Which macbook pro

Yes, you can play serious video games on the Mac now. It's impressive. Size and weight: The inch MacBook Air and Pro are only distinguished by the Air's wedge shape and slightly lighter weight. The MacBook Pro 3. Unsurprisingly, the inch MacBook Pro — which is a heavier 4. To find the best MacBook, we run each through our gauntlet of benchmarks and real-world tests, and then use them as our main computer for as well.

Only then are we comfortable recommending them or not for your purchase. We use a Klein KA colorimeter to test each MacBook's screen to find its average brightness and color quality so we don't just assume Apple's ratings are correct. When it comes to general performance, we use the Geekbench 5 CPU performance benchmark, and time how long the Macs will take to transcode a 4K video to p.

Then, we run our custom battery test to see how long each MacBook at nits of brightness can last browsing the web over Wi-Fi until it runs out of juice. We've tested various computer games on MacBooks, with Civilization VI being one of our current favorites to run.

Alex Wawro is a lifelong tech and games enthusiast with more than a decade of experience covering both for outlets like Game Developer, Black Hat, and PC World magazine.

He currently serves as a senior editor at Tom's Guide covering all things computing, from laptops and desktops to keyboards and mice. Included in this guide: 1. The best MacBook for you and your needs is a tricky thing to figure out, especially now that Apple is rolling out new MacBook Pro models with entirely new processors and a different design.

Image 1 of 4. Image 2 of 4. Image 3 of 4. Image 4 of 4. MacBook Air with M1. Specifications Display: CPU: Apple M1. Weight: 2. Reasons to avoid - Still has thick bezels - Light on ports. Image 1 of 7. Image 2 of 7. Image 3 of 7. Image 4 of 7. Image 5 of 7. But over the past year, many apps—like Adobe Lightroom and Google Chrome—have made M1 versions available, so you shouldn't have a problem.

If you're worried your favorite app might not work, do some research and scour forums to see if an M1 version is available, or if the x86 version runs just fine. The MacBook Air lasted me more than a full workday, with the battery hitting 22 percent after I ran it almost nonstop from 9 am to 7 pm using Safari and work apps like Slack.

I had to plug in the previous Intel model by 4 pm. M1 machines also can instantly wake up from sleep whenever you tap the keyboard or trackpad or lift the screen, just like when you tap your iPhone or iPad to wake it up. That's a stark difference from older MacBooks that took several seconds to light up. There's also no fan in the MacBook Air, meaning it remains whisper-quiet even under the heaviest loads.

There is a thermal heat spreader to dissipate heat, but it also never gets too warm. It comes with gigabytes of storage, but you can upgrade to another model with an extra graphics core and gigs. Unless you need more storage, the extra core isn't worth the jump in price. My biggest gripes with this machine?

The p webcam isn't great, and M1 Macs only natively support one external monitor. There are some workarounds you can employ to connect it to multiple displays. Apple didn't play it safe with its newest MacBook Pro In addition to a inch version, the company is also offering a inch model for the first time ever.

We haven't tested them yet, but they're the ones to buy if you've been waiting for the most powerful MacBook with Apple's silicon.

Both screens are larger than their chassis— Yep, you heard that right. The new and improved p webcam sits in a notch at the top-center of the display, but there's no Face ID here, just Touch ID baked into the keyboard.

That said, the menu bar that flanks the notch doesn't eat into your or inch screen space. It'll all feel a great deal smoother too, because Apple added ProMotion, which enables a Hz refresh rate.

You can read more about it here. The best part of these two new MacBooks? Apple had erased the pesky Touch Bar for a row of physical function keys instead, and you finally get more ports. This is the first time a MacBook has had this many ports since Additional perks include microphones that are decent enough for recording a podcast, a six-speaker sound system, and the return of the MagSafe charging port, which lets you magnetically connect the charger to the MacBook Pro.

