Buying a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro? I'm confused and don't know which one to buy.

Apple offers a variety of options in the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro lines, covering a wide range of prices. This is the model you should buy based on how much you want to spend.

The launch of Apple Silicon Macs has Apple adding its chip designs to the 13-inch MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, with the M1 chip being labeled as Apple's entry-level introduction to the shift away from Intel processors. Almost halfway through its self-imposed timeline, Apple is extending its use of Apple Silicon to its other MacBook Pro models.

The launch of the 14-inch MacBook Pro and 16-inch MacBook Pro not only adds new chips in the form of M1 Pro and M1 Max, but also changes the design of the products themselves. Sure, they still look like MacBook Pros, but there are a lot of tweaks and tweaks that redefine what the product is.

With more chip choices and range expansion, consumers now need to do more research before spending money on any of the latest models. Depending on how much you want to pack into your next notebook, you can choose between several different models at once.

Overall Price Range

Looking at the overall range of MacBook Air or MacBook Pro you can buy from Apple, the company seems to have the same maximizing price point coverage with its iPhones. You can buy a portable Mac for anywhere from as little as $999 to as much as $6,099.

Just looking at the overall picture, you can tell there are two general levels of devices, with the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro making up the value end, with a bit of crossover between the 13-inch and 14-inch MacBooks The Pro ranges from $2,000 to $2,299, followed by the M1 Pro and M1 Max models.

This seemingly built-in division does effectively divide the range into lower and upper tiers, but we’ll look at it from three different positions: below $2,000, $2,000 to $2,500, and above $2,500 Dollar.

Storage Issues

One thing we have to address right away is that the bars on the 14-inch MacBook Pro and 16-inch MacBook Pro are much longer.

Unlike the iPhone, the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro offer a variety of elements that can be configured to the buyer's preference at the time of purchase. While this can be inferred that the varieties have expanded in range, the reason for the extra bar length pretty much boils down to one thing: storage costs.

The MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro both offer up to 2 TB of storage. That's a lot, but you can go even bigger, all the way up to 8 TB, on the 14-inch and 16-inch models.

In fact, the cost of storage at the higher tiers is so high that even if all other elements of the configuration are the same, you can see a price difference of up to $2,400 between the lowest and highest storage capacities. That means you can more than double the cost of the cheapest 14-inch MacBook Pro simply by switching storage from 512GB to 8TB.

MacBook Air and Pro price ranges, showing how much extreme storage adds cost.

This diagram illustrates the problem, the lighter part refers to all configuration possibilities for storage at 2TB or less, including maxing out all other specs and more modest settings. The darker bars are the price ranges that are only achievable by setting storage above 2TB.

We're not saying there's no reason for anyone to configure so much on a MacBook Pro. Given the potential for higher models to be used in creative industries that rely on massive amounts of storage, and the apparent lack of the ability to manually upgrade storage, there may be a legitimate rationale for getting so much storage from the get-go.

Conveniently, Apple charges the same for storage upgrades:

• 256GB to 512G is $200.
• 512GB to 1TB is $200.
• 1TB to 2TB is $400.
• 2TB to 4TB is $600.
• 4TB to 8TB is $1,200.

More cost-conscious customers may be inclined to spend less on upper-tier storage volumes and prefer to use external storage drives to replace the reduced capacity.

This is something to consider as we look through the price ranges, especially on the pricier end.

Under $2,000 - MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro

The MacBook Air is probably the best value on the list.

Arguably the easiest of the three categories to deal with is whether your expenses are $2,000 or less. In fact, if you're spending less than $1,299, you're looking at the base 13-inch MacBook Air.

At $999 it’s the cheapest model, and it’s the only one you can get until the 13-inch MacBook Pro becomes a $1,299 option. For the lowest price, you can get the 8-core M1 with a 7-core GPU, 8GB of unified memory, and 256GB of storage.

Priced at $1,199, you can choose between 16GB of RAM or a 512GB SSD, as they're both great additions to the base configuration.

It gets a little trickier when we hit $1,299, as the 13-inch MacBook Pro adds a few elements that might make it a higher priority than the MacBook Air. These include getting a better 8-core GPU, as well as the Touch Bar and Touch ID, adding biometrics that the MacBook Air doesn't have.

The 13-inch MacBook Pro's $300 premium comes with another thing the MacBook Air doesn't have, and that's extra cooling. The MacBook Air doesn't have a fan, while the Pro does.

Admittedly, this is pretty academic, as anyone who really needs performance will be looking at the newer M1 Pro and Max instead of the M1, but the MacBook Pro at least offers the opportunity to chill out a bit.

For what you get for the extra $300 on the 13-inch MacBook Pro, it doesn’t seem worth it overall. At $1,299, you're probably better off pocketing that $100 and having double the RAM or double the storage on the Air instead of the bells and whistles of the 13-inch Pro.

Better yet, spend $100 more and get both 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage on the Air, and you'll probably be better served than buying a base MacBook Pro.

The same argument can be made across the entire price range, and the upgraded MacBook Air may be more valuable in the long run than a comparably priced 13-inch MacBook Pro.

At the top end of this section is the $2,049 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM and 2TB of storage. The closest thing to this is the 13-inch MacBook Pro's $1,899 16GB RAM and 1TB configuration, since you can't get 2TB cheaply without spending an extra $100 and dropping the RAM to 8GB.

