Performance wise you should see an increase of up to 15% with most applications. The M2 runs hotter than the M1, so for sustained load tasks, it may end up being a bit slower. However for the reasons you bought this machine it is still worth the upgrade. You get MagSafe and a bigger, better screen, better speakers and nicer design plus an increase in performance for day to day things. Depening on your use case the loss of the touchbar may also be a positive. If I’m guessing right your work will involve a lot of opening and closing of documents and the M2 Air will be able to handle it perfectly fine I think.

Depends a bit on what model year it is. If it is a “Retina” machine, you won’t be able to upgrade the components in the machine except for the drive with some adapters. If you have a machine from 2012 or before which ich chunkier and has a DVD drive, you will be able to change the memory (RAM) and the hard disk. Software wise the machine is no longer supported by the newest OS, but with so called patchers you can run modern macOS versions on your laptop, as the other comment mentioned.

I hope you get a lot of enjoyment out of the laptop! Don’t mind the iditos that comment “didn’t read” instead of scrolling on. In any case, I see a lot of people using Anki. The YT channel here! learns japanese and also went through a Mac transition, so I hope you can find some useful tips there. Regarding the Diary App, with the next iOS version (17.2) Apple will release the Journal App, which should do something similar to what you are looking for. It hasn’t been confirmed yet but it may also be available on Mac. Day One is another one that a lot of people use, which is also available on Mac. Other than that there is also Obsidian and LogSeq, which can be used as a diary. They use normal files so could be encrypted while you’re not using them.

It depends a bit on the layout of the machine. Sometimes laptops can run without the internal RAM with a little bit of work, some will not work unless the defective RAM chips are replaced. In any case it will most likley require intervention by a technician. Unfortunately it is very diffucult to find a machine with non-soldered RAM. However it is quite rare that the RAM dies on a machine that is treated well. If it falls to the ground a lot or gets slammed around/ the chassis is flexed, the chance for defects is bigger.

If it is an SSD and you are sure of that, it won’t be a problem. SSDs store informatin without having to have power applied and in the form of tiny physical changes of the storage which can only change with electricity and is not affected by magnetism. TLDR, it will be fine, especially if the SSD has a metal enclosure.

First warning, UserBenchmark is absolute rubbish. The benchmark above has tested the iGPU integrated into the processor and has ignored your RTX3080 completely. This may also be the case for some of the games. Some may use the RTX and get good performance others may use the integrated GPU and get worse performance. In the NVIDIA control panel you can set the prefferred graphics processor in the 3D settings, which should make most games use the RTX and solve some of the performance issues.

This is a pretty beefy machine, desktop replacement some might call it. It is focused on productivity, so gaming would not be the focus for example, however the machine is very capable of that still. The main feature is the CPU performance, for things like simulations and renders. The GPU is equivalent to an RTX3060, but has more video memory and a stability instead of performance oriented driver. So performance in some titles may be slightly lower compared to the same power mobile RTX3060s, but overall the machine should deliver good to excellent performance in nearly any situation, except for battery life.

I would recommend to look for a refurbished M2 or M1 Air with 16GB of RAM. The model you have, while slow should still sell for some good cash, so you could offset the cost of the new device with your old one. If you’re looking for M1 specifically, I don’t think they will fall much further in price between the sales on now and summer next year. Technically Apple still sells them, so they count as current models.

So there are a few ways you could approach this situation. If you could find out the model number of the machine, it would be helpful to find the best solution. The best solution would be to upgrade the internal storage. By replacing or Adding a higher capacity SSD you’d have more space available and you avoid lugging around an external drive. A second option would be to get an external SSD with a USB-C connector. USB-C Gen 1 or Gen 2 can achieve decent speeds for loading, especially if it is an NVMe SSD. The thrid option would be to add an external SSD with a traditional USB-A 3.0 port which has the lowest bandwidth of the options mentioned and is capped somewhere around 100 -150 MB/s with is much slower compared to an internal SSD.

Ah, I see. This makes the situation a bit different. I would hope the pools will be available. Iris Xe graphics means that they are integrated into the processor, so they can play some simpler games, but can’t handle complex 3D things. So doing CAD for example may not be as performant as they should be. Do they have a list of software you might have to use? Then you could look into if you need a better GPU or not. I would say you should be fine. If it comes to the worst, and your machine has a Thunderbolt 3 or 4 port, you could always get an external GPU. In a pinch you could also rent a cloud PC to run the apps your system can’t, but I think you should be fine.

I can only speak from experience regarding my M1 Air, which has had the whole cracked screen thing when it came out. I have brought it with me to uni and a bunch of other places with and without a sleve and it was fine. If you avoid dropping your backpack (even from low height) and also make sure nothing is putting pressure on the display lid, eveything should be fine. I also have seen people by hardshell cases, which will take some of the pressure of the shell, so that might be worth looking into.

My first guess is always overheating. If the machine is not too dusty, it could be the battery. If it shuts off whenever you do something demanding/ open an app for example, it would indicate a battery issue. If the fans are louder than usual/ when you firt got it, it could be overheating.

Gaming machines and any windows laptop really is not able to run at full performance on battery power. They will loose something like 10-50% of their performance on battery. For my Legion 5 Pro, I get about 90 on wall power in Elden Ring and about 15 on battery. So this is normal behaviour. If you want full performance, you have to have the power brick connected.

I would say your machine is quite far up the spec ladder. Do you have a model number for the GPU? But from the i9 and the 16GB of RAM it must be a decent model. I think you are more than fine. If you do electrical engineering I think you might not do any large/ complex simulations (or at least not as many). So your machine will be more than enough. I know some people that did their electrical engineering undergrads on Intel 3rd gen dual core computers with 8GB of RAM so. And even if you have to run big simulations, I am fairly certain the university will let you access their PC pools for such work.