That Mac Sale May Not Be As Good Of a Deal As You Think

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you why that deal on a new Mac may not be as good as it looks. 

So, if you're in the market for a new Mac you may notice from time to time you see sales. Sales listed at Apple News and rumor sites. Sales at your favorite electronic retailers. Some of these deals look really good. But you've got to be careful when looking at Mac sales. There may be a good reason why the price is so much cheaper than the models you see listed at Apple.com. 

Here's a typical sale that you may see. This one was heavily reported at a lot of Apple news sites. A MacBook Air for the low, low price of $599. However, if you look closely you'll see it is not the current MacBook Air, but it is the 13" M1 MacBook Air. This is the model from 2020. Five years ago! It's the original M1 MacBook Air. It's a great machine. I had one of these. It works great. It was a great deal when it came out and it is still a great machine except that it's old. Now this is not a sale on a refurb or a used MacBook. This is brand new. In other words it's either been sitting on the shelf for a while or Apple kept producing these for a few years and was probably one of the last ones that they made. So it is truly brand new. But it is still the same as what you would have bought in 2020. That's the problem. 

It comes down to what I call ownership price math. So, when you buy a new Mac it's brand new and it is using the latest operating system and you'll get the update in the next year for the next operating system and the year after that. However, you won't get these updates forever. Eventually your Mac will be too old to use the latest version of macOS. This is how it has always worked. The time you've got where you can get the latest macOS will vary depending on the model, the year, lots of other things going on. But here is something pretty typical. You purchase a new Mac while it is the latest model. Then after that you've got about five years and then it becomes vintage. Even during those vintage years you'll probably still be able to get the latest version of macOS. A new operating system will come out and you'll be able to download it, install it, and be using the same version of macOS that the brand new Mac coming out of the Apple store are using. Then when it gets to be about seven years old suddenly you'll find you can't update to the latest version of macOS. It is simply not compatible with your seven year old Mac. The number of years may vary. Sometimes it is as little as six years. Sometimes it is eight or nine years. Depends on the model and exactly what is going on with the new versions of macOS. Seven years is a good rough estimate. 

So when you buy a new Mac that is brand new, Apple just released that model, you probably can look for it to about seven years where you're using the latest version of macOS and then you'll be behind by one version and then behind by two versions and so on. You'll still get some security updates but even those will stop after a couple more years. Now this may not matter to you. There are plenty of people using Macs that are seven, eight, nine, twelve, fifteen years old and are perfectly fine with that. That's great! But a lot of people are not. They want to be using the latest version of macOS and be getting all of the updates and can use all the new things that come out, including third party software that may not be compatible with older versions of macOS. So there are a lot of people that will buy a Mac and use it while they can still get the latest version of macOS and as soon as they can't then it is time for a new Mac.  So approximately a six or seven year cycle. 

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So now back to these sales. Let's say that you bought a new Mac as soon as it came out. Apple releases a new version of MacBook and you buy it. So you buy it and let's say it is $999. The price for that M1 MacBook Air all the way back in 2020. Now you continue to use it for about 6½ years using the latest version of macOS. We don't know exactly when the 2020 MacBook Air will stop getting macOS updates but let's estimate 6½ years. So if you keep the Mac for 6½ years the ownership math works out to $154 a year. Your $999 divided by 6½ years is $154 per year that it costs you to have a Mac that had the latest version of macOS. Now let's consider if you bought the same Mac on sale. Instead of for $999 you buy it four or five years later for $599. A 40% discount. Pretty substantial discount to get exactly the same machine, still brand new, not used, not refurbished. But now you only have about 2½ years where you'll be able to get macOS updates. So if you want to buy a new Mac at that point, because you want the latest version of macOS, then the ownership math works out to $240 a year. The $600 divided by 2½  years gives you a higher per year cost than if you bought the Mac when it originally came out at full price. 

So you can see the problem with these sales. Very often you end up with a higher per year price for a Mac simply because you're buying Macs more often because you are buying them late. You're not getting them when they come out new at full price. The discount you get for buying an older model as new doesn't always reflect the decreased value it has because it doesn't have the longevity as if you had bought it when it first came out. 

Now this isn't necessarily always the case. For instance, here's a M2 MacBook Air. This one is slightly upgraded from the base. 16GB of memory instead of the original 8GB. It is $700. Now this is a 2022 model. So let's say you have this for 3½ years before you find you can't update it anymore and you're already looking at a new model. It comes out to about $200 per year. Now if you had bought this new it would cost you $1400. But you would have gotten more years out of it. After 6½ years you would have found that your price per year was actually $215. A little bit more than buying it on sale now. So it seems like it is a good deal to buy this model now than when it originally came out. The prices have been discounted enough for it to make sense. 

But there is another factor. It's a little bit fuzzier and hard to put an exact number to though. Consider a brand new Mac, one that Apple just came out with and you buy it as soon as it comes out. That first year or two it is the latest and greatest of that model that you're using. Those are the best years for that Mac. The best time to own it. Not because the age of your particular Mac but the age of the model itself. It's basically the current model of that type offered by Apple. But then consider another two years, maybe years four and five with that Mac. It's an older model now. Those aren't the best years for that Mac. It may still work just fine but there are much better models there. You're not using the greatest anymore. 

So look at this like this. The first two years are, like, the best years of that Mac. When you own a Mac from the very beginning you get those first two years. Then, in addition to that you get, say, 4½ more years to use that Mac. If you buy it later, let's say you even just buy it two years later, you're missing out on those best years. You still get 4½ years at a discounted price but you never got to use that Mac when it was latest and greatest. Now this might not matter to you. That's why it is kind of fuzzier. But it is something to consider especially when you're looking at the difference between $200 a year or $215 a year to own the Mac. The $200 a year cheaper price doesn't include those best years. You never had a Mac that was the latest and greatest of that model. You only ever owned after it was already replaced by another model. 

Now, all that said, there are still plenty of good reasons to own a new Mac that is an older model. For instance, you may simply not care about most of the things I talked about. You may not care about not being able to update to the latest version of macOS. You may not care that you didn't get to use the Mac during its first few years when it was the new model. This certainly makes an older model at a cheaper price attractive. Another thing is you may know that you only need this Mac for a limited time. For instance a student getting a new Mac may know that they are only going to use it between two and four years to complete a degree program and they are unlikely to want that same Mac once they're out of school and working. So they just want something to cover that period of time making a Mac that only lasts 3 or 4 years pretty attractive if the price is right. Or it could be that you simply need a really cheap Mac right now, say, for a job search. But after you get a job you fully anticipate that you're not going to want to stick with this cheaper Mac model and probably will want to upgrade to something more powerful anyway. In that case in having something that is cheap but not likely to last more than a few years is fine. Then I realize, of course, that there are people that have no other choice. That their budget may simply be $600 or less for a MacBook Air, $500 or less for a Mac Mini and it may be the only actual realistic option to get a cheaper Mac like this. 

In that case not only look at these new Macs but also look at refurbished models that Apple has for sale. You might be able to get a newer model that is refurbished for the same price as an older model that's new. But always buy a refurbished Mac from Apple, not from any third party just because there are too many third parties out there that are not doing a good job refurbishing Macs. 

So if you are drooling over some of these Mac sales that you see sometimes hopefully this gives you a more complete picture of what you will be getting if you decide to go with one. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.