The Touch Bar is an incredibly useful tool for streamlining creative workflows, and its functionality is only expanding with more and more apps providing support.
You'll get a few more advanced features with the MacBook Pro M1 13-inch for that premium, starting with the Touch Bar, and a brighter screen.īoth of these extra features are very much on brand with the MacBook Pro M1 13-inch. So, what exactly makes the MacBook Pro M1 13-inch worth up to $300 more than the MacBook Air M1, especially when there isn’t a huge difference in the internals core specs?
Upgrade options for this configuration are the same as those of the Air’s as well. That means you’re paying £200/$200/AU$400 more for mostly the same specs, except for its storage, which is doubled. It gets you the Apple M1 Chip with an 8-Core CPU and 8-Core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine, 8GB RAM, and 256GB of storage, and the same upgrade options as the Air.įor this laptop’s highest M1 configuration, you’ll be paying £1,499/$1,499/AU$1,999.
Meanwhile, the MacBook Pro M1 13-inch’s base configuration costs £1,299/$1,299. You’re essentially paying £250/$250/AU$400 more for a little extra graphics power and twice the storage. Similarly, its highest configuration will cost you £1,249/$1,249/$1,999 for a M1 Chip with an 8-Core CPU and 8-Core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine, 8GB RAM, and 512GB of storage. If you’d like to configure this base model to meet your needs, it’ll cost you £200/$200/AU$300 for 16GB RAM, and anywhere from £200/$200/$300 to £800/$800/AU$1,200 to get up to 2TB of storage space. Only this time, it comes with Apple’s M1 Chip with an 8‑Core CPU and 7‑Core GPU, and 16-core Neural Engine, as well as 8GB RAM and 256GB of storage. The MacBook Air M1 will still set you back £999/$999/AU$1,599 for its base configuration, like its early 2020 predecessor.
For more CPU-intensive tasks, however, the 8GB RAM model isn't that far behind.MacBook users looking to upgrade will be happy to learn the good news: despite the M1 chip promising a huge performance boost over its Intel rivals, the price tag for both laptops remain unchanged. For activities that require more memory, like exporting an 8K R3D RAW to 4K, it's only natural that the 16GB RAM configuration would finish faster.
YouTube channel Max Tech puts these two M1-powered MacBook Pros through a series of tests and, depending on what's being tested, the performance difference between the two isn't that stark.
Even benchmark tests don't give the full picture and you have to take them into context. It is, however, a simplistic view which could end up literally costing you when you decide which model to pick. It's probably logical to assume that an M1 MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM will outperform one with only 8GB of RAM and that may be true in some cases. Thankfully, someone took the time to benchmark these two variants, and the results might surprise you a bit. Even the MacBook Pro (Late 2020) offers two slightly different models with different RAM capacities. Not all M1 Macs are the same, of course, and not just counting the difference between an M1 MacBook Air and an M1 MacBook Pro. Apple's M1 Silicon has definitely been hogging the computing news spotlight these past weeks, most of them comparing its performance with Intel's chips.