"most americans" absolutely do not have "an order arriving every other day".
I order amazon on average once every 3 weeks. My mother (who has full time career and is under 60 years old) has never used amazon. Other members of my family also seem to rarely use amazon.
Also, having an order arriving every other day is incredibly wasteful.
I also agree. I'd say we're at the last few years of Core 2 Duo machines being usable. Anything before them is just not worth keeping around. Not only are earlier machines slow, but are going to be pretty energy inefficient. Buying a newer system might actually save you money when you factor electricity costs.
For example, a 2009-2012 era Mac Pro draws more power in sleep than a modern Mac mini/macbook Air draws under full load.
They would work but I'm not sure it's worth it. The 11" Air had a pretty terrible screen, and the models with 8GB of RAM are more expensive than I think they are worth. Plus Macbooks of this era are going to need a battery replacement, so your going to have to invest $70-100 on top of the price of buying the Macbook. You're likely going to be $200-300 invested into a 10 year old macbook.
Also keep in mind the 11" MacBook air wasn't that small. The Macbook neo with a 13" screen has almost the same dimensions.
With laptops of this era you only have two sodimm slots and DDR2 4GB RAM modules were quite expensive when they were new. So even still today they are more expensive than you would think. I sold mine for $25/each a few weeks ago.
Also some laptops of this era didn't support more than 4-6GB of RAM in the firmware. I know there are several models of early intel macbooks that you can physically install 8GB of RAM but they will not recognize it.
On the other hand, I have a 2010 iMac with all 4 DDR3 sodimm slots full giving it 32GB of RAM. It was a "just for fun" project before the AI prices. Those era iMacs are fully upgradeable (CPU, RAM, and GPU). Swapped in an i7 CPU, AMD m4000 GPU, and an SSD. Runs linux mint great.
Apple has been using LPDDR in the MacBooks since at least 2015. I remember it was one of the complaint of the 2016-2017 MacBook Pros. They were still using LPDDR3 because LPDDR4 wasn't ready for production yet (despite regular DDR4 being available). The 2018 MacBook Pro's finally switched to LPDDR4.
Most of the Red Hot Chili Peppers hit songs are pushing 30 years old. Their songs have already hit their peak popularity and will only be declining from now on.
This along with AI generated music flooding the market. An AI generated song has already been #1 on the iTunes Charts. AI generated music is only going to get better and more popular.
Future TV shows/movies/etc. will likely just be generating their own music, rather than paying royalties for "hit songs".
AI companies bought up all the NAND manufacturing capacity, limiting the available manufacturing capacity for consumer products. These data centers also use hard drives for some of their data storage.
There's really no reason to be scared working on your car. I have no formal training and I have never paid a shop to fix my car in my 20 years of car ownership.
The mechanical parts of a car haven't changed much in the last 25 years, and are easy to understand just by watching a few YouTube videos.
The electronics have certainly gotten more complex, but if you can understand basic computer networking and low voltage electronics it's still quite simple.
If you are interested in learning how to fix your own car, there is a great guy who runs an auto repair business on YouTube and his tagline is: "Remember folks If I can do it, you can do it."
People making $80-90K can live a similar lifestyle to the people making $125K+, they just aren't saving any money. I know people that do this, live their whole life with less than $5k in the bank.
The reason it is thick is because it supports 65W charging. Apple did the same with the USB-C cables that shipped with the pre-MagSafe MacBooks. It was a thicker cable that supported 100w charging but was only USB 2.0.
Black Magic gives video editing software that actual professionals use away for free. They sell professional grade equipment that regular consumers can afford. They also offer a ton of training videos teaching you how to edit professionally....for free. A ton of independent filmmakers have started their career using Black Magic software/devices.
"How many M1 mac will still be functional in 20 years?"
Probably quite a few, MacBooks have had soldered SSD's for over 10 years now. My 2018 McBook Pro still has a perfectly functioning SSD. I still see people using 2015 and older MacBooks all the time. There is no widespread SSD failure issue after 10+ years of Apple soldering the SSD's.
For most people the SSD's are lasting longer than the useful life of the device.
The reality is most 8GB M1 Macs are still working just fine 6 years later. Power users know they need more than 8GB of RAM and will buy a MacBook Air or Pro with 16GB+.
The MacBook neo is for students, grandparents, travel, etc.
Hell, even if it dies after 6 years it was still a better experience than using a $500-600 windows PC and the cost comes out to ~$8/month spread over 6 years.
I have never spent more than 30 minutes inside a Costco.