You can still charge it via USB-C. You can feel safe in knowing that the MacBook won't fly off your desk when you trip over the wire. You have the option to outfit them with either the M1 Pro or the M1 Max processors, which we go into in detail below. We'll update this section soon, once we've put these chips to the test. The inch MacBook Pro with M1 sits in an awkward spot. It isn't dramatically speedier than the MacBook Air. It has a fan that lets the processor get a little warmer and eke out more power over a longer period of time.

So if you're working on pro-level tasks like video editing but can't spend the premium Apple charges for its bigger Pro models, then this is a great laptop. Other perks include improved speakers and microphones, a slightly brighter inch screen, longer battery life, and a Touch Bar at the top of the keyboard if you consider that a perk.

The whole thing is slightly heavier than the MacBook Air 3 pounds versus 2. Is it also strange that Apple is leaning into display notches as branding elements on both the MacBook and iPhone, allowing them to be distinctively Apple products without having to put logos anywhere?

That seems clearer than ever, actually. This display is way more interesting than the notch, though. That means blacks can get really black on this display — up to a million to one contrast ratio, just like an OLED screen. But you have to go looking for it — in this YouTube torture test , you can see the backlight chasing this little square around the screen.

And just like the Pro Display XDR, it can reach a peak brightness of 1, nits, with a sustained brightness of 1, nits. The rest of the system is the same as every other MacBook Pro and runs at a max of nits. If you have a newer iPhone, you already know what this looks like: you open a photo, and it brightens up. I asked Apple about this; the company confirmed that the XDR system is content-dependent and designed to run at nits for most tasks.

The good part is that all of this works really well: HDR video works in every app I tried, including YouTube in Chrome and Safari, and it looks terrifically bright with great colors and saturation.

But I could only just barely see the improvement that Hz offers in normal, non-gaming use, and only when really looking. All in all, this display looks great, and a little minor blooming is a fine tradeoff for these black levels.

Lastly, the speakers on these new MacBook Pros are terrific. The first thing we did with these when we got them was open up a video to check out the new displays, but the first thing we noticed was that the speakers are so good. They are clear and crisp, with some actual low-end from four woofers, and they get super loud. Apple has three kinds of processor cores — efficiency, performance, and GPU — and all the M1 chips are different combinations of those exact same cores with unified memory between them.

For example: the inch MacBook Pro we tested last year had a regular M1 with four efficiency cores, four high-performance cores, and eight GPU cores.

The M1 Pro and M1 Max change that around a little, with two efficiency cores and up to eight high-performance cores. Again, those GPU cores are the same on all the chips — you just get more of them as you go up the range, along with things like faster memory with higher total limits and additional specialized video encoders.

And… it turns out that adding a bunch of cores and specialized video encoders makes these chips incredibly fast for creative work. The synthetic benchmarks we ran were extremely impressive. The only computers that even come close are desktops that use vastly more power. Things will be the same for an office workload or anything CPU-bound, but the Max has a clear advantage if you have specific GPU-optimized workloads.

Of course, synthetic benchmarks only tell part of the story, so to see how well a laptop performs a real-world task, we ran an export of the same five-minute, second 4K video clip in Adobe Premiere Pro.

I also gave the machines to Verge senior video director Alix Diaconis to edit and use them for a week to see how they worked for our real video production needs. Premiere ran smoothly with 4K footage — on both the inch and inch M1 Pro machines, I could play back the timeline at full resolution at 2x speed. But to no surprise, when I added graphics and adjustment layers with color, Premiere started dropping frames. It was minor, but after 20 seconds a frame or two would drop.

There was also a short but noticeable lag from hitting the spacebar to the timeline actually playing. It was about one second, as if the computer was thinking before it played. Overall, the editing experience was very similar to my regular work machine, a inch iMac from with an eight-core Intel Core i9, 64GB of RAM, and a Radeon Pro x graphics card; the M1 Pro machines were actually choppier during 2x timeline playback.

It did slow down with big graphics, though.