Cyber Monday Macbook Air Deals
It might not offer the same powerful features as the MacBook Pro, but the MacBook Air still packs a punch. The latest model includes an Apple M1 system-on-chip inside and is available in three color choices. In addition, it features a 13.3-inch LED-backlit display with IPS technology with 2560-by-1600 native resolution at 227 pixels per inch with support for millions of colors.
Apple Macbook Pro 15 Touch Bar
Specs: 15.4-inch 2880 × 1800 LED, 2.8 GHz quad-core 7th-generation Core i7, 16 GB RAM, Radeon Pro 555, 256 GB SSD
- Absence of modifications compared to preceding versions
If you still have doubts about whether to buy an Apple MacBook Pro or not, throw other models out and purchase this one. Having a lot of advantages, it is the best Apple laptop from the list of amazingly slim devices. Its 15-inch Retina display is a beautiful and bright one for performing complex tasks or watching movies.
The touchpad features a number of control options that are not really necessary, to my mind. However, they make the Mac more user-friendly and interesting. MacBook Pro provides a small performance boost due to its Kaby Lake processors. Nevertheless, this is not a radical improvement to guarantee an update to anyone who already owns a previous model.
Best Laptops For Music Production 2021 Featuring Portable Computers For Musicians Producers And Djs
BySimon Arblaster, Chris Corfield10 June 2021
Looking for the best laptop for music production? We’ve rounded up the finest ultrabooks and notebooks for music-making from Apple, Dell, Microsoft and more
For years now, Apple has produced some of the best laptops for music production. As the only portable platform for Logic Pro X, the Apple MacBook Pro is synonymous with the craft of music-making. By comparison, those of us using a PC have traditionally been chained to the desktop format, but that has changed considerably in recent years. Dell, Microsoft, Samsung, MSI, Asus, Lenovo and others big tech brands are all muscling in to give Apple a serious run for its money, and some of them have proper music-making clout too. All of which is great for the consumer, as it gives us genuine choice over the path we choose for music production.
For any DJs or traveling musicians reading this, weight – and portability – is likely to be another major factor. After all, some of the highest spec, beefiest laptops in the world also weigh a fair amount, and your shoulders will quickly tire of lugging those behemoths around.
So, the best laptop for music production should be powerful and lightweight, while also rocking a good battery capacity, for those situations where youre away from mains power. Keep scrolling for our recommendations…
- Or try the best budget laptops for music production
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How To Pick The Best Laptop For You
So, what makes a laptop worth buying? First, it needs to offer excellent value for money. That means budget laptops below the $400/£400 price point need to still offer good performance and build quality.
Meanwhile, ultra-expensive devices need to justify their high price tags with best-in-class performance, premium build quality and lengthy battery lives.
If you want something to work on, a laptop with a modern processor, at least 8GB of RAM and a large screen are worth considering.
For gaming, you’ll want a gaming laptop with a dedicated graphics card and fast and responsive screen.
Check out our guide on what you should look for when buying a new laptop at the end of this page for more in-depth advice on buying a laptop.
Best Performance Laptop: 16
The 16-inch MacBook Pro still has Intel processors, and when configured with higher-end processors and graphics, it remains the fastest Mac laptop in most cases. Users who want an M-series processor in the big-screen MacBook Pro will have to wait a little longer.
Students who need a bit more power, such as artists and designers, can easily find it here. The large, 16-inch screen provides ample working space at a 3072-by-1920 native resolution, perfect for working in programs like Photoshop and Final Cut Pro. The option to upgrade to a Core i9 processor means you’ll always have power to spare, regardless of the project.
Depending on what programs students will be running, they have several memory and graphics options available to them. For general use, the base 16 gigabytes of memory will be more than enough for most students and has the added benefit of saving them money. If a student plans on doing extensive video editing or 3D modeling, they can upgrade to either 32 or 64 gigabytes of RAM at an additional cost.
The 16-inch MacBook Pro has a variety of options when it comes to graphics, as well. The base model features an AMD Radeon Pro 5300M card with 4GB of GDDR6 memory, which is sufficient for most users. However, power users may find that upgrading to the AMD Radeon Pro 5600M option gives them better results when working in programs like Maya or AutoCad.
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Which Is Better Apple Or Hp Laptop
They differ mainly in their qualities as far as these two brands are concerned. Laptops from Apple typically provide a great user experience, and their customer service is the best in the industry. HP laptops, on the other hand, are more affordable than Apple laptops, so youll get more for your money when you buy one.
