We have 4 laptops for our family of 5. 2 Lenovo and 2  mbp. We need a budget option for our middle schooler and am wondering opinions on refurbished MacBook airs. More on reddit.com

I don’t have any personal experience with one, however from what I’ve heard they’re ok for what you need. Battery life and performance are definitely a far cry from M1, but you should still get totally usable results given you temper your expectations. Assuming you get a brand new battery, I’d expect around 6-8 hours of battery on a charge, however if you’re buying one used and not replacing it this can vary. The screen will still be amazing and will look great, speakers will be decent but not as good as modern offerings. Still better than most other laptops on the market. As I said, performance should be usable however the 8gb of ram is becoming a limiting factor, though that model of MacBook has upgradable RAM so you can just throw another 8gb stick in there. nope! Overall this Mac should still be decent in 2025, but don’t expect it to last for more than a couple years. At the end of the day, these specs are dated. More on reddit.com

I still use 2019 16 inch MBP and it runs absolutely fine. More on reddit.com