What old MacBook to go for

[Robti]

Hi my niece has asked me about getting an old MacBook and as a windows user I am at a loss, so thought to ask on here, if it was a windows laptop I would know about cpu,gpu and memory and what could be upgraded and what couldn’t.
so what Mac book would represent value for money and that I could upgrade the memory/hard drive etc if required ?

Thanks

[reecie]

Depends what she wants to do with it tbh. Most recent Macbooks have very little in the way of upgradable parts so the spec you buy is the one you are stuck with. If you want to run Office and the current MacOS then I think you need 8GB ram. You can probably get away with a 128GB SSD but 256GB would be better. Then it is really whether you can get an i7 or i5 based CPU. I managed to pick up a Macbook Air on here recently at a decent price with i7/8GB/256GB for my son for his Uni work and it does all he needs for writing up coursework and being very portable perfectly.

[Optimum]

Sorry to hijack but I’m in a similar boat, however, I would want to run Garageband. Any help on spec would be appreciated.

[Tokyo Tokei]

Macbook Pro from 2012 to 2015 should be good. Before 2012 and you only get USB2. After 2015 and you cannot upgrade the parts. If USB3 isnt of interest, even older ones can still be perfectly usable. I recently upgraded a friend's 2011 Macbook Pro to 6GB RAM and a 512GB SSD and she was delighted. It's more than fast enough for modern software. My wife uses a 2011 Macbook Air (4GB RAM, i7) every day, including MS Office for Mac and even Windows as a virtual machine, and it is fine. Just be aware that at this age, something is going to break eventually, so don't spend too much on upgrades.