A new MacBook for a new chapter

The last laptop I bought was a Space Grey 13 inch MacBook Pro back in 2017. I got a pretty beefed up model, in terms of its internal specifications, and it’s still creaking along to this day (although Apple had to change that awful keyboard twice but keys continue to stick and it’s generally horrible to type on).

But I haven’t used it for anything serious like work for a long time. For the last five years I’ve instead relied on work laptops, but now that I’m self employed again I found myself on Apple’s website, weighing up the pros and cons of various machines.

Form factor

First up, it was always going to be a MacBook: I have a Studio Display on the standing desk in my home office which I normally work from, but I’m writing this from the dining room table, and I often work from a coffee shop or shared workspace.

Because I like to be mobile, I also wanted the smaller size (13 inches for the Air, 14 for the Pro) as I’ve had a larger laptop in the past (a 16 inch Pro) and it was heavy, too big for train and aeroplane tray tables, and I never really felt like I needed that extra screen space.

Pro or Air

So the next question was: Pro or Air. Aside from my very first Mac (which I’ll tell you about later), I’ve always used Pros, but the M-series Airs are pretty hard to ignore.

In terms of what I do, there’s not much that’s super intensive. The only thing that ever set off the fans on my last work machine (a MacBook Pro with M2 Pro chip) was batch image compression, and that usually just meant a quick tea break until it was finished. The Airs don’t have fans, which means they slow down instead, but I figured I could deal with that throttling on the odd occasion I asked a lot of it. The Air was very much in contention.

Price

The first thing I did was price each machine up:

A top-spec M4 Air with 32GB RAM, 512GB storage, 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, and 16-core Neural Engine came out at £1,599

An equivalent spec M4 Pro came out at £2,000, but the Pros can have Nano-texture displays, which I’d regret not adding, so make it £2,149

That’s a £550 difference, so what would I get for that, aside from the Nano-texture:

1 inch bigger screen

A slightly nicer display

An SD card slot

An HDMI port

USB-C ports on both sides of the laptop

Screen

The screen size and quality didn’t bother me at all. Just the Nano-texture; as tempting as it was, I figured: it’s a laptop; I can move it slightly or shift position if any glare is bothering me.

Ports

I have loads of dongles from the years using my 2017 MacBook, which only had USB-C ports; I spent hundreds of pounds on them. So on the rare occasion where I ever want to plug an SD card in, I can use the dongle.

On the HDMI front, every time I’ve needed to connect to an external display in recent years, there has been a USB-C option. For projectors, HDMI is still around, but I have a dongle!

My biggest issue with my M2 Pro was connecting to my Studio Display. My Thunderbolt cable dangled down on the right side of the laptop, and every time I went to plug in I’d find the SD card slot first. Every. Single. Time. To find the USB-C port, I’d have to bend down under the desk to visually identify it. I wouldn’t miss that SD slot, even if it meant I didn’t have any ports at all on the right side.

Colours

My first Mac was a white polycarbonate model back in, I think, early 2009. They had discontinued the black version the year before and, while I liked my white one a lot, I would have been all over the black one.

Just like with my phones, I’ve always chosen the darkest model which was, until very recently, Space Grey.

The Pros now come in Space Black, and the Airs in Midnight. Both are nice, but Midnight is darker and a more interesting colour. More points for the Air.

Size

Although the 14 inch Pro isn’t large, per se, it’s thicker than the previous Pro model. The new Airs are around the same thickness as my 2017 Pro, and slightly smaller corner-to-corner, so the Air edges the Pro here yet again.

Power

The Air maxed out at the specifications I listed above (although I could have got a bigger hard drive, I suppose), but the Pro has much, much more headroom. It can be beefed up to around the £5k mark, but that’s way beyond anything I’d ever need. But would the maxed-out Air specs be enough?

Can you guess what I bought?

The maxed-out Air felt like it’d be fast enough. I bought it during my notice period, so I still had my decent-spec M2 machine for some side-by-side comparisons. The Air was miles faster, which I hadn’t anticipated.

Paying over £500 for a Pro just for the Nano-texture display would have been a step too far, especially with all the other little up-sides of the Air.

I’m very happy with my new MacBook Air.