Hi! I currently use a MacBook Air (11 in, early 2015). It still works great but sometimes it would lag or go blank when I'm editing documents on Word with more than 10 pages.

Since classes will be purely online for this semester, I was thinking of getting a desktop. I'm still a student so hopefully, you guys can help me decide so that I can get the most out of my money :) Initially I was set on getting the most basic (non-retina) 21.5 in iMac then upgrade it to 16 gb RAM and 256 gb SSD but the i5 (7th gen) processor worries me. Will it be enough for the future? I plan on using it atleast until I graduate and study for boards (med student here!) which is around 4-5 years away. I don't really play games or edit stuff. I will just be using it for studying (anki, lots of ebooks, videos, etc), netflix, and maybe research.

However, I read from here that it's actually more cost efficient to just get the 27 in iMac since you can upgrade it if the need arises in the future. The most basic 27 in iMac actually is cheaper than the 21.5 in version (retina) when considering the upgrades. But I honestly don't know anything about all of this and it's kinda overwhelming haha can anyone help me decide?