How do I compare MacBooks?

In My Humble Opinion
1

The decision has been made to buy a MacBook. I’m still kids confused as to all the options and googling hasn’t really helped.

Here’s some info. I think 13 inch is better, it will need to travel in my backpack frequently. Battery life would be nice. I’m not a gamer. I’ll be doing light video editing, think vacation videos and such, not making commercials or amateur films. Light Excel and light word processing, I’m not crunching serious data.

What’s the main difference between a MacBook air and a MacBook Pro? I often see models available on Groupon and the refurbished section of the Apple website. I don’t think I’ll need the absolute latest. Reading laptop articles has my head spinning.

Don’t need answer fast, will probably pull the trigger around the endless Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.

2

Basically the Pro has better hardware, more options, and more I/O. If the Air has everything you need, by all means go with that. If it does not, you will need to go Pro.

3

Here’s what you get with a base MacBook Pro over a base MacBook Air:

A quad core i5 instead of a dual core i5, a little nicer display, a little nicer graphics, a little less battery life, a quarter pound heavier, and the Touch Bar.

The quad core puts the Pro over the line, IMO. That should save you actual time when exporting your videos. Unless you’re on the go a whole lot where every pound and minute of battery life counts, I’d go with the Pro.

You can compare up to three Mac models here https://www.apple.com/mac/compare/ but it’s mostly a list of specs and numbers.

4

I have the latest MacBook Pro 15" for work, and a new Macbook Air for home.

Please note I am not a technical person - the list of specs don’t mean much of anything to me, but I am a heavy user.

My work mac needs to be powerful as I’m working on large graphic/imagery/video files.

But the Air is perfect for my home use - watching videos, writing Word docs, surfing, carrying it on holiday - it’s lightweight and easy to lug around. My Macbook is heavy and cumbersome in comparison.

The battery life on both is great.

5

Note that if you want any I/O that’s not Thunderbolt, you’ll have to find an older model. My Macbook Air is a refurb (that I specifically bought the older model so it had a USB port) and I’ve had zero issues with it.

6

Warning:
Apple is way ahead of the curve with USB-C ports*. If you have a lot of wired, external stuff, expect to pay for gadgets/connections/dongles to hook them up.
New MacBooks (Air or Pro) only have USB-C, whereas older pros have SD-card slot, HDMI outlet, USV 3.1 ports. OTOH, if you don’t need to hook up a screen, printer, DSLR, getting a newer MB will get you a machine that’ll keep for at least five years, probably more. If you’re going for re-furbished, see to it that it has an SSD (at least 256GB) and 8GB RAM.

*Everyone will come around to USB-C eventually. For older MB Air, you’ll see names like “Thunderbolt” “Mini Display Port” “Lightning”. These are proprietary connectors and adaptors cost a lot. If I were to buy a refurbished, I’d go with the MB Pro, pre task bar.

7

Very few common uses of computers are actually CPU-bound, so the Air is likely a better choice for most people. Cheaper and longer battery are more important than 2 more cores. If you know you’re doing something CPU-bound, then you’ll know it, and you can look at specs. But if you don’t know, you very likely don’t need it.

Also note that Apple’s laptop keyboards for the last few years really suck. They are rumored to be going with a different design for laptops starting next year.

8

Nitpick: The ports are USB-C form factor and are Thunderbolt 3, but they also support I/O for multiple display formats, and all USB devices, with adapters. (I have a 2018 15" MacBook Pro, and use USB-C to USB-A adapters daily–they cost a couple of bucks from Monoprice or Amazon.)

Since the OP is not doing heavy video editing, I’d say go for the MacBook Air, but probably prioritize a storage upgrade over a memory upgrade. The base 8GB of memory is likely plenty for all but the most demanding tasks, but a 128GB SSD might fill up pretty quickly with photos/videos, and aftermarket upgrades are extremely difficult on these machines.

One other thing: there have been significant issues with the current Mac laptop keyboard design. They’ve made some mods to ameliorate the problems, but a major redesign is rumored to be coming, but maybe not soon. There is, IIRC, an extended warranty period on the keyboard in response to the increased failure rate, but don’t eat anything crumbly near your open laptop.

11

However, if anyone wants to jump in, feel free. Still haven’t bought a laptop yet. It seems like it was back in the medieval era that I posted this thread.

12

Well, one thing I know is that the redesign that RickG mentioned has now happened. The newest models now all have returned to their older, tried-and-tested keyboard style. And, while the batteries themselves stayed the same, they claim battery life is better.

However, I note that the top of the line is the only one to use a whole new generation of CPUs which are more power efficient. So that might factor into your choice if battery life is the most important thing for you.

I do agree that storage is more important than memory (beyond a certain point) for video editing. However, I note that you can get external storage to plug in and copy stuff off, but you can’t get external memory.

13

Yes, I bought a new MacBook Pro 16" a month or two back. At the time the new 16"s had the fixed keyboard and the older 15" and the current 13" didn’t. I see now they’ve fixed the keyboard on the 2020 13"s too.

That’s a big deal in my opinion. The keyboard was shockingly bad before the fix. Make sure you take that into account if you go the refurbished route (or if the store still has old stock in its backlog).

14

No kidding. SOME of us are pretty bitter of the complete lack of COVID-19-centric wording in your O.P.

