{"id":36983,"date":"2026-11-04T16:04:17","date_gmt":"2026-11-05T00:04:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/?p=36983"},"modified":"2026-11-04T16:04:17","modified_gmt":"2026-11-05T00:04:17","slug":"justify-new-computer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/2026\/11\/justify-new-computer\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Justify a New Computer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Everyone listening (or reading) has faced that moment when they really <em>want<\/em> to buy a new computer\/tablet\/phone, but they clearly do not <em>need<\/em> a new device. Some of us stay strong, like SR, who wrote in our Slack that instead of buying the new shiny, he buys stock so he can continue to afford more new, shiny retirement living.  Smart guy! This article is not for  him.<\/p>\n<p>I come to you this week to tell you how I justify making purchases that I don&#8217;t need. My goal is to be an enabler, not to help you be practical in planning a secure financial future.<\/p>\n<h2>Flowdown Example One<\/h2>\n<p>The most important skill to learn is how to use flowdown of devices to your advantage.  My first example is how I justified a new MacBook Air. My M2 MacBook Air was a fantastic device \u2014 fast, light, and fun to use. There was nothing at all wrong with it.<\/p>\n<p>But when \uf8ffOS 27 came out and Apple said that the new enhanced Siri voices and advanced dictation were only available on M3 Macs and higher, suddenly I felt compelled to get a new MacBook Air. Unlike many podcasters, I won&#8217;t claim I need it for my job. I have a much more nuanced strategy to justify my unnecessary purchases.<\/p>\n<p>Step one is to take a family (and friends) inventory to see who might really be in dire need of an upgrade and could help you justify your desired purchase. I looked through my family:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Kyle already has an M3 MacBook Air (better than mine)<\/li>\n<li>Lindsay has my 14&#8243; M1 Max MacBook Pro that she absolutely loves<\/li>\n<li>Steve is a hard-core MacBook Pro fan and wouldn&#8217;t consider a MacBook Air<\/li>\n<li>Kyle&#8217;s wife Nikki doesn&#8217;t really use the Mac she has, which is an M1 MacBook Air<\/li>\n<li>Lindsay&#8217;s husband Nolan uses his M1 MacBook Air all the time, so I set my crosshairs on him<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>When I asked Nolan if he&#8217;d like to upgrade from the M1 to the M2 MacBook Air, he enthusiastically said, &#8220;Yes&#8221;, because his M1 was feeling really slow. The jump from M1 to M2 wasn&#8217;t life-changing, but with an 18% faster CPU, 35% more powerful GPU, and 50% faster memory bandwidth, it would definitely be noticeable. After I bought a 13&#8243; M5 MacBook Air, I brought the new one to Nolan, and he was super happy. You want your devices to go to a good home where they&#8217;ll be appreciated. Nolan and I also worked on a few techniques to increase the performance of the way he was using his Mac.<\/p>\n<p>Nolan being very happy to get a new Mac was enough to assuage my guilt over getting the M5 MacBook Air, but this upgrade spawned even more upgrades in the family. Nolan and Lindsay&#8217;s daughter Siena is six years old, and the poor thing was using Nolan&#8217;s original MacBook Air: an ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD Intel Mac!<\/p>\n<p>While I was feeling pretty good about buying myself an M5 MacBook Air as my gift to Nolan, upgrading Siena from a machine that shouldn&#8217;t even be on the Internet anymore removed any lingering guilt over buying the new Mac.<\/p>\n<p>You may be thinking a six-year-old doesn&#8217;t <em>need<\/em> a computer, but you&#8217;re just not really trying to learn from my example.<\/p>\n<h2>Surround Yourself with Enablers<\/h2>\n<p>Another important part of my strategy is to surround yourself with enablers. The NosillaCastaway community is quite good at this, but if you want to take it up a notch, I recommend finding yourself a David Roth.  Having a David Roth in your life isn&#8217;t just about relieving guilt about spending money; it&#8217;s about making you feel good about your decisions and giving you a hard time if you don&#8217;t do what would make you happy.<\/p>\n<p>This folds into the next upgrade story.<\/p>\n<h2>It All Started with an M1 Max MacBook Pro<\/h2>\n<p>If you&#8217;ve been playing along with our home game for long enough, you may remember that when the M1 MacBook Pro first came out, I bought the Max version of that sweet laptop. I did not need the Max for performance, but I wanted 64GB of RAM, and the Pro version topped out at 32GB.<\/p>\n<p>I wrote an article in 2023 entitled <a href=\"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/2023\/09\/do-you-need-macbook-pro\/\">Do You REALLY Need a MacBook Pro?