Why I Didn’t Buy a New MacBook (Yet)

I currently use three laptops: a work-issued Windows machine that I use every day, a personal 17-inch Windows laptop that I used at my previous job (and subsequently bought from my employer when I left the company more than five years ago), and my trusty MacBook Air. My Mac is a 2017 MacBook Air - Intel i7, 8GB of RAM, and a 500GB SSD. It’s almost nine years old now. The battery gives me a few hours at best, it’s occasionally sluggish, and it doesn’t support multiple external monitors the way newer Apple Silicon Macs do. That’s particularly annoying because both of my Windows laptops connect to my home setup through a single dock. I have two home desks with almost identical setups because I work from home a lot, and my son and husband also use the docking stations to connect their laptops - it’s literally a case of plugging in one cable and you’re away. It’s seamless. My Mac doesn’t do that, but throughout its entire life with me I’ve mostly used it as a literal laptop on my lap - for…