Wow, thanks for clarifying this. I’ve never seen one in the wild either. Must have been a short run before the M1 air was released.

2020 should receive OS upgrades for another 3 years.

Also apple has never made an i3 air. There was an m3 MacBook which was older, I believe support for these has now ended.

For college/university absolutely 100%. 8gb is also enough providing you don’t plan on extensive machine learning or multiple VMs.

For professional developer use I’d opt for a pro 16gb.

Don’t buy older than 2017, it’s no longer supported and really old/dated hardware.

General advice in the Mac space is don’t buy an Intel Mac.

You can pick up M1 airs for as little as $749 new or $500 used. This will be supported until at least 2027 and be perfect for the needs you described.

Simply no. It’s a five year old laptop, they’re littered with issues/faults and Apple is killing support as soon as they can.

General rule on this sub “Do not buy an Intel Mac”

If you need a laptop get the M2 Air now. M1 air would be fine to be honest and save you a tonne of money.

M3 doesn’t exist and may not come out for 4-6 months, long time to wait if you need a laptop.

The fact you are asking reddit and you haven’t specified requirements I would say no.

The Mac for you sounds like an m1 air. You can frequently get these for $700-750 new and they are fanless/thin like the og 12".

Apple won’t do a 12" again. While I loved it personally the majority did not, with the air 13" they don’t need to and it just fragments the lineup further.

As for a $700 new Mac, apple also won’t do this. Apple operates like a fashion brand, Apple won’t lower the value of the brand Mac to this low beyond what they ever have. If you went to an apple store looking a Mac at $700 they would have the perfect product for you, an iPad air with a keyboard.

For your use case the extra RAM won’t really have much benefit.

Go with the size you want and feels personally better to you. If it were me I’d go 13" and save a bit of money by lowering to 16gb ram. But some people really like the big screen.

Also wait a few days. You may be able to get an m3 for the same price or a significantly reduced m2 model.