<\/a> where I tested some pretty heavy-duty operations at the time on the M1 Max MacBook Pro vs. the M2 MacBook Air I just talked about. The MacBook Air held its own and further solidified my conviction that I didn&#8217;t need the Max MacBook Pro.<\/p>\n<p>The sad part of the M1 MacBook Pro story is that I ran into issues with battery drain. For over a year, I worked with AppleCare trying to get them to believe me that something was wrong with the hardware, but they just kept having me nuke my machine over and over again as each new version of the OS came out and never figured out what was wrong with it.<\/p>\n<p>It was in the middle of the battery drain saga that I bought the M2 MacBook Air because I simply had to have a functional machine while my M1 MacBook Pro spent most of its life being nuked and paved! Having a second Mac has been extremely useful to me, especially while I&#8217;m creating ScreenCastsONLINE videos. I&#8217;ll often have the MacBook Air open while recording so I can test the applications I&#8217;m recording about without messing up the recorded version.<\/p>\n<p>As I continued to battle Apple past the one-year mark, it was clear it had become an unhealthy obsession of mine to prove them wrong.<\/p>\n<p>This is where having a David Roth comes in handy. He <em>begged<\/em> me to just trade it into Apple and buy an M3 MacBook Pro. He even suggested I drop-kick it into the ocean and buy a new machine, just for my own sanity.<\/p>\n<p>I finally took his advice, but rather than drowning the machine or trading it in, I decided to flow the M1 Max MacBook Pro down to Lindsay, the daughter. This replaced the Intel i9 16&#8243; MacBook Pro she&#8217;d been using, so it was a fantastic upgrade for her. And of course the punchline of the story is that she&#8217;s never had the battery drain problem I experienced with it! I&#8217;m not certain I ever confessed that before on the show.<\/p>\n<p>I replaced the M1 with an M3 MacBook Pro, but again I &#8220;had&#8221; to go with the Max because I wanted to maintain that 64GB of RAM.  The good news is that since the M3 had been around for a few months by that time, I was able to get a good deal on a refurbished model. That also helped with the guilt, but I owe my sanity to David&#8217;s not-so-gentle badgering me to do the upgrade.<\/p>\n<h2>PROLED Touchscreen MacBook Pro<\/h2>\n<p>The M3 Max MacBook Pro is an outstanding machine, and interestingly has no battery drain issue, even with all of the same software as I had on the M1. I&#8217;ll never know what the root cause was of that disastrous year, but I&#8217;ve moved on. Really, David, I have.<\/p>\n<p>Around the same time I bought the M1 Max MacBook Pro, Steve bought one too. He also wanted 64GB of RAM, but he went with a much more reasonable 2TB SSD.  Over the years, I&#8217;ve asked him if he&#8217;s ready to upgrade his laptop, but he says it&#8217;s still great.<\/p>\n<p>So that brings us up to the present day, as Apple announced the PROLED touchscreen MacBook Pro. Or as Apple call it, &#8220;MacBook\u00a0Pro with PROLED\u00a0XDR Display&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>I want it. No, I do not <em>need<\/em> it. Why do I want it? Because, touchscreen! Plus an OLED display. Organic Light Emitting Diode displays don&#8217;t require a backlight, which means they can be much lighter. So without sacrificing performance or battery life, the PROLED MacBook Pro is substantially lighter than the non-OLED version.<\/p>\n<p>My current M3 MacBook Pro (the Max version) weighs 3.6 lbs. But the Max version of the PROLED weighs a half pound lighter at 3.1 lbs. And the Pro weighs even less at 3.0 lbs. One of the reasons I reach for the MacBook Air so much more than the MacBook Pro when away from my desk is because it&#8217;s so much lighter, so a 14% drop in weight will be super noticeable.<\/p>\n<p>Just like going to a shelter &#8220;just to look&#8221; at puppies or kittens, I decided to &#8220;just take a look&#8221; at the pricing of the PROLED MacBook Pro. I&#8217;d heard people blathering online about how stupidly expensive it is, but I wanted to check for myself to see if I could rationalize this purchase.<\/p>\n<h2>Pricing Out the PROLED<\/h2>\n<p>The first step was to see how much more expensive it really would be to buy the same specs on the PROLED MacBook Pro as the M3 I bought in April 2024. I popped open <a href=\"https:\/\/undermyroof.app\">Under My Roof<\/a>, the fabulous app Steve and I use religiously to store an inventory of all of our major purchases. We keep photos and receipts for insurance purposes, but it&#8217;s also a great place to find serial numbers and specs.<\/p>\n<p>My receipt for the 14&#8243; M3 Max MacBook Pro in Under My Roof showed the refurbished model cost me $4159 before tip and tax. That discounted price won&#8217;t help me rationalize it very well, so I looked up the list price, which was a heftier $4900. I really did get a great deal.