APPLE SILICON

I Just Bought My Least Expensive Mac Ever (It’s Not a Mac mini)

The M2 MacBook Air with 16GB RAM and 256GB SSD

M2 MacBook Air | Image courtesy of the author

I bought my first Mac in the summer of 2008. Twenty-three years into my software engineering career and busy writing Linux network device drivers, I hadn’t noticed when Apple released the iPhone SDK on March 6th, 2008. It wasn’t until the App Store opened in July that I became aware of the vast opportunity represented by the iPhone as a software development platform. Having succeeded with my first software startup I was eager to start selling apps on the App Store¹. I bought a 2007 Core 2 Duo Mac mini and was on my way. With an all-in-cost, with peripherals, of close to a thousand dollars, it would remain my lowest-price Mac purchase until yesterday.

Back To The Future

In the years since then, I’ve purchased over a dozen Macs for myself and my kids. Back in 2013, as my younger daughter was preparing for college, I bought her the newly released Intel Haswell I7–4650U 13-inch MacBook Air with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD for $1,456. That computer served her well all through college and beyond but after eleven years it’s in serious need of an upgrade. She might have continued to make do with her aging Air but a return to college for a Masters degree has made…