What laptop should my mom get?
My mom is retiring and will soon no longer have her company laptop. I'm a 'old thinkpad with xubuntu' guy, so I have no idea what's worth spending money on these days. She uses an iphone, so I'm tempted to say mac even though she's always been a windows user, since modern non enterprise windows is so bad.
MacBook Air. This will be the least hassle for both you and her.
Get her a Mac. It might be more expensive, but you pay for the comfort of her having a computer that works & natively syncs with her iPhone