Have you ever used windows on a $100 second hand laptop?
Imagine for a second that you don't know much about computers. You buy something crap like that and turn it on. Windows is of course already installed. Along with 18 antivirus programs and who knows what other junk. The computer will run dog slow. Even if you get rid of all the preinstalled programs, it'll run horribly slowly.
My mum has a computer from her work. Its pretty recent - worth way more than $100. It takes about 5-10 seconds for zoom or google chrome to start. And about 15 seconds for outlook to open. Its an utterly horrible experience.
If you can afford it, you'll have a way better experience on a macbook air from the last few years. In comparison, everything starts instantly. The experience is fantastic. Premium, even.
Personally I think its criminal that cheap laptops run modern software so poorly. Its just laziness. There's no reason for the experience to be so horrible. But the world being what it is, there is plenty of reasons to spring for a $1000 macbook air over a $100 second hand windows crapbook if you can afford it. Even if you don't do much with the computer.
> Have you ever used windows on a $100 second hand laptop?
Who talked about using Windows ?
Many of my family/relatives (most of which have zero knowledge about computers, and little money to invest) use ~100$ laptops, with Debian+XFCE, Firefox+ublock origin, Libreoffice, vlc, thunderbird... I just put the maximum RAM I could, and installed a SATA SSD, which makes the machine fast and completely usable. I now live on the other side of the planet yet I get very little complains from them or demands for remote support as it works very reliably and fast.
And those were 100$ machines 8-10 years ago. Today's 100$ machines will give you a decently recent core i5 or i7, nvme, 8G RAM...
> there is plenty of reasons to spring for a $1000 macbook air over a $100 second hand windows crapbook if you can afford it
Plus you can pick up a used M1 MacBook Air for as little as $300 these days. Despite being 5 years old, it'll still smoke anything on the PC side much under a grand, in terms of responsiveness.
Imagine for a second that you don't know much about computers. You buy something crap like that and turn it on. Windows is of course already installed. Along with 18 antivirus programs and who knows what other junk. The computer will run dog slow. Even if you get rid of all the preinstalled programs, it'll run horribly slowly.
My mum has a computer from her work. Its pretty recent - worth way more than $100. It takes about 5-10 seconds for zoom or google chrome to start. And about 15 seconds for outlook to open. Its an utterly horrible experience.
If you can afford it, you'll have a way better experience on a macbook air from the last few years. In comparison, everything starts instantly. The experience is fantastic. Premium, even.
Personally I think its criminal that cheap laptops run modern software so poorly. Its just laziness. There's no reason for the experience to be so horrible. But the world being what it is, there is plenty of reasons to spring for a $1000 macbook air over a $100 second hand windows crapbook if you can afford it. Even if you don't do much with the computer.