i’m a senior in college and for the past 3 years i’ve used a 2020 13” inch macbook pro. it was amazing and did everything i needed for university and then some. last year i spilled some water on it and it stopped working completely it made more financial sense to get a new computer than to pay the price they wanted to fix it. so it’s bricked essentially. i got a m2 macbook air as a replacement after hearing such good things about it. it is genuinely the worst machine i’ve ever used and it makes it near imposssible to do do work. nothing loads from webpages to programs and i can’t deal with it anymore. my course load requires using adobe suite and i can’t do that on here reliably. i’m at a crossroad because i spent $1700 on the computer and apple care for 3 years. i’m planning on selling the m2 air and fixing the pro but i’m really stuck and would love some advice. or does it make sense to invest in an m3 a pro as a method of future proofing. any advice would be greatly appreciated
I would suggest taking a look at the activity monitor and see if it gives any clues of what’s causing the issues. Is the processor having some abnormal usage? High usage when idle? How much RAM do you have free? Test with the computer on idle and using the programs that are running slow.
Try closing everything and running a single program, like illustrator. Does it work fine? Is your machine maybe overheating? I believe the Air is fanless, so this can be causing it to throttle using heavy applications.
I believe that you need to do a bit more of diagnosing to try pinpointing the exact source of your issues