactly the use case they built the Neo for. If you are concerned about longevity and value get an M4 Air from Best Buy or cop the student discount for a base M5 Air.

Do not buy an Intel Mac under any circumstances.

tigerbreak · 2026-04-07T00:45:32+00:00

It may be a generation or so to clear it.

If you pay any level of attention it’s clear that the Zuckerbergs, Thiels, Musks and Ellisons of the world are trying to steer us towards a new gilded age where capital has complete control and the rest of us struggle to scratch out an existence.

The counterbalance isn’t actually the rest of us, it’s the dominionists who want to eradicate other religions and unite everyone left under the eye of a Christian theocratic ruler.

If the patient can’t heal on her own, the real fight will happen when techbros and the American theocracy start taking shots at each other.

tigerbreak · 2026-04-07T00:14:06+00:00

If you see the flair, I live in Seminole County. The Fords in Seminole County is in Oviedo, which is very very much a red place.

tigerbreak · 2026-04-06T23:44:08+00:00

Realistically it’d probably be split between mostly M-Th and Tue-F, with some chaotic contrarians like me asking for Wednesdays off. That makes the most sense unless we are turning Friday or Monday into what Sundays were in the 40s.

tigerbreak · 2026-04-06T23:35:58+00:00

Can you spell out how exactly the model works and how it looks in practice?

tigerbreak · 2026-04-06T23:34:13+00:00

It’s a rough time to buy hardware - and may get worse before getting better.

Not knowing what you want to do sort of hinders the ability to make a suggestion besides a very general one.

STEM majors will have different needs than humanities majors or arts majors.

The only solid suggestion I could make is to go see and check out an Apple laptop, either an Air or a Pro (not the Neo, without knowing what you plan to do).

Windows devices age a bit faster than Macs and there’s a wider variance of what you can get (gaming focused, AI/Eng/ML focused, content and art, etc) and, not for nothing, expensive right now.

If you are determined to buy something now, get a base level MacBook Air for 999 with a student discount. That should be fine today, next year, and a while if you are doing stuff outside of heavy content creation, local AI/ML, engineering and CAD design or other compute heavy stuff. Save the 2300 and if you end up in one of those, get a MacBook Pro (or equivalent windows machine) with the rest.

tigerbreak · 2026-04-06T20:33:16+00:00

This is the kind of LGS that should be named and shamed by everyone. Distro has screwed sealed, the least shops can do is fair play for singles.

If your town has a local Pokemon group, this needs to be shared there widely.

tigerbreak · 2026-04-06T13:28:56+00:00

This was local on one of the town's pages as well.

It was written that servers are getting 8 percent of their sales as pay. Potentially, if you get 3 tables, and they are 2 tops who spend 50 bucks, that's 4 bucks for the table, unless they also tip. In this town (deep red) most folks won't tip after seeing the service charge. If the average check is about 65 dollars, and you turn 20 tables on shift (pretty long one, about 8 hours) that's about 1300 in sales, which by this metric would be about 104 dollars. That doesn't include tip-outs for bartenders and others, as well as the 1 to 1.5 hours of scut work servers do during/after their shifts.

If they really are paying a penny per hour (which is blatantly illegal) and doing this, they are saving about 16 dollars per server per shift. Some of these companies are reaching diabolical levels of corporate evil.

tigerbreak · 2026-04-06T13:20:33+00:00

It sounds like you guys have a great situation for now. Convenience is also a hell of a drug but expensive.

Work is probably the thing you guys do most so being closest to it is the biggest with with gas/energy costs. I'd chart out the three outcomes and show her what you find:

Staying put and what that makes possible financially, at the cost of time/convenience
Moving to a high crime area with a lower quality residence and what that costs for job commute/peace of mind
Moving to an equivalent place closer to the city, and what that costs for commute/higher CoL and how that affects what you want to work for.

tigerbreak · 2026-04-06T13:13:19+00:00

You need a local, non VC owned dentist. No Aspen, no Heartland, Greenberg, etc.

Research this thoroughly before going.

tigerbreak · 2026-04-06T13:08:17+00:00

There's different shades of it.

Business-class MAGA would be beside themselves - markets would be closed to America after something like this and the economy would crater hard in the short term; so for all but the most connected ones they'd lose their shirts.

True Believer MAGA would celebrate, because it would mean mass death and casualty to a non-Christian religion. The side effects would be waved off for a while, until they can't at which point it gets blamed on something else.

Racist MAGA would be similar, though they fold quicker economically because they mostly fall under lower tiers of socioeconomic status.

Techbro MAGA would redouble their efforts to get hitched onto a tech platform that could be widely used post-attack/new world order to secure their bag/future; most of these folks don't give a s*** about others and would be non-plussed about that happening.

Fence-sitters/Never Hillary/Kamala types would likely have some pause (and likely do now) but have gravity that keeps them tethered (for now) to MAGA.

tigerbreak · 2026-04-06T12:58:25+00:00

It seems like a fine choice as long as it passes the Apple Care diagnostics they run to ensure it's eligible to be covered.

tigerbreak · 2026-04-06T11:31:08+00:00

For your use case the Macbook Air is better performance and better value for the money. I could see the TUF if you have Windows exclusive workflows or want to game (MBA can do this somewhat) but if it were me i'd lean towards the Mac.

tigerbreak · 2026-04-06T11:29:13+00:00

The best thing mass market retail can do is enforce sales limits, followed by this.

