M1 with 16gb. Yeah it looks a little older and is a little less powerful, but the 16gb of ram will make a much bigger difference in the long term.

Congrats, hope you enjoy your new machine.

Like apps or like uses?

If you are genuinely considering waiting a year for a better upgrade than im gonna go with know, your device is clearly working fine at the moment.

If you didnt hear a loud cracking sound and your display still functions well, both in holding itself up and performing right, than its fine. The hinge will stop itself when you reach its max and to get it past that you will need to break the hinges.

What kind of engineering student? I will be an ME major next fall and have been very specifically instructed to not go apple silicon because of compatibility issues. Make sure your program works with MacOS.

The difference between the M2 air and M3 Pro is minimal. Its like 15% better performance in the best scenario possible, which is unlikely. The money is better spent on buying a higher end refurbished machine or upgrading the ram and/or SSD of the Air.

About as crackable as a bone when you bend it

Its unlikely but if the case causes issues with airflow its not impossible.

It really depends where you get them. Apple refurbished is the gold standard. Bestbuy and Amazon are okay (though amazon is the better of the two). Ebay is meh. After that it kinda goes down hill.

Shit. You cant do bootcamp anymore since its Arm so you need parallels (power limited) or a local VM (those just dont run well honestly) and then you are dealing with translation layers. If you need windows, get a Dell XPS. Its as good as they get on windows. If you dont, feel free to buy an M1.

No. That only runs during the education sale which wont be back till next summer (if they choose to do that one again). What is guaranteed is that lowered price though (so long as you are a student/teacher of course).

From my understanding its a mix of the M2 not selling well and having been shipped late (but since they had already started on M3 well before that they just delivered M3 at the time they want to release the MPs)

Upgrade as many internal pieces as possible. 16gb ram and as large of an SSD as she needs (assuming both of these can be upgraded). I would try and leave about 50gb of free space in it. I dont know off hand what type of ram you will need but im sure someone does. Cleaning out the inside (use a air compressor or air spay canister, and try not to let the fan(s) spin. If you are feeling really technical you can pull the cooler off and get some new thermal paste.

A fresh install of MacOS would be good too. Dont let it keep files and manually reinstall everything she needs (of course, back all the data up first).

Yes, M2s SSD speeds are dramatically slower. I guess they are like 15% or so faster (in the absolute best case) when it comes CPU and GPU though.

They have literally the exact same chip, one just has a newer designed and the other has a fan.

This is a issue. I would contact whoever you purchased it from and talk about a return or repair. Especially if you got it directly from apple.

Yes it will work. Hook your drive up to the macbook through the USB© port and open the time machine app. Follow the steps from within the app.

Parallels is a popular option, though it is paid and im not sure how well it performs.

Also doesnt adobe have a macos native for those?

Do you have access to an external display? It sounds like the display isnt going active for some reason and seeing if it would light up a external display can narrow it down.

No. This is perfectly fine. It is designed in a way that allows it to be used this way. Any possible effect this has on the battery (in the long term*) is not measurable by current technology.