Is it really worth spending 300 pounds extra on the macbook pro over the macbook air so this is the base macbook air with the m1 chip eight gigs of ram 256 gigs of storage and we'll set you back a thousand pounds same in dollars whereas this guy is the macbook pro 13 also with an m1 chip also with 8 gigs of ram 256 gigs of storage it's the base model as well and it'll cost you 1300 pounds or 1300 and there really isn't that much difference between them anymore and on paper at least really it comes down to the pro having an extra graphics core a fan a slightly brighter screen bigger battery and better mic and speakers and in favor of the air it's a little bit thinner and lighter and also a fair bit cheaper so let's put these to the test and if we start with the design this shouldn't take too long because you know they're both beautifully well made all aluminium uh one finger opening premium laptops uh with chunky bezels they're pretty familiar by now and arguably getting maybe a little bit dated especially when you compare it to the likes of say the dell xps 13. but crucially we do have the fantastic magic keyboard on both now the Macbook air is 100 grams lighter and tapers in toward the front so it's a little bit sleeker than the pro but we do miss out on the touch bar although personally i don't think that's a great loss they also both come with two Usb 4 ports with thunderbolt 3 support as for the screens well they're exactly the same size same resolution same sharpness and they both support true tone and also as it turns out they're just as color accurate as each other so if you're a photo or video editing and thinking oh i probably need a pro for the more accurate screen nope the air is just as good and i'd be happy to edit on either of them one minor difference though is that the pro actually peaks at 500 nits of brightness whereas the air here maxes out at 400 nits so yes you can see the difference but i don't think it's a real reason to go for one over the other so far so similar then but before we get to performance let's talk about battery life because the pro does actually have a slightly bigger cell inside we've got a 58 watt hour battery in here versus 49.9 in the air and apple claim this will get you an extra couple of hours however in my pretty extensive tests i found it to be neck and neck firstly i ran a long youtube playback test with both laptops set up exactly the same screens measured 150 nits i then left them overnight and in fact the air lasted 10 hours and 10 minutes versus 10 hours and 26 minutes on the pros just 16 minutes longer now i'm not sure how many people watch 10 hours of youtube straight so i wanted to run a slightly more realistic battery drain test as well and so starting with an hour of youtube and then an hour-long zoom call followed by some fortnight streaming a show on apple tv doing some office work in word and google sheets and then finally the best part of an hour doing some video editing in foul cut by which point they both died within literally a couple of minutes of each other there really wasn't much between them it will of course come down to how you use it maybe the programs you use and of course apple do claim that you'll get a little bit more out of the pro but from my experience at least it really is pretty much the same although the pro does charge a little bit quicker although not by as much as you'd think given this has a 61 watt charger to the air's 30 wattbut the big question is how much of a difference does that extra gpu core and also having a fan make in terms of speed and performance over the air well let's get a couple of boring old benchmarks out of the way first and in cinebench r23 there's really nothing between them in single core but interestingly the pro is 12 faster in multi-core then in geekbench 5 cpu test this time both single and multi-core scores are neck and neck although running the opencl graphics test the pro with its extra gpu core takes a 12 lead so why is it then that in geekbench cpu tests these scored pretty much exactly the same but in cinebench this was about 12 faster well i think that all comes down to the fan and because cinebench r23s tests now run for 10 minutes which is much longer than geekbench it takes into account throttling because while they have the exact same processor with the same 3.2 gigahertz clock speed the air has to throttle back sooner to avoid overheating so as i'm sure most of you guys probably guessed the big difference with a pro then comes down to sustained performance how fast it is over longer periods and actually my gaming tests back this up when i ran fortnite for an hour during my battery test i also measured the frame rates along the way and with high settings at full hd to begin with there was only a 4 fps difference but then just 10 minutes later i checked back and the air was now averaging 30 fps a drop of 8 and the pro was on 40 a drop of just 2. so even just with 10 minutes of gaming we see the air lose about 20 of its performance and the pro loses only about five percent although interestingly when i came back to check it again at the full one hour mark they actually hadn't gone down any further so it seems that we do uh see that sort of drop off that throttling on the air particularly within the first sort of 5 10 15 minutes of use sticking with gaming for a minute and i fired up a bit of shadow of the tomb raider and after five repeat runs on both again at full hd high settings the pro held firm at 24 fps whereas the air averaged 22 for the first two cycles but then dropped to 20 for the last three so they're both actually quite capable little light gaming machines although you are still limited by the range of games available on big sur and also there is still some compatibility issues with the m1 chip and games running through rosetta 2. as i mentioned in my macbook versus xps video the other day there's actually a really handy spreadsheet with compatibility and performance in games running on the m1 chip now i suspect most people probably aren't going to spend a whole lot of time gaming on their macbooks so for me at least more importantly is how they perform when it comes to video editing well i loaded up my 10 minute 4k 30 test project in the latest versions of adobe premiere pro davinci resolve studio 17.1 and also final cut pro to test how long the render times were on each for this roughly five gigabyte file in premiere pro the macbook pro was about ten percent faster to export and just six percent quicker in both davinci and final cut anything that puts it under more sustained load you'll see the pro come out further on top what's really interesting though is despite the pro having a fan i could barely hear it even putting my a right up to it while exporting and having just come from some gaming tests i couldn't hear anything and surface temperatures were broadly similar as well the pro was only a couple of degrees cooler now for this bit i need your help tell me if you can hear much of a difference in the audio quality because the pro has what apple call three studio mics versus just presumably three regular mics on the air so while you do that let me give you myexperience on the speakers because again there's only a very small difference but apple says uh the macbook pro has hdr speakers slightly better high dynamic range uh than the air in my experience it's not really noticeable only when i had them side by side volume right up to 100 uh turning up to 11 and i play some music or watch the movie could i hear just a little bit more sort of distortion from the air but it wasn't much and if it weren't side by side i really wouldn't notice so on the one hand you may be thinking that's a little bit disappointing uh that we're not getting more from the pro but then the way i see it is that most people then can get away with buying the cheaper macbook air it all depends on your use case though if you're editing rendering or gaming all day then the 10 to 20 boost in performance with the pro may come in handy although going for the highest spec air with the full eight core gpu chip would certainly narrow the gap between them even more what i'd recommend doing is buying the air for a thousand pounds and then maybe because of the saving from the pro pay 200 pounds extra and either double the ram or double the storage and even then it's still 100 less than the pro so that's what i would do personally but what do you reckon which one would you go for or none of the above let me know in the comments below
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