Question for the Mac guys

Its rare for me to post threads these days, but hey ho.

Anyway, my question for the mac guys, I have a 2008 iMac (and a 2006 Powerbook), both going as I think its time to upgrade. I'm not looking at getting an iMac, due to desk space as I have more than enough desktops on my desk at the moment.

The 2 macs I've looked in question are the Macbook air (which my younger sister has) and the 2016 Macbook. I can live without the need for a USB port, so a single USB-C is enough and gives me the opportunity to charge it from another computer on the train. Now the issue I have, the variants I am looking at is either an M5/M7 macbook, or i5 or i7 Macbook air. I've been trying to determine which one is better for performance as one uses an older chip than the other and I can't seem to find benchmarking reviews comparing these 2. So, does anyone have any thoughts? The occasional T:ANE use would help too, even if a little slower.

i'd say neither of these will run trainz well,basically due to limitations of the inbuilt graphics cards.forget the macbook iar, its no good for this purpose, macbook mighh just mange to play at low settings.
ALthough i prefer macs, i am no apologist for their poor games abilities. if you do not a have a load of mac apps,and you are prepared to put up with windows 10 , i'd buy a used acer ROG like i did , for around a thousand you can get a machine that will play games much better then even a macbookpro. . However with the release of new imacs, the newer 21 inch imacs may now be good enough to run trainz well if they have at least 4gb vram , but beware ,apple has a history of using underpowered graphics cards in their machines , and the AMD cards they are using arent as good as the equivalent nvidia versions you can install yourself on an underpowered pc.

The way Apple appears to be aiming at the moment is to use a TB3 dock for an external GPU. This is in Beta at the moment but assuming it pans out as everybody is hoping, the best answer at the moment is probably "get the fastest-cpu mac you can afford that has a TB3 port so that you can upgrade it with a real GPU later".

hth,

chris