


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. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play
