Apple’s latest MacBook Pros were announced on Monday, October 18th and start shipping on Tuesday the 26th. Naturally, I ordered one, and I was lucky enough to get a Tuesday delivery date.

I deliberated for about 45 minutes before I submitted my order, and even then I wasn’t sure if I should. I told myself I wasn’t going to upgrade because my M1 MacBook Air is just so good. It’s thin and light, it has amazing battery life, I’ve never experienced the slightest slowdown, it has no fan so it’s completely silent…it’s nearly perfect. Then I saw the MacBook Pro.

I opted for the base-level 14-inch MacBook Pro. While some of the specs look similar to the M1, it’s still going to be a pretty great upgrade. Here’s how it compares to my Air.

M1 vs M1 Pro

At first glance, the base-level M1 Pro doesn’t look like a big upgrade over the M1 because they both have 8-core CPUs. What makes the M1 Pro “pro” is that it has 6 performance cores and 2 efficiency cores, while the M1 has 4 of each. That shift towards performance is what will give the MacBook Pro an edge in overall speed while still offering a high level of efficiency.

For my MacBook Air, I opted for the upgraded M1 with the 8-core GPU (graphics processing unit). This is where the base M1 Pro shines, because it has a 14-core GPU. I haven’t been doing much graphics-intensive work on my Air, but in the event that I do, those extra cores will be nice to have.

I also went for the upgraded 16GB of RAM in my Air, which is the same amount as the base MacBook Pro. This is another spec that looks the same on paper, but the upgrade is more subtle. The MacBook Air’s memory bandwidth is somewhere around 68 GB/s, while the Pro gets 200 GB/s. Even though it’s the same pool of memory, it can be accessed much faster so it’s even more efficient.

The M1 Pro can be configured with a 10-core CPU (8 performance, 2 efficiency), 16-core GPU, and 32GB of RAM, but all of that seemed like overkill for my usage (and my budget).

The 14-inch MacBook Pro can also be configured with the new M1 Max, with a 10-core CPU, up to 32-core GPU, and 64GB of RAM. Some of these specs are just mind-boggling.

The Rest

Display

The new smaller MacBook Pro has a 14.2-inch Liquid Retina XDR display with ProMotion, which is a whole lot of marketing terms crammed together. What it means is that the screen gets much brighter, looks even more crisp, and offers much smoother motion.

The Air has 227 pixels per inch, while the Pro has 254 PPI.
The Pro’s display is mini-LED, which obviously means the LEDs are much smaller and there are more of them. This allows for more local dimming zones, creating a more dynamic display with truer blacks.
The MacBook Pro can reach a sustained brightness of 1,000 nits, with peak brightness of 1,600 nits for HDR content. For SDR content, it reaches 500 nits. The MacBook Air only reaches 400 nits of sustained brightness, which is the only aspect of that computer that I don’t like.
While the MacBook Air’s display has a static 60Hz refresh rate, ProMotion on the MacBook Pro dynamically adjusts the refresh rate from 24Hz all the way up to 120Hz depending on what’s happening on the screen. This alone is a massive upgrade, because once you’re used to a high refresh display, it’s hard to go back. Now that my big iPads and my iPhone have ProMotion, it’s jarring to use a device that doesn’t have it, like the new iPad mini. That said, some people don’t even notice it. For me, the test is whether or not you can read text as you’re scrolling. On a plain 60Hz screen, text gets a little too blurry when it’s scrolling by too quickly. At 120Hz (or whatever dynamically faster rate it chooses), it’s easy to continue reading or skimming text as it whizzes by. I can’t wait to see what it looks like on a 14-inch laptop.
And of course, the display on my new MacBook Pro is just plain bigger, at 14.2 inches vs. the Air’s 13.3 inches.

We can’t talk about the display without mentioning the most polarizing thing about these new Macs: the notch. Yes, like the latest iPhones, the new MacBook Pro has a notch in the top of the display that houses the FaceTime HD camera, ambient light sensor, and indicator light so you know when the camera is activated. There’s a vocal minority of people that are wasting a lot of energy hating this notch.

In my opinion hatred of the notch, especially on these laptops, is misguided. What people seem to be forgetting (or choosing to ignore because it makes for better clickbait headlines) is that the notch doesn’t take up any usable screen space. While it may seem as though it’s protruding into the display, it’s actually the opposite. The screen has grown larger, pushing up into the bezels, so you’re getting more overall display space than before. They just needed somewhere to put the camera. In normal display mode, the notch only covers the center of the Mac’s menu bar, and it gets hidden by black bars on either side of it in full-screen mode.

In fact, developers have the option to take advantage of that extra space in full screen mode, so I’m really interested to see what they come up with.

There will be a small number of people who have a ton of icons extended across their menu bar, so I’m curious to see how macOS deals with that, but the vast majority of people will not be affected in the least.