<\/p>\n<p>I priced out the 14&#8243; M5 PROLED MacBook Pro, specced out just like my M3, with the Max chip, 64GB of RAM, and a 4TB SSD. That came in at a whopping $6100 \u2014 $1200 more than the list price of the M3! Holy cannoli, they weren&#8217;t kidding.<\/p>\n<p>But then I got to thinking.  Remember how I said I was certain I didn&#8217;t need a Max chip? It turns out that getting 64GB of RAM on this new MacBook Pro does <em>not<\/em> require the Max chip. Maybe it wouldn&#8217;t be quite as painful. It would give me 18 CPU cores (2 more than I have now) and 20 GPU cores (half of what I have now). I know GPUs are good for AI, so this isn&#8217;t a future-proof decision, but we&#8217;ve got to cut corners somewhere. And remember, going from the Max to the Pro \u2014 I save an extra .1 pounds!<\/p>\n<p>The M5 Pro with 20 GPU cores, 64GB of RAM, and 4TB of disk drops the price down to $5600, but that&#8217;s still $700 more than the M3 Max&#8217;s list price.<\/p>\n<p>But wait, we forgot to take inflation into account! That M3 Max in late 2027 dollars would be nearly $5200 in today&#8217;s dollars! That makes the PROLED M5 Pro as configured only $420 more than the M3 Max&#8217;s 2024 list price. Now that doesn&#8217;t sound so bad, does it? What&#8217;s an 8% price increase for all that joy?<\/p>\n<figure style=\"float: center; margin: 10px\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/spreadsheet-on-comparing-Mac-model-specs-and-pricing.png\" alt=\"Spreadsheet on comparing Mac model specs and pricing.\"  title=\"spreadsheet on comparing Mac model specs and pricing.png\" width=\"799 \" height=\"389\"><figcaption style=\"text-align:center\">Do the Math and Don&#8217;t Forget Inflation!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>I wondered if I was missing something in my logic or calculations, so I enlisted my rationalization mentor David Roth as well as Steven Goetz to review my work. Steven is a darn good enabler too, but he&#8217;s just slightly more likely to tell me if he thinks I&#8217;m doing something stupid. I&#8217;m happy to say they both gave it their stamp of approval!<\/p>\n<h2>Flowdown<\/h2>\n<p>To truly justify such an unnecessary purchase, I still had to find a flowdown strategy. Having just deployed the M2 MacBook Air into the family fleet, there was really only one person left who could help me.<\/p>\n<p>Steeeeve &#8230; wouldn&#8217;t you rather have an M3 Max than that perfectly capable M1 Max you&#8217;re so happy with?  He sounded interested and surprisingly supportive of my lust for the PROLED MacBook Pro.  So we took a look at the specs.<\/p>\n<p>Steve&#8217;s M1 Max MacBook Pro has 10 CPU cores and 32 GPU cores.  The M3 Max I was offering had 16 and 40.  His M1 has a 2TB drive, whereas the M3 has 4TB. He has 64GB of RAM just like the M3, so that was a wash. We checked our battery percentages, and even though my Mac was two and a half years younger, they&#8217;re both around 85%.  I&#8217;m rougher on laptop batteries than he is \u2014 probably because they spend so much of their lives plugged into a dock charging.<\/p>\n<p>The good news is Steve thinks trading up to the M3 Max is a dandy idea, and Apple will give us $1100 for the M1 Max on trade-in. That will make it feel like I paid $400 <em>less<\/em> for the PROLED MacBook Pro than the M1 Max!<\/p>\n<h2>Bottom Line<\/h2>\n<p>The bottom line is that I absolutely, positively do not need a new computer. But I really want the new hotness, and my delivery date is November 20th.<\/p>\n<p>I hope you&#8217;ve learned from me how to rationalize buying computers you don&#8217;t need and how to enlist the support of enablers to meet your goals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Everyone listening (or reading) has faced that moment when they really want to buy a new computer\/tablet\/phone, but they clearly do not need a new device. Some of us stay strong, like SR, who wrote in our Slack that instead of buying the new shiny, he buys stock so he can continue to afford more [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36988,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[147],"tags":[524,733,8458],"class_list":["post-36983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog-posts","tag-macbook-air","tag-macbook-pro","tag-proled"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/PROLED-MacBook-Pro.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36983"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36983\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36991,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36983\/revisions\/36991"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}