So why buy this Mac? Notably, you might have no choice. Still, that at least helped us tell the two otherwise identical MacBook Pro 13in machines apart. And before that gives the Intel Mac a moment of smugness, we should note its fans fired alarmingly often when the machine was under stress. That said, unless you need that sustained performance or have a hankering for a Touch Bar, save yourself 300 quid and get a MacBook Air.Īlbeit not with Photoshop itself, which isn’t native yet, meaning you don’t with that product see performance gains on Apple’s new silicon. It’s also something to realise that this is the puniest M1 MacBook Pro Apple will ever release, yet already it often outperforms much pricier Intel models. Frequently, the M1 beat the i9 MacBook Pro 16in too – which costs twice as much. Only when we ran unoptimised Intel apps did the older MacBook Pro sometimes edge ahead, but even then only marginally. The M1 – with half the RAM – stomped all over its 13in Intel i5 predecessor. What’s more striking is how this Mac compared to Intel MacBook Pro models.

(This was one of the few tasks where we got the fan to regularly spin up.) In our HandBrake video encoding tests, the MacBook Pro finished in 85–90 per cent of the time the MacBook Air took – although this encoding happened to the dulcet tones of a fan. The time taken for resource-intensive tasks is lower. In general use, this extra grunt is hard to spot, but run a load of benchmarks or time tasks and pore over a resulting spreadsheet of figures (WIRED reviewers know how to live) and the gap between the two machines becomes clearer.įPS scores are higher. Meanwhile, Best Buy (Opens in a new tab)'s inventory of the silver version has completely sold out at full price.That last point is important, because it makes this machine more performant than the MacBook Air (above) for sustained, demanding tasks. That's a whole $100 cheaper than the latest MacBook Air's base model (Opens in a new tab), even when you factor in Apple's special Education Pricing.įor comparison's sake, this exact configuration has been priced at $899.99 on Amazon (Opens in a new tab) since late July, per data on the price-tracking site camelcamelcamel (Opens in a new tab) - and even before then, it's only gotten as low as $893.92. 19, you could snag an early 2020 MacBook Air (Opens in a new tab) with 256GB of storage, a 10th-gen Intel Core i5 processor, and a gold finish on sale at Walmart for just $799.99, or 27% off its $1,099 MSRP.

The best place to buy Apple gear this fall continues to be *checks notes* not the Apple Store.Īs of Aug. SAVE $299.01: The gold MacBook Air (early 2020) (Opens in a new tab) with a 1.1GHz Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB RAM, and 256GB of storage is on sale at Walmart for just $799.99 as of Aug.

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