Should I upgrade my 2017 Macbook Air or sell it and buy something else?
I have a Macbook Air 2017, 128GB hard drive, and use it to run a freelance business. I bought the machine boxed and seemingly as new in Jan 2020. But my space needs have outgrown the laptop. I find its smallness and lightness convenient as I live overseas and will likely move countries in the next 6 months.
The laptop is clogging up so I am thinking to upgrade the internal hard drive. A local shop has quoted US$260 for an NVME 1T SSD. But before I commit I'd like to get advice on whether this is the best option. I ask partly because I have heard there's a worldwide shortage of computer chips so we should invest in the best microprocessor now to make sure our computer is good to go for another 2-3 years. I understand my model is a dual-core i5. Is this good enough? Or is the space issue more important? Other options might be to pull out of Macs, sell this second hand and move my files to a Windows laptop that's newer.
Questions
Is this the best use of that budget?
Or am I better to spend on processor power?
Or should I sell this machine because it's 5 years old already and destined for the trashcan?
here's more about my use case.
USE case
I tutor science online and have lots of resources including videos and audios for my students in China, many of these resources I must WeChat to them, due to the Great Firewall of China.
During lessons I need capacity to have various software programs open at once – Zoom, Chrome, Powerpoint, WeChat, Word, Excel, video player.
Other uses
I do text editing/writing. And as a hobby, I write songs. I would like to have the option in future to do some home recording/ audio editing with a software package.
Issues
- Files are all over the place and sometimes the system blocks from updating/editing a file, or files get corrupted. Storing many files on an external Toshiba 500GB hard drive. Half full so far.
- Hard drive gets clogged up and I have to move files to the external drive. The laptop works slowly.
Tech spec
Here's the serial number FVFXPNESJ1WK
