Poll: *** The official 2020 MacBook Air/13" MacBook Pro thread (it has the M1 chip and everything!) ***

What 2020 Apple Silicon notebook have you ordered?

  • MacBook Air

    Votes: 72 70.6%

  • 13" MacBook Pro

    Votes: 30 29.4%
  • Total voters
    102
Feek said:
Why not get one from Apple and try it. Then if you decide you want one, send it back within a fortnight and buy one from JL instead.
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Because JL are doing a 0% deal so getting it that way.

Let's be honest, I've had the Air for 8 years now so I know all about the OS and what both machines will be all about. I guess it's purely down to whether the Pro is worth the extra outlay.

It gets used for Photoshop when I do the occasional bit of graphic design work and then for general use.
 
BMox81 said:
Because JL are doing a 0% deal so getting it that way.

Let's be honest, I've had the Air for 8 years now so I know all about the OS and what both machines will be all about. I guess it's purely down to whether the Pro is worth the extra outlay.

It gets used for Photoshop when I go the occasional bit of graphic design work and then for general use.
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Apple do 0% as well.
 
I’d wait anyway, while the current air and the pro are highly likely to continue in their current forms, the fabled M1X/M2 may show up in a 14” form factor and you may decide you want that.

The next event can only be a few weeks away and given we’ve already had iMacs, iPads and iPhones this year, there isn’t a lot else to announce updates for.
 
BMox81 said:
I can't decide.

Head and literally every YouTube video says to get the M1 Air, yet I've currently got a 2013 Air so feel it would be a case of same old.

Yet the heart is saying get the Pro.
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Get the Air. It’ll be a significant improvement over your current model. I personally don’t think the 13” Pro is worth the extra.
 
Macbook Pro owner since 2011 here. I have two that I run in the household, they are about 3 years old.

Just a little note to say I trialled the 2021 Macbook Air M1, Macbook Pro M1 side-by-side and I would definatley go with the Macbook Air for this generation. I could not see the reason for the Pro, which says much about how far Apple have let the Pro fall.

Out of the two, I then decided to run the Air alongside a refurbished Dell XPS13 (2021), 1165G7, 4k Touchscreen, 1TB, 16GB RAM with no OLED, the Air has gone back for now as I managed to snag the Dell for 800inc Vat. and I will await to see what Apple do in 2022.
 
Lol, I got the Pro. Love it. Significant upgrade in every form. So quick and I’m a big fan of the Touch Bar from what I’ve used of it so far.
 
I bought a Pro and Air at the same time from Apple with the intention of keeping just one of them. I kept the Air and the Pro went back.

For my use case there was absolutely no difference in performance that I could notice and I didn't much like the touch bar so I saved a few £ and kept the Air.
 
If you will use the extra grunt of the pro, get the pro, if you wont then get the air.

People saying that there is no point to the pro over the air are either not power users or they are so used to the difference between pro and air being huge that they can't understand how good the new air is. The new pro is amazing but so is the air. Both of them are mind boggling fast for almost ever normal user task that its easy to think the pro isn't pro. It is, the M1 chip is just so damned good that it chews through most tasks so easily that there is no discernible difference for most users.

I moved from a 16" MBP to a 13" M1 pro and it blows the 16" out of the water in every respect apart from its ability to run multiple monitors. Even then you can hack together a multi display setup for it and now I don't have to listen to a jet taking off when I have 2 monitors connected to my mac.
 
fez said:
If you will use the extra grunt of the pro, get the pro, if you wont then get the air.
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What extra grunt? It’s the same CPU. The Pro benefits from active cooling so will be a little bit quicker for long running high CPU tasks but that’s it.
 
fez said:
That extra grunt. If your running CPU intensive tasks then it doesn't matter how good your CPU is if its throttling.
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Various tests have shown the difference to be quite small and it's only going to be in certain situations. For regular day to day use they are exactly the same in terms of grunt.
 
ChrisD. said:
Various tests have shown the difference to be quite small and it's only going to be in certain situations. For regular day to day use they are exactly the same in terms of grunt.
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I thought it was a reasonable difference under heavy load but you've clearly done the research so I'm happy to be wrong. They are quite amazing little machines.
 
fez said:
I thought it was a reasonable difference under heavy load but you've clearly done the research so I'm happy to be wrong. They are quite amazing little machines.
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it’s only if that heavy load is sustained for about 6mins or more and by heavy load we are talking about 100% pinned CPU usage. After about 6 mins it throttles back but not by much at all.

On the pro there isn’t any throttling at all, that’s the only difference along side 1 GPU core. That mainly only impacts stuff like rendering, simulation etc.

For the vast majority of people, there is no discernible difference in performance.
 
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