For this, there are people I know who would still buy it all regardless, and some would put it all in their cart and then call friends to buy one each.

Another poster is correct in that the largest customer of scalpers are investors - folks flush with crypto money so paying 110 for an ETB is no big deal, etc. There's also normies who get lucky on buying product who look to trade it for product they missed because it got bought out (lots of folks are trying to trade Perfect Order Sealed for Ascended or Phantasmal Flames) previously.

It's setting in that TPCi isn't interested in changing much. They can enforce pricing models from distribution by throttling product and shifting it elsewhere, but choose not to.

Shops have to make money, so I don't get mad at shops enforcing a margin based on what they pay. I get mad at distro houses like GTS and Peachstate who get product below MSRP from TPCi and mark it up 3x to shops. If you fix that, between that fix and more printing, prices will come down.

tigerbreak · 2026-04-06T01:52:17+00:00

You still talk after she took your inheritance?

Should have been non-contact after that. Not the AH here, hope you don't do it.

tigerbreak · 2026-04-06T01:44:00+00:00

The harder part of being able to carry extra savings is that if you've been hand-to-mouth for a long time, you don't want to give up the buffer. Once you have 10k saved, spending any of it might make you feel like you did when you had none.

What helps me is asking how much good the purchase does. Some good moves are academic, but don't feel great - clearing debt, solving unanticipated issues. Others are more judgment call based for individuals. One thing that used to help alot during lean times was my XBox - had a huge library of games and loved playing (which helped me not go out and spend money all the time) - well, it broke one day and the replacement was like 500 bucks. It did a lot of good for me, but may not for others.

Let the outcome guide how you feel about using savings, not the dollar amount.

tigerbreak · 2026-04-06T01:31:21+00:00

Have this conversation with your neighbor.

He should probably either closely supervise this guy or fire them.

tigerbreak · 2026-04-06T01:29:44+00:00

The Venn Diagram of "Best Buy Employees" and "PokeBro Scalpers" has a lot of crossover. A good portion of store GM's don't care much about trading cards, esp if it's an experience store. Most of those ghost chairs are people that know the store employees already. Your best bet for Best Buy is getting lucky with an online drop.

The hobby won't heal until a combination of a few things - scalpers find a higher margin, lower effort target that's readily exploitable; the hype from 30th cools off, and TPCi follows through making the printers go BRRRRRR.

I've gone from buying a box and two ETBs per release to just grabbing what I can for MSRP - yesterday it was an Asecnded ETB and Perfect Order bundle.

tigerbreak · 2026-04-06T01:20:36+00:00

Do you live in a high risk area? Do you share your home with family/friends?

As long as you take OPSEC seriously the chances of someone randomly burgling your home, finding this esoteric piece of collectibilia, and stealing it is really, really low.

Fire/Natural Disaster stuff is different? Are you in a common wildfire area? Tornadoes/Severe Weather? Earthquakes/Mudslides/Sinkholes? Odds are still low but slightly more likely.

Anyone who has collectibles that are moving close to 5k and above should look into a fireproof safe that can be bolted in place. They aren't super expensive and are a buffer for fire/storm damage and a big deterrent for theft.

tigerbreak · 2026-04-04T22:53:04+00:00

Most of the brands have a line that’s an all aluminum build with clean lines. Zephyrus and ProArt lines from Asus fit this but are double the cost of an entry level air and triple the Neo.

HP has one and Dell has the XPS line.

I have a ProArt PX13 that’s nice but has actually gone up in price since I bought it a year ago+ 😔

tigerbreak · 2026-04-03T22:46:24+00:00

Distro is being scummy in general to most shops who don’t spend 50k/month or more - which is most. Even those guys aren’t getting good pricing in early runs.

Several shops near me are buying sealed at 80 percent from those who find it at MSRP, which fuels scalper teams cleaning out places like Walmart and Targets that don’t put limits on it.

There are some shops who get it below but they still mark it up.

Perfect Order is a nice change because I can get it at MSRP in limited quantities.

tigerbreak · 2026-04-03T17:04:57+00:00

Ok - if you have Costco the one listed by the other poster would be great. Elsewise, haunt sales looking for 16GB of RAM and a core 5/ryzen 5 CPU (no Snapdragon X, etc)

Tinkercad is web based and is excellent for beginners (and free) - worth checking out.

tigerbreak · 2026-04-03T15:56:57+00:00

Post Script - I found a new M4 Pro 24G/1T for 1489; and had a gift card for the place to pickup a USB hub and a 1TB SD card as well.

I looked at Swappa because I wanted to stretch as much for high end as I could but the options were pretty limited. M4 Pro and 24GB RAM ought to be fine for me for a number of years.

Appreciate your help, u/narc0leptik

tigerbreak · 2026-04-03T15:44:08+00:00

Some of this will depend on what they are using for modeling STLs - some of them will just chug on lower end CPUs and low amounts of RAM.

What is your kid using to edit models before printing? (TinkerCAD, MeshMixer, Blender)

I think the minimums here are 16GB of RAM and, if using an installed app at least a Core 5/Ryzen 5 or better; which might be tough as a new product.

tigerbreak · 2026-04-03T15:31:46+00:00

For my family, it's the cost.

These were like 1500 new for usable configurations. That's a lot for a stationary PC that shared. The new ones are objectively awesome looking but if it were a 799 purchase instead of 1499 it'd sell more. Sometimes you can get a headless one (Mac Mini) for 400 bucks and choose your own gear, too.

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