Apple MacBook 12" 3PL GSRF MK4M2LL/A Gold 2015

The 12-inch MacBook is a stunning piece of hardware held back by a painfully slow Intel Core m3 chip and a single USB-C port. It's only worth considering if you need the absolute lightest Mac for basic writing and browsing, and even then, the $1,215 price for a refurb is hard to swallow. For everyone else, an M1 MacBook Air is a vastly smarter buy.

The 1.1GHz Intel Core m3 is a fanless chip from 2015, and it feels every bit its age. It can handle light web browsing and document editing, but open more than a few tabs and you'll see the spinning beach ball. The Intel HD Graphics 5300 is fine for pushing the display, but our gaming score of 9.5 out of 100 tells you everything you need to know about playing anything more demanding than Solitaire. The 8GB of RAM is soldered and sits in the bottom 5th percentile of our database, which is a real choke point for modern multitasking.

Stacked against modern ultraportables like the HP OmniBook X Flip or the Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro, this MacBook feels like a relic. Those machines offer modern processors, better battery life, and actual port selection. Even a current iPad with a keyboard case will be faster and more versatile. The ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 and Lenovo Legion Pro are in a different universe performance-wise, but they highlight just how far laptop silicon has come since this Core m3 was released. The only thing this MacBook still wins on is sheer thinness and weight.

At $1,215, this is a tough sell. You're paying a premium for a refurbished piece of Apple history that gets smoked by a base model iPad in raw performance. The build quality and screen are lovely, but you can get a brand new M1 MacBook Air on sale for around this price, and it will run circles around this machine in every conceivable way. You're really paying for the form factor here, not the function.

The 12-inch MacBook was Apple's ultraportable experiment, and this refurbished unit is a blast from the past. It's impossibly thin and light at just two pounds, and that Retina display still looks crisp. But you're buying a decade-old processor and a single, controversial port, so expectations need to be firmly in check.

This model is a Geek Squad Certified Refurbished unit, which means it's been tested and cleaned up. The design is still a head-turner, but the Intel Core m3 chip inside was built for basic tasks even when it was new. If your workflow lives entirely in a web browser, it might just work. For anything else, it's going to struggle.

If you need to run any professional software, edit photos, or even keep more than a handful of browser tabs open, look elsewhere. This machine's 8GB of RAM and aging processor will have you pulling your hair out. Anyone who needs reliable battery life should also skip it, as a refurbished unit of this age is a total gamble on cell health.

This is for a very specific person: someone who absolutely needs the lightest possible macOS machine for writing, email, and light web browsing, and values silence and portability above all else. It's a secondary machine for a coffee shop, not a primary computer. If you try to make this your daily driver for anything more than text, you'll be frustrated within a week.