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Comment by deskamess | Hacker News Reader

> The earliest M1s are three years old now, so may be up for replacement under some corporate refresh policies

If anyone knows where I can be downstream of these M1's (website, other old stock websites) please let me know. I would like to procure 1 or 2 on the cheap. Esp an M1 Pro.

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I've only used it to get a phone, but backmarket has a lot of old apple machines listed. I'm real tempted to get a 2013 trashcan mac pro, but I just don't know what I would do with it.

That's a good site. Unfortunately, they do not ship to Canada. Will need to look at them later when I visit the US. I have a service that provides a US address but no immediate trips planned.

Whoever I bought the phone from shipped it real slowly, and backmarket doesn't seem to have a lot of control over that. So if you decide to do that, be sure to order a couple weeks ahead of time at least.

Thanks. Good to know. Will plan accordingly.

Do a video where you turn it into an actual trash can

I've been trying to get our IT manager to bend the knee on our own policy

We ship our laptops off to some company who gives us some nominal amount for I assume the scrap value of the machine, then we can donate it to a charity

I'd be happy to "buy" an M1 Air with a cracked screen and run it as a headless Asahi Linux box for a hundred bucks or something. But he won't budge

This is hard to change because its a policy that affects finance, legal, infosec, and it.

Finance has been depreciating those laptops as capital assets and if youre going to buy one from the company that means its not depreciated, and they need to amend their taxes.

Legal and security are concerned about the data and dont know how to prove the encryption really worked and the keys are gone, but the recycling company has insurance and certifications “proving” they dispose of things properly.

You don’t need to amend your taxes to sell a fully depreciated asset.

Sometime you can accelerate depreciation, so you would have to amend in that case.

Last I checked loaded M1 Airs were going for $600 on FleaBay.

I was all set to upgrade to an M3 Pro until I saw the weird SKU binning for the higher memory models and remembered that my M1 Air still does everything that I need it to do and more. I originally bought it strictly for music production but have since used it more generally as I have to use Apple machines for work... I'll probably end up keeping it for another two years and swinging back to a nice Thinkpad with Mint or similar as my dev machine as there are insane deals on 7840-based Lenovos right now.

Imho M1 airs are the best bang for buck as mid-whatever-range laptops. Especially if one finds a 16gb one. Crazy if you think that before, the base macbook air you could get at the same original price would be a mere i3 one, while m1 actually competes well in raw performance with i7. Unless somebody wants something specific that M2/3 have that M1 does not, M1's price/performance ratio is hard to beat.

I believe SSDs are soldered onto the motherboard for M1 laptops + M1 mac mini, I wonder how bad of an issue it is when considering used M1s.

Can’t imagine it’s a big issue; the SSD on my 7.5 year old Skylake MBP is cheerfully claiming 96% lifetime remaining, and seems to be fine. The days of SSDs self-destructing after a couple of years seems to be largely behind us, at least for consumer applications; even low-end stuff has a decent practical lifetime these days.

Very much depends how it was used. You might be able to tell with the SMART report.

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