The MacBook Air has officially caught up. Now with the M3 on board, the MacBook Air has gained the benefits of the new chip, which was previously available just on the MacBook Pro and iMac.
Choosing between the M3 15-inch MacBook Air and the 14-inch MacBook Pro is tough, and requires an in-depth look at differences in ports, displays, speakers, and more. It’s a legitimately hard decision to make.
But there’s more general advice at play here that should guide the majority of buying decisions, and it comes down to really just one principle: be honest.
Look, I’m not going to convince you to take your budget more seriously. There will always be people who think something is better just because it costs more money. If you’re already convinced about spending as much money as possible, I can’t help you.
But given the number of people I see carrying around MacBook Pros makes me think there’s a general misconception out there about the two laptop lines. Or, put another way, people aren’t aware of just how good the MacBook Air has become. And if they were being honest with themselves, they’d realize that they’re probably better off buying the MacBook Air.
With the M3, the MacBook Air has become a very capable laptop. The GPU, in particular, has really become impressive in this latest generation, improving graphics performance by as much as 43% from the M2. It’s really that big of a jump.
But even if you go with the cheaper M2 model, which is still being sold by Apple, I have a feeling you’re going to be pleasantly surprised by just how good the performance really is. That doesn’t mean that it’ll compete head-to-head with laptops with discrete graphics like the ROG Zephyrus G14, but for what it is, I was certainly impressed in my own testing. You can even run a surprising amount of AAA games on this thing.
I was also impressed at how well it performed in video editing as tested in PugetBench. It’s a compact, fanless laptop, and yet it earned a higher score in the PugetBench Premiere Pro test than the Dell XPS 14 with its RTX 4050 GPU.
What that means, in the end, is that so long as you’re not a professional video editor, music producer, or developer, the MacBook Air will even handle some of your creative hobbies quite well. The only people who will actually appreciate the performance of the M3 Pro or Max MacBook Pro are those who are running Premiere or Pro Tools all day. My only advice is that if you do want to dabble in some heavier applications, make sure to upgrade to 16GB of RAM.
There are three major advantages of the MacBook Air. Obviously, the price is the primary advantage. The 13-inch MacBook Air starts at just $999 and comes with the M2 chip, while the M3 model comes in at $100 more. Not only does the 14-inch MacBook Pro not offer a cheaper configuration with 8GB of RAM, but it also starts with a 10-core GPU in the base configuration. So, that makes the 14-inch MacBook Pro implicitly more expensive. Throw in the fact that the M2 MacBook Air is currently selling Buy at Best Buy , and you have a pretty killer deal.
But putting price aside, the MacBook Air has a couple of other benefits. First off, it’s significantly more compact than the MacBook Pro. That’s especially true for the 13-inch model. The 14-inch MacBook Pro is 28% thicker and 21% heavier than the 13-inch MacBook Air — and takes up less space on the table. If you plan to travel with your laptop a lot, the MacBook Air has the clear advantage.
Secondly, the MacBook Air is completely fanless. That means it’s silent — no matter what. Even if you’re attempting to play games, the MacBook Air never makes a peep. It’s kind of magical from that perspective, especially given just how fast it really is.
Now, I can’t put all that out there without mentioning the many advantages the MacBook Pro has over the Air. Its screen is brighter and more vibrant, the speakers are better, and it comes with significantly more ports. For plenty of people, those are must-have features. But if they’re more ancillary features for you, you’ll want to take a serious look at whether they’re actually worth the extra cash — and heft.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.