It’s not just about how much storage you’re currently using, but also the rate that it’s increasing. I would look at the past few years and then come up with a “gigabytes per year” number for yourself, and then multiply that by 2 to account for growing resolutions.
Also: I hope that you’re keeping backups. Storing all of your data on your MacBook is risky because, if there’s an unrelated problem with your MacBook, you can’t exactly pull out the drive to get your data.
“Budget” means different things to different people, so it might help for you to provide a price range.
I have a Dell U2723QE that I’m pretty happy with. At $600, I consider it a budget monitor because it’s a lot less than the $1600 that Apple charges for a Studio Display.
(I would love a Studio Display but I can’t justify spending that much on a monitor. Plus, the U2723QE is nice because it essentially functions as a KVM switch, so it makes it easy to swap my webcam/keyboard/mouse with my PC.)
According to the directions, doing that a few times is supposed to fix the issue.
(This is why I don’t use AlDente, by the way. I don’t want to be inconvenienced by stuff like this and I haven’t seen any strong evidence that it actually helps with battery health vs. the stuff built into macOS.)
No. This is a limitation of Thunderbolt and the fact that macOS doesn’t support multi-stream transport. You need to use (at least) one other port to get 3 monitors working.
My guess is that AlDente caused this. Have you been following the “IMPORTANT” directions in the documentation?
IMPORTANT: Keeping your battery at a lower percentage, such as under 80%, over weeks without doing full cycles (100%-0%) can result in a disturbed battery calibration. When this happens, your Macbook might turn off with 40-50% left or your battery capacity will drop significantly. However, this is only due to a disturbed battery calibration and not because of a faulty or degraded battery. To avoid this issue, we recommend doing at least one full cycle (0%-100%) every two weeks. Even if your battery calibration gets disturbed, doing 4+ full cycles will recalibrate your battery and the capacity will go up again.
I don’t see any problem here?
Safari doesn’t appear to be using a lot of energy—49.96 is nothing compared to the numbers I’ve seen for Chrome, Arc, etc. which can be in the hundreds or higher.
Also, from the battery graph before you plugged in your laptop, it looks like you lost 20% in about 2.5-3 hours, which is very different from losing 70-80% in 3-4 hours.
I'd like to know the best way to find out if Instant View is indeed capturing everything I do.
Yes, it is, but it needs to capture everything because that’s how these types of docks work.
The downsides are that (1) you may experience choppy performance if there’s a lot of stuff moving on your screen and (2) some video content won’t play at all because of copy protection.
Unfortunately, because your MacBook (and my MacBook) only supports one external display, there is no way around these limitations if we want to use multiple external displays.
That does seem below average considering the age/cycles, but I don’t think Apple will consider a warranty replacement until it’s below 80% and/or gives you a “service recommended” warning.
Like you said, you shouldn’t expect the degradation to be linear. On my MacBook, it seems to be leveling out—it was something like 93% after year 1, 89% after year 2, and 87% right now at year 3.
Unlikely. You could probably get away with an M1 MacBook Air with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD.
There are many factors that contribute to battery degradation. Cycles and age are factors (as you’ve already identified) but also heat and differences in manufacturing.
So, maybe you run more intensive apps than your girlfriend and, because of that, your battery gets warmer. Or maybe she just got a good battery from the factory.
This is why all of the situations that you’ve described are considered normal.