Is it worth buying extra SSD storage with new MacBook?

[HoofWankingSpangleCunt]

Hello all,
This is on behalf of DD19 who has asked me to ask mumsnet. High praise indeed.

She has got about a grand due in wages and with that she'd be able to buy a MacBook air 128gb.
For an extra £180 she could get an increase of storage to bring it up to 256 GB in total. However, to do this she'd have to dip into her maintenance loan. She will be entering her 2nd year at uni and needs the MacBook for studies.

We've already done eleventy billion spreadsheets to establish what type of laptop is best and she is certain that, although pricey, she wants the MacBook air.

Is it worth buying extra storage, does anyone know? Or should she save her money for jägerbombs and supernoodles?

Thanks in advance.

To clarify, DD will be using it for reading, essays and streaming.

She plans on having this MacBook for a good while, it needs to be portable so no big external hard drive.

She hasn't used a MacBook before so the whole cloud thing is a big unknown. However, if she does have to dip into her maintenance loan, she will have to make cuts elsewhere. Not easy when it's not a lot of money to start with.

Actually, I'd probably say yes (potentially contributions from family for Christmas/Birthday to cover it?). Only because you can't upgrade the SSD at a later stage and Macs tend to last ages. My previous MacBook Pro got to 8+ years old and only replaced due to the 2nd battery going and I got DH's 5 year old MacBook Pro as a 'free' replacement.

However, I don't think she'll need that much capacity if she uses cloud storage for everything. Lots of options around for that, Apple has it's own (iCloud), there's Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive plus others. It's very cheap now too. But there's nowhere to go if she does need more capacity later on.

Well, actually if you look online you can upgrade the SSD but you need to do it yourself, it's doesn't appear to be something currently you can pay Apple to do later on.

Personally I'd pay more for more storage. My Air has 256Gb and I regularly fill it, even though I work extensively in Dropbox (it uses your hard disk space when syncing). Macs last a long time and files are only getting bigger.

I'm actually considering buying a Macbook Pro with 1Tb of storage, but I am a designer so I work with large files.

BTW the Macbook Air is a great choice IME. I've burnt through many PC laptops - even expensive ones - but my Macbook is surviving everything I throw at it.

Thanks all of you who posted.
I tend to agree, if you're spending so much money already then it surely makes sense to spend the extra to get the specs you need?
She's back for the summer now. I wonder how many errands I can get her to do? 50p a dog walk?

I have an iCloud account and pay the princely sum of 79p/month for 50Gb on top of the 250Gb on my Macbook. It's more than enough for my documents but if she's keeping a lot of music on her computer that'll alter her needs.

I’d suggest using the extra money to get a MacBook Pro 128GB it’s the same price as the MacBook Air with 258GB hard drive but faster internals, I’d just the extra cash to get that then just use cloud storage for documents

Always max your memory and storage. We are still using a 2008 Mac which had unique specs with extra memory.