Other people have different hardware and different goals. A year or so ago I worked on a Linux laptop that was dog-slow. If I didn't enable GPU-rendering for the UI, it competed for the very limited CPU.
I use TextEdit a lot for drafting fiction. I only use it in plaintext mode, and enable word wrap with ⌘ + W.
To me there is noticeable input lag when using Obsidian or IA Writer that just doesn't exist in TextEdit.app. I also could use Nvim, which I use for coding, but often don't care enough about editing while I'm drafting.
2020 was when the ARM-based chips came out. Did you get her an Intel-based or M1-based mac? Because from 2017-2020 the Intel-based Macs were absolutely awful. I've owned several of them. The keyboards were terrible and they were slow.
I still have 2019 Macbook Airs sitting around, and I consider them completely unusable.
My wife has owned a 2020 M1 Macbook Air since then, and it's still working really well. To the extent that every time we talk about upgrading, we end up agreeing to wait.
I still have a 2019 mbp 16” .. i9 something with 32GB of RAM and a 2GB radeon 4xxx, which was my work machine until I got an M1 pro… set it up to replace my son’s 2015 macbook air and HOLY SHIT this thing feels slow. I can’t wrap my head around how they can be this bad. Like swimming in syrup.
I've owned an M1 Pro since its release and it's still going strong. I was going to see how long I could run it for. My bet was that by staying on Sequoia and/or installing Linux, I could run it for a ridiculous amount of time. I've met developers in the past with 12 year old Macbooks.
But due to personal circumstances, my previous employer and I mutually agreed to part ways. I was gifted my work laptop, a Macbook Pro M4. So I will (un)fortunately never get to run the M1 Pro into the ground like I planned to.
The M1s are fantastic. If you have the 16GB model, I have no doubt that you will still be using it in several years. If Mac OS gets sluggish, Linux can be installed on it (I installed Debian Asahi on an M1 Mac Mini).
One of the things of an M1 Pro I depend a lot on is fingerprint reader (ie TouchID) and sadly that won't work on Asahi or any such distro on a mac. That's one reason I've not tried it again. Because I just come back to it (I am also used to keeping kinda long mac passwords).
Aslo, when I parted ways with my last employer I was given this 16GB piece as a temp laptop and the 32GB Pro (iirc M2 or M3) was in repair (sound issues). The "parting" happened during the repair. The IT helpfully suggested if I want they could delay all that if I don't sign the F&F settlement (great team; good to okay company). But I just wanted to get done with all that. I regret it though – I could certainly live without that mac's speaker working, but living with 32GB and local models isn't that nice :D
Despite all the sound and fury online, Golden Gate will also run just fine on the M1. They're barely less powerful than the current Neo - and usually have more RAM.
I was in the same boat with an M1 Pro I loved, but the display on mine died, and a replacement is about £800, which is bonkers. So now it's tethered to the monitor on my desk.
I just replaced a battery on a mid 2012 retina macbook pro and set it up for my kids to use and I was amazed and how much it does basically everything just fine, which for them means playing videos and some light gaming. screen looks great still, keyboard is actually a bit nicer than the current one with a bit more travel. Speakers are terrible though.
I don't think it accumulates enough solid waste to worry about. I'm Aussie, and I'm in favour of a proposal I heard a while ago to let other countries export their concentrated nuclear waste to the middle of Australia. Just bury it in one spot, on the oldest, most geologically stable landmass on the planet. It's far from bodies of water, it's far from population centres (excepting Alice Springs).
That said solar panels and batteries are so bloody good now, why even bother building nuclear reactors in much of the world? And geothermal looks promising too, with the new fracking tech they're using. But who knows.
Mt Isa Mines when done is a good spot, and as a bonus you largely get to avoid issues with indigenous opposition since the area is already suitably dug up.
Reading down through that, there are exceptions built in already for research waste, medical waste, waste from "a nuclear vessel" (ie. submarines), and generic "waste that needs to buried for safety reason".
Would indigenous Australians living near proposed sites object to this plan? Are there areas of Australia with no human population? My impression is that nomadic indigenous groups used a lot of land in Australia even far from permanent settlements.
I drove through Nevada recently and it made me angry how much flat, high sun, land there is for solar, with no real environmental impact whatsoever (probably improvement for local life from the bit of shade).
Nevada also has the geology and part of a repository built already for nuclear waste. But Las Vegas controls the state and so those empty holes sit unused.
This is also true of central Australia - dry, cloudless places that are good locations for solar panel arrays are also good places to store spent nuclear waste. There is the issue that solar panel efficiency drops somewhat in hot weather, but yeah there should be way more photovoltaic solar power in the American southwest, including Nevada.
If the numbers worked out the way you imagine, there would have been a gold rush to do it. NV is actually pretty low elevation and dusty and is surprisingly bad for solar even if it seems like it should be great. You know where is great for solar? New Mexico, Central Mexico and the northern part of the Andes range. Those are places at high elevations with low cloud cover and lower latitudes. That's where solar does well. I know it seems like it should just work in the desert...it doesn't however. The critical factors for solar are latitude, altitude and cloud cover.
I've also noticed that certain app stores on Linux are catching up a little. I use MacOS as a daily driver, and can attest to the fact that the apps have been and are definitely higher quality. But I briefly had to use desktop linux, and was surprised at the quality of some of the apps available on the Bazaar store (I used GNOME on Fedora).
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