In regards to that screen, the Pro’s exclusive 120-hertz ProMotion Mini LED-packed Liquid Retina XDR display is unrivaled. If you can shoulder the expense, either of these laptops will last you for years to come. They offer the superior creative suite (Garageband, Final Cut, and XCode) and iOS handoff capabilities that are convenient, in addition to raw all-day power to back it up without even triggering a fan. Though while most people can do a lot with a budget Chromebook-and a strong Windows laptop allows for layers of customization and gaming-this year’s MacBooks are some of the most impressive laptops I’ve used. Despite being an iPhone and MacBook user myself, I have admittedly found Apple products overpriced in the past. I make recommendations on price to performance.
And to gather transfer and encoding speeds to illustrate the strength of the M1 versus M1 Pro, I used Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. I noted the rate of battery life drops every ten minutes to calculate an average per hour over the course of three work days. These tasks included downloading software, browsing between 20 open Google Chrome tabs (with multiple live streams), and taking one hour of daily video calls.
I called in the MacBook Air with a basic M1 Chip and the MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro, which is a mid-range chip, and integrated them into my daily workflow.
To show which is best for you, I pitted the two MacBook lineups against each other in a series of head-to-head tests below. While this is true of even the base M1 found in the Air, the M1 Pro has significantly better encoding times, transfer speeds, and memory bandwidth thanks to more cores and transistors.
No matter how many intense processing tasks you throw at Apple’s new proprietary silicon, performance is consistently putting out peak performance without turning on a fan. Compared to the new MacBook Pro-which includes tons of connectivity ports, is cool to the touch, silent, and drops battery at a rate of just 4 percent per hour-the difference is night and day. It often sets the fans off when juggling my creative workflow, requires a USB-C hub since it’s limited to just two ports, and has its battery drained at a rate of 24 percent per hour. To illustrate these real-world gains, I had to look no further than my work-issued laptop, an older 2019 MacBook Pro.