Hi I want to purchase 2 x $500 gift cards (from my credit card points) for Officeworks. Can you enter both at online checkout? Ive searched and cant find the answer - I dont want to waste my credit card points if you cant.
Bonus question - son is required to have a Macbook Air M2 for highschool next year. is 8GB suffience or 16Gb to futureproof? Its an extra $320 for 16gb.
It’s year 7 - but I want it to last for most of high school hopefully. It would be word processing, learning browsing etc.
8GB of unified memory on M2 is more than sufficient to last them even through university.
Excellent thank you
8GB of unified memory on M2 is more than sufficient to last them even through university.
Should even last them all the way through to the nursing home.
While 8GB will likely be sufficient for years 7-9, beyond that it might not be. Suggesting it will be sufficient for university level work in 5 years time is a very big assumption. I would not recommend 8GB for any university student in 2023.
@pinchies: If OP's son isn't doing any work with the Adobe Suite or other creative apps then 8GB will be fine even beyond Year 9. It is a consideration though
@CrispyChrispy: But OP doesn't know what sort of work their child is going to be doing. So why not just spring for the extra and future proof it for more possibilities?
Never going to last for 7 years.
I'd go for 16GB, you are future proofing it for a long time, and also 16GB models in the future I would assume have better resale values. Apple offering 8GB on base models that are non-upgradeable is really corporate negligence at this point. Is there a reason that it has to be the M2 Air? The M1 Air is still a brilliant machine.
For reference I use an M1 Air with 16GB RAM as my work machine, mainly browser tabs, chat apps and office apps and I'm regularly around 13-15GB of RAM utilization and RAM requirements are only going to go up…
RAM utilisation is fairly meaningless, macOS will simply compress stuff in RAM if it's running out of room and it'll cache files in RAM if there's unused RAM just to make the system run faster (rather than running those files from the harddrive like it usually would).
13-15GB with high levels of app usage, wired memory and lots of compression would mean you're really using that RAM. If you want to work on a large piece of video then data going in and out of swap is going to be noticeable as you work.
But for a lot of things (think browser tabs you haven't clicked on in hours) having it in swap isn't much of a problem. We're talking really faster storage here, it is only work where fractions of a second added to response time make it frustrating, think video or gaming, not switching browser tabs.
So this highschool student is going to run a linux web/application server from their Macbook Air?
Not sure why you're being downvoted. You're correct the OS is going to use as much ram as it can, it's inefficient to not use ram if it's available. So ram utilization is always going to appear high.
If you are looking for 8GB though, you can consider the M1 since there is not much difference in performance chipwise, and the M2 (8GB) SSD is actually slower than the M1 (8GB) SSD.
You can price match the Space Grey M1 at Officeworks by showing them this website (Australian retailer) so Officeworks will price beat it by 5%, bringing the price down to $1186.55 for the M1 (8GB).
If you compare with the Officework standard pricing for M2 (8GB) at $1727 or M2 (16GB) at $2047 there's no way the M2 models are value for money.
I tried price matching that Emporium Electronics price at my local OW but the warranty is different, so they wouldn’t match it.
Multiple Macbook price match success at Emporium reported here.
Maybe try a different OW? The only criteria is supposed to just be Australia based retailer and the same model number.
The model numbers are different.
Officeworks is MGN63X/A
Emporium is MGN63X/A-BN
I'm going to try and price match today as well; but am not too hopeful. If it works, great.
@MrHyde: Officeworks Kew price matched the Macbook Air 13" M1 from Emporium Electronics - no questions raised. Got it for $1186.55 - very happy here.
Comments on the tax invoice say
"Same Product SKU checked ABN & warranty"
Managed to get a price match at a different store. I think it depends on who serves you.
We're really going to need more background into what it's going to be used for.
Basic word processing, browsing, etc is definitely fine.