For pretty much all of my life, I've used a custom PC built like the Ship of Theseus; ever-changing, getting new parts every few years, impossible to determine if it's still the same computer or not. Over the years, I came to understand that I don't need that much power on a daily basis and would prefer portability. Now that I live in a walkable city, I want to be able to carry a computer with me if I'm going to the coffee shop so that I can work on my site, do some admin work on my server, or anything else that you might do on a computer.
I've finally retired my Thesian desktop to a comfortable life as a couch gaming/websurfing PC. The goal is to move it to a small form factor PC case with a handle for easy transportation, but I can't justify the cost of it at the moment, since I'd probably need a new motherboard as well. In the meantime, I've been using a mid-2012 Macbook Air that my fiancee had lying around. She no longer needed it and I needed a laptop, so I backed up her stuff and set it up in a VM so that she could take a trip down Memory Lane if she felt like it.
So what is life like with a mid-2012 Macbook Air? In all honesty, it's not too bad outside of a few quirks.
When I first started using this laptop, the battery was beat and wouldn't last more than an hour off its charger. I ordered a replacement battery online and installed it fairly easily. Considering this is a Macbook, critical components like the battery, Wifi card, and storage are pretty accessible, only requiring the bottom cover of the laptop to be removed. RAM is soldered on and cannot be upgraded though. Replacing the battery took no more than 20 minutes from unpacking the new battery to booting the laptop up again.
With the new battery, I'm able to squeeze out about 4 hours of light computing from a full battery, which is acceptable given the age of the components and the stress that's being put on them from running software 14 years into the future. Speaking of which, the performace on this laptop is not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. It seems to outperform my fiancee's Surface Pro 7 that she has, gracefully handling multiple browser tabs and even multiple applications like GIMP and Waterfox. It also handles video playback decently well, though I haven't tried watching a full movie on this yet. Games are almost completely out of the question, even with humble games like Downwell refusing to launch. It might be possible to play RPGMaker games, and I was able to get Shovel Knight and UNDERTALE to run, but the fans protest pretty loudly over this and the battery drains fast. If any gaming is going to be taking place on this laptop, it's gonna be through streaming via Sunshine/Moonlight.
It's a Macbook Air! These things are sleek and feel quite premium, even at this age. It has a reassuring weight, the keyboard feels great, trackpad is smooth (though a few features like gesture swipes seem to be missing). Media keys all work as expected. Anything that you could say about a given Macbook Air mostly applies here, even under plain Debian. Part of my laptop screen is damaged and I need to run a custom resolution, so no Wayland here. KDE runs great regardless.
This is my fault, but I fried the Wifi component of my Macbook when I spilled water on my keyboard. I was able to swap the keyboard with a replacement from eBay and got it working again, but I tried replacing the Wifi card with no luck. It seems like I'd have to replace the logic board to get this working again, but the goal is to get a new laptop anyways, so that will be for another time.
The trackpad still feels great to use under Debian, though certain gesture functions seem to be missing. I'm not bothered by it though, so we'll say it mostly works.
I had to install mbpfan to get fan control working properly, as my Macbook would regularly hit throttle temps without it. Temperatures are much more acceptable now and I can hear the fan kicking in when it's under load, though that's not too often.
All in all, I'm quite happy with using an over-decade old Macbook Air. With a minimal Debian installation using KDE, it handles most basic tasks I throw at it, and with a fresh battery, it lasts quite a while (4 hours) on a single charge, and charges in less than an hour. It's sleek and has a reassuring weight, great keys, and a responsive trackpad. If not for the issues with the Wifi card, I wouldn't really have any complaints about it.
It's gotten me a period of not having a "proper" laptop and not using my desktop PC for anything other than gaming and couch surfing, and it really shone in this aspect. This entire website was built using this laptop, and I'm incredibly grateful to have had this laptop available to me.