Macbook Pro : Display
As for the display, this model comes with a 14.2-inch “Liquid Retina Pro XDR” mini-LED panel with a 120Hz refresh rate and 5.9 million pixels. The panel can supposedly deliver up to 1,000 nits of brightness with a peak of 1,600 nits. If accurate, this would make it the brightest panel we’ve ever tested .
Using clusters of local dimming zones that can illuminate during bright scenes or turn off completely during dark ones, the panel also achieves a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio. We haven’t seen the screen in person, but the iPad Pro 12.9-inch’s mini-LED was vivid and exhibited deep black levels, especially when watching HDR content.
With ProMotion, the aforementioned 120Hz refresh rate can dynamically match the motion of the onscreen content to provide smooth motion while conserving battery life.
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Get 3 Months Of Apple Arcade Free When You Buy A Mac
- Listed pricing is Maximum Retail Price
Best Laptops For Music Production: Buying Advice
Choosing a laptop capable of running CPU-intensive audio production work can be tricky. Some options focus heavily on battery life. Others major on performance, and favour higher-grade processors to ensure operations run snappily. Add into that differences in screen sizes, aesthetics and any number of other variables and we can easily see how its hard to justify buying one model over another.
You’re essentially looking for two major things on the spec-sheet above all others: the CPU and the available RAM. The CPU is what does the real work. So every time you load a new MIDI instrument, fill the piano roll with data, or bounce down audio to new tracks, you’re asking the CPU to translate it into sound.
Adding extra effects or instrument plugins works the CPU. Exporting finished versions of your tracks works the CPU. You get the picture. If it involves processing, the CPU is your best friend so it pays to prioritise a solid model over most other features.
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Goodbye Intel: Testing The Apple M1
Once all of this transitional dust settles, M1 Macs are going to be significantly faster across the board compared with the Intel Macs that preceded them. To demonstrate, we ran a handful of tests on our recommended M1 MacBook Air and Pro configurations, the Intel Core i5 MacBook Air configuration that we recommended earlier in 2020, and a fully loaded Intel Core i9 iMac from 2020.4 Heres what we ran:
- The Geekbench 5 benchmark, which is good at showing how processors do when performing for short periods of time. This includes both a single-core test, which measures the processors speed when just one of its cores is active, and a multi-core test that uses all available processor cores.
- Maxon Cinebench R23, which can be used to demonstrate how processors perform over longer periods of time. It also has both single- and multi-core tests, and we ran the 30-minute version of the test.
- Transcoding an 87-minute movie using HandBrakes 1080p30 Fast preset, to test how quickly each Mac can encode a video.5
- Running devMEremenkos Xcode Benchmark in using Apples Xcode development environment. This tests how long it takes a Mac to compile code, as youd do before you uploaded an app to one of Apples App Stores.
We chose all of these tests because theyve already been optimized for Apple silicon, and because they represent a mix of basic benchmarks plus activities that actual people do with their Macs.
| Geekbench 5 single-core | |
| 9 minutes, 13 seconds | 139.6 seconds |
Apple Macbook Pro 13 M1 Review
Ive read the first batch of Apple MacBook Pro 13 M1 reviews and youd be hard to find anything negative about the new laptop. At the worst, there were some complaints about the iOS app experience, but on the whole, early reviews, described the new MacBook Pro 13 essentially as Gods gift to the notebook wanting masses.
Dont get me wrong, there were some very positive things about the new laptop. The new M1 processor is impressive, but far from perfect- it has many warts, that nearly nobody is discussing. I think the new MacBook Pro 13 M1 will likely be fine for users who use 100% Apple software, stay primarily in Safari and dont need to connect it to a bunch of peripherals, and have a lot of money.
I wanted to provide some balance to those early reviews and discuss who I believe shouldnt consider the new MacBook Pro 13 M1. I know that may sound negative, but I call it balance. Ive used my unit for nearly five days and here is my assessment of whom I think should avoid it.
You can find my gaming review here.
Edge crash
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How We Test The Best Laptops
To find the best laptop, we run every machine through a rigorous suite of benchmarks and real-world tests to gauge how it will perform during everyday use.
We measure the average brightness and color quality of each laptop’s display using our in-house light meter and colorimeter. For general performance, we run our machines through tests that include Geekbench 5 , as well as various 3DMark tests to measure graphics capabilities. We also run a file transfer test to measure how fast a machine’s hard drive is, and a custom battery test that has the machine browse the internet over Wi-Fi until it runs out of juice.
When testing dedicated gaming laptops, we run benchmarks for popular games such as Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Hitman 2 and Far Cry: New Dawn.