$2,000 to $2,500 - 13-inch MacBook Pro, 14-inch MacBook Pro, 16-inch MacBook Pro

Overall, the 14-inch MacBook Pro is probably a better deal than the 13-inch model.

After proving to be largely irrelevant in the sub-$2,000 price range, the story appears to continue between $2,000 and $2,500. That's because it's where the new model comes into play.

For $1,999, you can get the cheapest 14-inch MacBook Pro, which comes with an 8-core version of the M1 Pro, a 14-core GPU, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage. That's before you consider the higher resolution and larger screen, as well as the Mini LED backlighting that offers superior brightness.

Then there’s performance, the M1 Pro uses six high-performance cores and two efficiency cores, an even split from the M1. Additionally, the GPU also has more cores than the eight in the 13-inch MacBook Pro, and there are more ports available, so it's hard to justify the 13-inch at this level.

The only positives about the 13-inch MacBook Pro are its slightly smaller size, lack of a notch, inclusion of the Touch Bar removed from newer models, and storage space. You can get 1TB of SSD storage and 16GB of RAM on the 13-inch for $1,899, while the 14-inch has 512GB for $1,999.

Moving up to the largest 13-inch you can configure, the 16GB RAM and 2TB model costs $2,299. For $100 less, you can get the 16GB/1TB version of the 14-inch. For $200 more, or $2,399, you can even upgrade the model to the 10-core version of the M1 Pro.

Over $2,400 - Screen sizes, M1 Pro and M1 Max

You should focus more on performance than storage, even at the high end of the scale.

When you take the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro out of the equation, the choice becomes both easier and harder. On the one hand, the fundamentals of the two models are the same, with the same ports, styling, and general internals and configuration options.

Even with these chips, the chip options for the Pro and Max come down to whether you want 8 or 10 cores in the Pro's CPU, how many GPU cores you want, and whether you want more memory bandwidth, and whether you need more hardware acceleration help with video encoding and decoding.

At first, the decision is easy, since you're still looking at the $2,399 14-inch 8-core M1 Pro with 512GB of storage and an upgrade to 32GB of unified memory. Instead of upgrading the memory, you can buy a 10-core M1 Pro and 1TB of storage for the same cost, and the features are easy to mix and match since they're on the lower-cost end of the spectrum.

$2,499 Screen size becomes an issue because that's where the cheapest 16-inch MacBook Pro comes into play, with the 10-core M1 Pro, 14-core GPU, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage. For the same cost, you can opt for the 14-inch model with a 16-core GPU version of the M1 Pro, 16GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage.

The battle of trade-offs between more screen and a bit of a spec bump, until you get the first M1 Max option, a 14-inch MacBook Pro with a 24-core GPU, 32GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage, for sale Price $2,899.

At this point, the performance gains you'll get come from how much memory you get, the graphics improvements from the number of GPU cores, the increased memory bandwidth, and the additional media engines your video editor uses to encode and decode bit lens.

Granted, the addition of a media engine is only a benefit for video productions that use clips and media heavily, but other elements deserve a closer look for most users.

For the same cost, you can get the 14-inch 10-core, 16-core GPU M1 Pro with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, but you might decide that the M1 Max's better performance is worth it.

You can get the M1 Pro, 16GB and 1TB 16-inch MacBook Pro for $2,699, or swap out the 512GB for 32GB of RAM for $2,899, but then you compare screen size to performance. Then again, the 14-inch M1 Max might be worth more.

When the 16-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Max launches, the base configuration will cost $3,099 and give you 24 GPU cores, 32GB of memory, and 512GB of storage. For the same cost, this is the base M1 Pro version with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, but given the reduction in cores and performance, that seems like enough to warrant the storage trade-off.

The $3,499 14-inch MacBook Pro tops out the memory and M1 Max configurations, with a 32-core GPU but 512GB of storage. This is definitely the performance option, but you can drop the memory to 32GB to get a more usable 1TB of storage and save $200.

If you decide the extra $200 is worth the two-inch screen, the 16-inch Sacrifice Edition is also $3,499.

For around $4,000, the smart money would be to buy the full-bore 32-core GPU version of the M1 Pro, along with 64GB of RAM. You can get 1TB of available storage for $3,899 for the 16-inch model, or go a little higher to $4,099 for 2TB of storage.

At over $4,000, the decision comes down to whether you want more storage or value a bigger screen. At least that's the case until, at $5,899, this is the most expensive 14-inch MacBook Pro you can buy. The 16-inch model costs slightly more at $6,099.

Feature Recommendations

The general advice when purchasing a MacBook of any description is to base your purchasing decision on a lack of upgradeability. Customers looking to buy a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro will have to settle for whatever they configure at checkout, and they'll have few other options.

One of the options is to replace one unit with another with specifications that match your needs, i.e. sell or trade your old unit for a new model. In addition to the costs involved, you also have to deal with the hassle of data transfer and resetting everything.

Perhaps one of the easiest non-intrusive upgrades is to get an external drive. This gives your MacBook more storage space, connected via one of the Thunderbolt ports, although it does let you take it with you and remember to connect the drive when you want to use it.

Given this, the best advice is to spec your MacBook Pro based on performance rather than storage. If you have enough power to get the job done and can use an external drive as overflow storage, it might be worth it to buy a better M1 chip or extra memory rather than buying a storage block.

You can always add more storage outside. You won't be able to do anything with processing or graphics capabilities or even memory without replacing the entire machine.

Determine where your Mac's future computing needs will be and purchase as close to that as possible. If possible, sacrifice storage space or screen size first.

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