I'm sure whatever's newer wins all the technical benchmarks, but what does it do differently for a college student?
The battery life alone. It's a literally all-day laptop, even when you beat on it hard, constantly. If you don't, it's closer to an all-week laptop.
Also, in the context of Apple, as they're trying to transition rather rapidly to Apple Silicon across the board, it will almost certainly have a longer supported life and better resale value than an Intel one in 5 years.
So really any functioning MacBook will do, subject to the battery still working for 4h.
Eh. I spent an awful lot of college scrounging outlets for laptops with "4h" battery life.
Also, the more I read, the more the M1 chip seems to be a big deal (but I'm not interested enough to research the why of it).
It really, really is. To borrow the car analogy being abused mildly in this thread, it's a Honda Fit for the same price as the previous year, that, oh, by the way, can tap 200mph, tow 8000 lbs, and gets you about 150mpg. It really is that revolutionary in laptop performance.
World's dumbest computer question. What do Mac people do for spreadsheets and Word docs. I truly don't know as I've only owned Windows based computers? Can you get Excel on a Mac (I feel real dumb asking this)
Office. Microsoft Office for Mac has, often enough, gotten new features on Apple before the Windows team got around to it. It's a flagship application, though I've got an older version and am not at all sure about the current stuff, but it works fine. Or Google Sheets.
Numbers is useful for generating charts to embed in Keynote and that's about it.
I suppose I should have asked. Does it matter? What exactly do you get when you buy a benchmark? Can you sit on it? Wouldn't a $6,000 Mac Pro be a more straightforward way to buy benchmarks?
Not if you want to carry it around to class, no. But for laptops, "cool under heavy load" is pretty darn nice.
To me, this is the essence of mustachianism. Do I really need the shiny new thing and its technical specifications that seem cool now but will be obsolete in 5 4 years? Similarly, should 5 year old laptops with 6+ years of life remaining be discarded on Ebay because the new models have better benchmarks, stats, and specs? This should be an easy question for anyone more serious about academics than gaming.
The problem here is that the last 4 years of Apple laptops (2016 to 2019) have had fundamentally broken keyboards. I agree with you about "used when possible," but I also would spend money on a 2016-2019 Apple laptop, and if you gave me one for free, I'd sell it while the keyboard still worked. They're just known faulty.
So you're at either a last gen Intel (that are hot, battery hungry pains in the rear to deal with), a mid-2015 which are getting on the old side for another 4-5 years of use, or a M1.
Of those, the M1 is a far better option. There's no comparison between my 2015 MBP and my M1 Mac Mini. The M1 absolutely crushes it in performance, and would do the same in battery life in a laptop form factor.
Apple, the past couple years, isn't following a linear path that optimizes for buying stuff a few years old.
