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Thinking about buying a used i5 MacBook Air 13” 1.4ghz 4gb RAM 128gb ssd with 128gb tardisk. Fairly clueless about laptops in general but having owned a MacBook 2007 which is on its last legs I'm looking to change it. What things should I be asking the seller and checking prior to making an offer?
can you stretch to 8gig ram?
The only other thing I would check, what version of OS X can it accept,
The one that I’m interested in only has 4gb ram, will it make a huge amount of difference? It’s only for photo & video editing/storage and day to day email and excel/word stuff.
only for video editing
I'd definitely go for one with 8gb RAM then.
+1 8GB
Also check the number of battery cycles
Video editing? Not that one. You’ll need more of everything.
will it make a huge amount of difference?
Yes. I have a 2011 with the i7 CPU. It struggles to deal with some streaming services now due to how resource hungry modern apps are
Have just sold a MacBook Air - around 2014 vintage, might have been just the ticket. Anyway -- I'd have said battery cycle would be one to look for if you were going portable. If plugged in, crack on. Check the connections as well - thunderbolt, USB 2/3, and if the power is MagSafe (2).
Friend has a top tip.
If buying from eBay etc, Google image search any pictures used in the advert.
Pictures 'borrowed' from other sellers or used multiple times in different ads are a good indicator of a dodgy seller.
Could save you some grief down the line.
Thanks for the advice folks. In terms of video editing it is only short iPhone and camcorder family videos - not what I’d term full on film editing stuff. Here is the link to the ad:
https://touch.adverts.ie/macbook-air/macbook-air-1-4ghz/18410781#comment_118293385
The “tardisk” is slow and worth pennies.
6 months ago I bought an excellent condition 2015 MBA 1.6 8Gb 128Gb for IRO £350. Absolutely love it. 90% of my recent project work is done on this, including some lightweight video editing. The latter is fine. For the higher-end editing and main production I use another laptop. As you're probably aware, the default res is very limiting - fine for everyday activities but anything requiring serious real estate becomes a bind (that's when I fire up a 4k screen).
Watchouts:
1. 128Gb is v v small in this day and age. I've sorted my storage to make smart use of Dropbox and GDrive so I've always got IRO 50% spare. Start going into 10% remaining and performs drops (and apps can crash).
2. Update the colour profile. IMO it does indeed make the colours a bit more poppy.
put a black picture on it to see if the screen has any scratches on it.