Ports

When the MacBook Pro was redesigned in 2016, it created the meme of living the dongle life. Every Mac laptop since then has only offered USB-C ports for connectivity and charging, so everything else required some sort of adapter (USB-A, HDMI, and SD cards, to name a few). 5 years later, Apple has reverted and added back some of the connectivity that people missed. Now you get a full-size HDMI port, SD card slot, three Thunderbolt 4 ports (USB-C connections), and even the return of MagSafe for charging. MagSafe was sorely missed for some because it added the peace of mind that, if someone tripped over your charging cable, it would release effortlessly without yanking your laptop to the ground. Plus, it provides an at-a-glance status of your charge level and a nice new braided cable.

The cool thing is that these new laptops also support charging over USB-C, and the MagSafe cable connects to the power brick with USB-C, so it’s detachable. I’m excited to have MagSafe around the house for when our pug gets the zoomies and runs around like a madman, but for travel, I can still bring a single USB-C cable to charge my laptop and my iPads with the same power brick. It’s the best of all worlds.

Oh, and it does still have a headphone jack that I’ll never use. This one supports high-impedance studio-quality headphones, which will be nice for on-the-go audio pros.

Camera

Finally…FINALLY…an Apple laptop has a 1080p FaceTime camera. The MacBook Air’s 720p camera is fine, and it does use the M1’s image signal processor to tune the image to look much better than past 720p FaceTime cameras, but it’s no substitute for full HD. The only thing missing is the new Center Stage feature from the latest iPads, but I don’t envision myself walking around while on a FaceTime call anyways. And my iPad mini has Center Stage, so it’s all good.

Audio

Both the 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros have a six-speaker sound system with force-cancelling woofers that support wide stereo and spatial audio. In short, the sound will be great. I already experienced a similar sound system (minus spatial audio) with my last Intel 16-inch MacBook Pro, so it’ll be nice to have again. Plus, the new Macs get the “studio-quality” three-mic array with high signal-to-noise ratio and directional beamforming…so coupled with the new FaceTime camera, I’ll look and sound amazing on video calls.

Function keys

Another big headline of these new MacBook Pros is that they’ve dropped the Touch Bar in favor of full-size function keys. The MacBook Air has a row of narrow function keys, so I’m already used to having them, but Touch Bar users should be aware that it’s officially dead.

Storage

I’m not upgrading here, but I might as well mention it. The base model 14-inch MacBook Pro comes with 512GB of storage, which is the same as my higher-tier MacBook Air.

The crazy thing is, the Pro can be configured all the way up to 8TB. Yes…8 terabytes of storage in a laptop. Video professionals rejoice.

Drawbacks

Not all of the grass is greener on the Pro side. A few trade-offs that I’m making are:

Size and Weight

The 14-inch MacBook Pro is actually a hair thinner than the MacBook Air at its thickest point, but the Air’s wedge shape makes it sleeker. This Pro is also about a half-inch larger in width and depth, and it weighs 3.5 pounds vs. the Air’s 2.8 pounds. It’s not much, but it’s something.

Battery Life

Apple’s battery ratings are pretty general, but based on those alone, the MacBook Pro may not last as long on a single charge as the MacBook Air. Here are the specs:

MacBook Air
- Up to 15 hours wireless web
- Up to 18 hours Apple TV app movie playback
MacBook Pro
- Up to 11 hours wireless web
- Up to 17 hours Apple TV app movie playback

So yeah, battery life may not be quite as great, but it’s still pretty great. I’m never far from my charger, so I’m not too worried about it.

Price

This isn’t really a trade-off since I’m not deciding between the two devices, but if you are, it’s something to consider. My MacBook Air configuration cost $1,449, while the base model 14-inch MacBook Pro that I ordered is $1,999 (that’s $550 more in case you didn’t want to think too hard).

Yes, $1,999 is expensive. The reason for the high price is that this thing is packed with new technology that involved lots of research and development, and a company that invests that heavily in a product needs to pay off those costs. I would expect the entry price for these things to come down with the next revision in a couple of years.

But in comparison, in 2016, I paid $2,199 for a then-brand-new 13-inch MacBook Pro. It had a dual core Intel i5 processor (gross), integrated Intel Iris graphics (yikes), 720p FaceTime camera, 16GB of (much slower) RAM and a 512GB SSD. And it had the infamous butterfly keyboard. Looking at it through that lens, $1,999 in 2021 dollars is a hell of a bargain for this much technology.

So, why?

Why did I decide to buy the new MacBook Pro when I clearly love my MacBook Air? Honestly, I’m not really sure. I don’t need any of the upgrades I mentioned. I haven’t been taking photos like I thought I would when I bought my nice Nikon camera. I edited one video last year, but even still, I have my 2020 iMac with a much larger screen that’s excellent for video editing.

Sometimes, new tools bring with them greater inspiration. Maybe this bigger, brighter HDR screen and SD slot will make me want to get out and take more photos because I’ll know that the editing process will be easier and more enjoyable. Maybe having this incredible graphics processing power will make me want to shoot more videos just so I can play around with Final Cut Pro’s new capabilities. Who knows?

At the very least, I knew I’d have lots of people asking me questions about these new Macs, so it makes sense that I should use one. Yeah…let’s go with that.

So let me know your questions!

My New MacBook Pro