Apple’s MacBook Air and MacBook Pro share similarly impressive, iconic designs, but which one delivers the right balance of power and value for what you do? Check out our MacBook comparison and see how they rank in our testing.
With the powerful Apple MacBook Pro, available in multiple screen sizes, and the slim, efficient MacBook Air, there are two broad Mac laptop families to chose between nowadays. They’re both excellent ones. With similar specs and exterior styling across both the Air and the Pro, deciding which one is best for you largely comes down to which size screen you need and how much processing power your typical computing tasks require. Picking between the two families is the easy part. Getting down to the nitty gritty within each family is trickier, though. The 13-inch MacBook Pro and MacBook Air are now available with Apple’s brand-new M1 processor, which promises speedy performance but might not be the right choice for everyone. We’ll walk you through the processor choices as well as all the different CPU, memory, storage, and other component options that Apple offers on its latest MacBook laptops. The MacBook Air: The More Portable Pick Apple’s smallest laptop is the MacBook Air. It’s a slim, sleek machine that measures 0.63 inch at its thickest point and weighs just 2.8 pounds. The MacBook Air is also Apple’s cheapest laptop, starting at $899 for students and teachers or $999 for the general public. The cheapest and most portable entry point into the macOS ecosystem obviously has enormous appeal. A low price doesn’t mean the MacBook Air’s screen is low quality, though. Despite the fact that it’s not the highest-resolution 13-inch display you can buy, the LED-backlit panel impresses with its brightness and clarity. The native resolution is 2,560 by 1,600 pixels. The display uses in-plane switching (IPS) technology, which means that the remarkable picture you see while sitting in front of it doesn’t degrade much if you turn it to show a colleague what you’re working on. Its True Tone feature automatically adapts the color temperature to match ambient lighting conditions, and support for the P3 color gamut means brilliant colors and the ability to perform basic color correcting for photos and videos. The current version of the MacBook Air sports the same Magic Keyboard you’ll find on the MacBook Pro. It offers a far more comfortable typing experience than previous MacBook Air and MacBook Pro keyboard designs, which suffered from extraordinarily shallow key presses. To fit everything into the small enclosure, Apple made a few sacrifices in terms of the MacBook Air’s connectivity and power. The most limiting factor is the pair of USB Type-C ports, which handle pretty much every connection apart from audio output, from recharging the battery to connecting an external display or hard drive. You may well need to buy a third-party expansion dock with additional ports if you choose the MacBook Air. Inside the laptop, there’s a single processor option: the Apple M1 chip. It has an eyebrow-raising maximum of 16 processor cores. Four of the cores are compute cores dedicated to complex calculations that require lots of processing power.