Pretty goddamned UnAmerican of you. :stuck_out_tongue:

If you’re doing very basic video editing, check to see if the MacBook Air can even handle that. If it comes bundled with iMovie, one wishes to believe it can.

If you’re looking to do 11-layer digital compositing? Buy something ballsier. Also, does battery life really matter for most situations? When’s the last time you were that far from an a.c. outlet? ( Seriously ).

That said, I do miss my 2012-era MacBook PRO 15". Fabulous machine, if a bit hefty.

From what I witnessed working in a lot of media environments, the MacBook Air’s popularity arose partially because everyone started charging down the hallways from one meeting to the next holding their MacBook Air by its edge while open, waving as though it were a baton, balancing their Venti Jamocha Latté in the other hand.

They’re physically quite light. How important is the weight of the machine to you on a day to day, hour to hour basis?

ETA: Driver8 is on the damned mark re: the Keyboard issues. I detested using the onboard keyboard and used a separate one at home or at the office when working.

15

Except for iPhones, surprisingly enough, where it’s behind literally everyone else.

Though it also seems just about every laptop you can purchase has had a USB-C port for a few years now.

16

The nice thing is that Apple recently rev’d the hardware on Airs and Pros, and they fixed a lot of pain points.

  1. They all use a non-sucky keyboard now.
  2. They all have an escape key.

I am still of the opinion that the touch bar is worse than function keys, so I think that’s a minor negative of the Pro, but the worst part of it (no hardware escape key) is now gone, so it’s less worse than it used to be.

If you don’t know that you need the extra cpu cores, you very likely don’t, and the Air will be a better choice for you.

17

I just bought a 13" MacBook Air 3 weeks ago, a week after they released the update.

I think the decision between an MBA and an MBP is really what you’ll do with it. The MBP’s are more powerful and one do more intense task easier, but unless you personally need it, it’s wasted.

Right now I do “work” (word, excel, PPT etc), music, surf the web with the most taxing thing being photo and home video editing.The MBA is more than capable for that. Zero issues and I’m extremely happy.

From the reviews I’ve read, where it starts to lag is with intense video editing or streaming (ie: 4K videos) or intense gaming. It doesn’t have the horsepower to do those. Not at all an issue for me and give the price advantage MBA was an easy decision.

But since I bought, they launched the new MBP, so maybe that’s changed things.

I upgraded the base model to:
1.2GHz Quad Core I7
16 Gb Ram
1TB SSD hard drive

BTW - This is a good site I refer to before I buy any Apple products:
https://www.macrumors.com/guide/

If you are looking at used or reconditioned Apple products this seems to be a good site to get values:

Last thing, is when you buy, get a USBC to USB converter cable. If you’re porting over from a Time Machine backup, you’ll need to connect it.

18

The only thing that might give you trouble is the video editing. Just how often do you need to do that? If it’s not very often, just grin and bear it and don’t necessarily base your laptop buying decision on that one infrequent task, because it can make a huge difference in the specs you need.

Any of their computers can do web browsing, office work, etc. Any semi-modern computer, even a refurbished 5 year old one, can do that fine. But video editing is a whole different beast, if you intend to do a lot of it.

You know their $6000 Mac Pros? They made that for rich video editor types. There’s no upper limit to what you can spend on video editing equipment, yet that would be overkill for the once-a-year vacation video.

If I were you, and if money isn’t an issue, I’d choose the size you like, the weight you can stand (the Pros are heavier by a little), and then upgrade the specs to a level you’re comfortable with, because it’s difficult to upgrade them after the fact.

For regular office work, any of the baseline specs are fine, but it would make life easier to upgrade your storage to at least 512 GB. And you might consider one with 4 Thunderbolt ports if you need any peripherals or external monitors, otherwise you’d need a hell of a USB-C hub/dock (which means more to carry). The CPU and RAM differences probably won’t be enough to be noticeable in day to day life.

But if you’re video editing frequently, ALL the specs become an issue. I’d opt for 16 GB of RAM at least, the best CPU you can afford, and a 1 TB drive. Preferably, also the Mac Pro 16" because that’s the only one that has a dedicated graphics card, which can speed up video editing by a little to a lot depending on what you’re doing. Apple’s pricing model unfortunately means that will very quickly add up, and almost none of it is easily user-upgradable after the fact, so you have to decide what you want right off the bat.

Two other, more annoying options you could consider are 1) buying a basic Macbook and plugging in an external graphics card via Thunderbolt only when you need to do video editing and 2) buying a Macbook plus a separate desktop Windows PC for video editing… in terms of editing performance, you would get 3x-4x more bang for the buck out of a PC desktop than a Mac laptop, and having both also means you don’t have to carry around all your videos on a small laptop drive. (I use a Mac for work and a desktop PC for other stuff for exactly this reason. Fast macs are ridiculously priced, which is annoying because they can run off standard PC hardware just fine if Apple wanted them to. Hackintoshes are a possibility too, but you probably don’t want to do that for your primary computer.)

And I would STRONGLY second the opinions about the keyboards. The last few generations had TERRIBLE keyboards, so bad that I skipped 2-3 generations of Macbooks because of the keyboard alone. Definitely do try out the keyboard before you buy one.