I'm probably the millionth person to parrot this to you but my goodness you are a hero if you can tolerate the Intel Mac experience in 2026. I thought my Intel

I'm probably the millionth person to parrot this to you but my goodness you are a hero if you can tolerate the Intel Mac experience in 2026. I thought my Intel Mac from that era was incredibly weird. Little firmware-ish things were so glitchy and sluggish. At some point the wake from sleep/lid open just took forever in ways that didn't happen on older Intel Mac models (or maybe I was going crazy). I just had this strange feeling that Apple was knowingly half-hearting their Intel drivers and products as a whole as they were putting more energy into developing Apple Silicon. Dude, you owe it to yourself to just grab a used M2 MacBook Air or something along those lines. Treat yourself. You'll be kicking yourself for not doing so sooner. (Don't get a MacBook Neo, too many compromises including poor battery life, a used Air is much better, and if you use more than one external monitor use caution on what model/CPU you choose). Sure, a laptop should last longer than 7 years, but this is one of those "Apple yeets out a new architecture" exceptions like the PowerPC to Intel transition. Better to accept it and move on. 7 years is still a solid run. You've only got ~2 more years left until you start losing security updates anyway. The other machine I highly recommend is Linux/Framework 13 Pro with the Intel Core Ultra Series 3, although that's a whole different price class, and obviously not everyone can make that move in terms of software compatibility.