The Best Macbook To Buy In 2021
Apples M1 chip in the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro 13 is the biggest improvement to the MacBook range in years, making them top laptops for 2021. This system-on-a-chip features an eight-core CPU and either a seven-core or an eight-core GPU . It increases the power and performance of Apples laptops in incredibly impressive ways and gives them an enormous battery boost to boot.
If you are in the market for a new MacBook, that means you have a lot to think about. Do you go for an M1 model or a laptop using an Intel processor? And if you do go for an M1 MacBook, which is the best choice? That is what our guide will explain. We have examined all of Apples current Mac laptops to find the best MacBook for your money.
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Best Macbook In : Find The Best Macbook For You
ByAlex Wawro03 September 2021
The best MacBooks you can buy right now are all here so you can figure out which is best for you
The best MacBook for you and your needs is a tricky thing to figure out, and we get asked for help all the time not just by readers, but friends and family too. Factoring in the latest MacBooks makes it an even harder decision, because the Apple M1 chip is changing the MacBook as we know it just read our MacBook Air with M1 review and our MacBook Pro with M1 review to see why.
But once you take a closer look at the best MacBooks you can see that one size doesn’t fit all. There are specific reasons why many should pay more for the M1-based MacBook Pro, plus there’s still an audience for those who may prefer Intel-based MacBook Pros and the 16-inch model only comes with an Intel CPU for now.
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Apple’s M1-equipped MacBook Air 2020 is our top recommendation for the best MacBook overall. The new Apple M1 chip makes it faster than we ever expected the Air to get, and its power efficiency enables much longer battery life, lasting over 14 hours on a charge.
But if you need more than 16GB of RAM, or want 4 Thunderbolt USB-C ports , this conversation gets more complicated, and you’re going to want to look at the Intel-based MacBooks as well.
Best Laptop : Top Picks For Every User And Every Budget
The best laptops from Dell, Apple, Razer and more
If you’re looking for the best laptops you can buy in 2021 then look no futher. Every laptop on this page has been hand-picked and thoroughly tested by us to ensure they represent the very best-of-the-best.
So, what is the best laptop of 2021 overall? In our view, it remains the excellent MacBook Air . Although it launched last year, it’s yet to be beaten when it comes to design, performance, value and battery life.
If you’re looking for something more affordable, then the Acer Swift 3 is our choice for the best budget laptop you can buy right now, offering a perfect balance of affordability and performance. If that doesn’t take your fancy then we have a rundown of the best cheap laptop deals to help you pick a device that won’t hurt your wallet.
No matter what kind of budget you’ve got, or the kind of laptop you’re after, we’ve got top notebooks for you, from budget Chromebooks to powerful gaming laptops, and everything in between.
Not sure what to look for when buying the best laptop for your needs? Check out our guide on what you should look for when buying a new laptop at the end of this page for in-depth advice on buying a laptop.
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Buy Macbook Air Vs Macbook Pro For College
As one of the most frequently asked questions from students, getting MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro for college has no definitive answer it all depends on your specific requirements and needs. MacBook Air, for example, is generally considered the best Mac for college students at large, due to its light configuration and long battery life. Its also one of the cheap Mac laptops that nevertheless covers all the basics.
Those who anticipate spending lots of time working on complex projects need to look for an advanced processor, large storage capacity, high-resolution display, or all at once. MaBook Pro is a great option here, since it offers much more power without sacrificing portability and lightness. On the other hand, its safe to say that if you need a laptop simply for research and written assignments, then a MacBook Pro might be a waste of money. But dont let that stop you just yet, since you could be eligible for the Apple MacBook Pro student discount.
Flaws But Not Dealbreakers
Apple continues to include a basic 720p webcam in all of its MacBooks. This is OK for casual video chatting where all the person on the other end of the call needs to do is see your face, and the M1s image processing does help with exposure and white balance. But the webcam in the $1,000 MacBook Air is still noticeably inferior to the front-facing camera Apple includes with the $400 iPhone SE, or any of our less-than-$100 standalone webcam picks.
Current MacBook models use Thunderbolt 3 for all connectivity, including power. This means that if you own any hard drives, scanners, printers, thumb drives, or card readers that use USB Type-A ports, you need a hub or adapter similarly, if you want to use an external display or projector, you need the right video adapter.
The M1 MacBook Air is missing one thing that older Intel models had: the ability to connect to more than one external display. That external screen can have a resolution as high as 6K, which covers Apples astronomically expensive Pro Display XDR, but even if you just want to connect a basic 1080p budget monitor to your MacBook, the laptop can only handle one of them.1 That said, the M1 MacBook Air feels faster and its animations look more fluid in day-to-day use than the previous Intel MacBook Air when connected to an external 4K display, and its also quieter since theres no fan to kick on.
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