I have been using a Mac since 2017.
Did I know how to use a Mac when I first got one?
No.
Did it look cool?
Absolutely.
My introduction to Mac happened when my brother gave me his used MacBook before I went to London for a summer course. I had no idea what I was doing with it, but somehow it looked exactly like the kind of laptop a person should carry around while sitting in an English café, drinking coffee and pretending to work.
I was fascinated by that whole image.
Funny enough, I still am.
That old Mac stayed with me for a couple of years after I returned. And then, in February 2021, I got my first MacBook Air M1.
Actually, let me correct that.
My brother gifted it to me.
That beautiful dark-grey M1 became my life.
It was my work machine, my entertainment machine, my writing machine and, occasionally, my machine for doing absolutely nothing productive for five hours.
It became an extension of me.
Until April 2026.
I opened my laptop sleeve one day and found the screen broken.
I was shattered.
I am extremely careful with my things, so I had absolutely no idea how it happened. To this day, it remains a mystery.
I took it to the Apple Store. I checked with third-party repair shops too.
The estimates were somewhere around ₹30,000–₹40,000.
And I thought:
This is a five-year-old laptop. Am I really going to spend ₹40,000 repairing it?
Probably not.
But accepting that my M1 was gone wasn’t easy either.
Then came the difficult part — buying another laptop.
I hate spending money unnecessarily. Even when I can afford something, spending a large amount still makes me uncomfortable.
So now I had two problems:
I had lost the laptop I loved, and I had to spend a lot of money replacing it.
I looked at my options.
The MacBook Air M5 base model was around ₹1.20 lakh, while the newly launched MacBook Neo was around ₹80,000.
Both felt expensive.
So I did what I usually do before spending money:
I researched the hell out of it.
Credit-card discounts, store offers, exchange prices, online deals — everything.
Eventually, I found a reasonable deal at Vijay Sales.
The final price came to ₹1,03,290.
The store wasn’t offering me a good exchange value for my old Mac, so I decided to sell it myself on OLX.
I managed to sell it for ₹26,000.
Honestly, I was shocked.
And happy.
After the resale, my actual out-of-pocket cost for upgrading to the black MacBook Air M5 was roughly ₹77,000.
Still a lot of money.
But somehow, it felt more acceptable.
I was genuinely excited about my new laptop. I even made a little unboxing reel for YouTube. Told you, my content creation efforts are real.
And then I started using it.
The base M5 already offered roughly double the storage capacity of my old machine, and the performance was more than I needed for my current work.
I am not particularly tech-savvy. I don’t understand every specification, chip architecture or benchmark.
But I do know one thing:
I want to create more.
I’ve already been thinking about YouTube, Instagram, photography, videos and visual content.
And if I am serious about that journey, I know I will eventually need a machine capable of handling video editing and content creation without becoming the bottleneck.
So maybe this wasn’t just a laptop purchase.
Maybe it was an investment in the person I want to become.
And now comes the funniest part.
It has been about six months since I bought it.
It is September 2026.
I recently checked the price of the same MacBook Air M5.
₹1,49,900.
Yes.
The same model.
I just stared at the screen.
Apparently, the price has shot up dramatically — whether because of supply issues, chip costs, currency movements or whatever else is happening in the tech world, I don’t know.
What I do know is this:
I would never have bought it at ₹1.49 lakh.
And suddenly, that ₹1,03,290 purchase doesn’t feel quite as painful anymore.
For once, my obsession with researching every possible discount before spending money actually paid off.
Six months ago, I was sitting there thinking,
“Why am I spending so much money on a laptop?”
Today, I’m sitting here thinking,
“Thank God I bought it when I did.”
And yes, I still drink coffee while working on it.
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