Choosing the Right Mac for a College-bound Student. With a Mac, you get the best of both worlds! Choosing from Apple’s laptop line—the MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro—requires determining the relative importance of price, performance, and portability. Best 13-inch Laptops for 2018. Our editors hand-picked these products based on our tests and reviews. If you use our links to buy, we may get a commission. Laptops & Notebooks/ The Best Laptops of 2018. The Best Lenovo Laptops of 2018. Apple MacBook Air (2018) Laptop Picks for Everyone on Your Holiday List. Mac buyers guide 2018: Best Mac computer to buy in 2018 There's an Apple Mac for everyone but the choice can be confusing. Here we look at every Apple desktop and laptop computer to help you.
Our new pick is the 13-inch MacBook Pro (2019, two Thunderbolt 3 ports), and the MacBook Air (2019) is our new budget pick.
Your guide
Andrew Cunningham
The best Mac laptop for most people is the 13-inch MacBook Pro (2019, two Thunderbolt 3 ports). It’s more than fast enough for the things that most people use a computer for—Web browsing, working on documents, and photo and video editing—and it has an excellent high-resolution screen, a great trackpad, enough battery life to get most people through a day of work, and a (relatively) reasonable price.
Our pick
Apple MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2019, two Thunderbolt 3 ports)
The entry-level MacBook Pro has a fantastic screen, a fast quad-core processor, and a reasonable price, though we wish it came with more ports and more storage.
Buying Options
The entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro includes a quad-core processor and much faster integrated graphics than in the Air, both of which will make your work go significantly faster—2019’s 13-inch Pro is almost as fast as 15-inch models from past years. The laptop does have some shortcomings, but they’re almost all shared by other modern Apple laptops: the low-travel keyboard, a small number of homogenous ports (in this case, two Thunderbolt 3 ports) that may require the use of USB-C hubs or new cables, and a high price relative to Windows laptops with similar performance and features, especially if you need more than 128 GB of storage. But the Pro’s light weight, solid construction, and industry-leading support make it a good laptop, especially if you also own an iPhone or other Apple devices.
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Budget pick
Apple MacBook Air (2019)
The Air includes most of the good stuff from the Pro, such as the great screen, the solid construction, and the Touch ID fingerprint sensor, for a bit less money. But its dual-core processor is noticeably slower.
Buying Options
*At the time of publishing, the price was $1,100.
The 2019 MacBook Air is a couple hundred dollars cheaper and a quarter-pound lighter than the 13-inch MacBook Pro. It also has slightly better battery life, and it’s functionally an identical laptop in most of the important ways: screen, memory and storage, ports, keyboard and touchpad, construction. But its dual-core processor and slower integrated graphics make it a worse choice if you plan on doing much photo and video editing or programming, or if you plan on connecting it to high-resolution external monitors. It also skips the Touch Bar in favor of a row of physical function keys and a standalone Touch ID fingerprint sensor, though depending on how you feel about the flashy but superfluous Touch Bar, you might prefer this.
Upgrade pick
Apple MacBook Pro with Touch Bar (15-inch, 2019)
The 15-inch MacBook Pro has a larger screen and the fastest, most powerful components Apple ships in a laptop, and it’s still relatively thin and light. But you pay a lot for that extra speed.
Buying Options
The 15-inch MacBook Pro is our top Mac pick in our guide to laptops for video and photo editing. You won’t notice a huge speed boost in everyday computing tasks, but our recommended configuration’s six-core Intel Core processor can give it a speed boost of around 30 percent over the 13-inch Pro when rendering video or compiling code, and its discrete AMD Radeon GPUs provide better performance when running 3D drafting programs or games.
Because you can’t upgrade Apple’s current laptops later—the memory, storage, and processors are all built in—you need to make sure to buy the right configuration. We’ve listed our recommended configuration for each of our picks in the sections below.
If you aren’t wedded to macOS, we have a separate guide dedicated to helping you find the right laptop.
Everything we recommend
Our pick
Apple MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2019, two Thunderbolt 3 ports)
The entry-level MacBook Pro has a fantastic screen, a fast quad-core processor, and a reasonable price, though we wish it came with more ports and more storage.
Buying Options
Budget pick
Apple MacBook Air (2019)
The Air includes most of the good stuff from the Pro, such as the great screen, the solid construction, and the Touch ID fingerprint sensor, for a bit less money. But its dual-core processor is noticeably slower.
Buying Options
*At the time of publishing, the price was $1,100.
Upgrade pick
Apple MacBook Pro with Touch Bar (15-inch, 2019)
What Is A Good Mac Laptop For College 2018 Football
The 15-inch MacBook Pro has a larger screen and the fastest, most powerful components Apple ships in a laptop, and it’s still relatively thin and light. But you pay a lot for that extra speed.
Buying Options
Why you should trust us
Andrew Cunningham spent more than six years testing, reviewing, and otherwise writing about PCs, Macs, and other gadgets for AnandTech and Ars Technica. He has been building, upgrading, and fixing PCs for more than 15 years, and he spent five of those years in IT departments buying and repairing laptops and desktops as well as helping people buy the best tech for their needs. He has also used just about every Mac laptop that Apple has released in the past two decades.
Who this is for, and when to buy
The best reason to buy a MacBook is if you need or prefer macOS instead of Windows. The operating system is stable and easy to use, but more important, it integrates well with iPhones and iPads—iMessages and SMS messages sent from your Mac also appear on your iPhone and vice versa, and features such as AirDrop and iCloud make it easy to share notes, pictures, videos, reminders, contacts, passwords, bookmarks, and other data between your devices.
Macs are also a good choice if you want great support. Apple’s tech support is routinely rated above that of all other PC and phone makers, and Apple Stores and Apple Authorized Service Providers offer accessible in-person tech support and repairs in many locations.
Macs aren’t a great choice if you have less than $1,000 to spend on a laptop, if you want to get the most performance for your money, or if you want to run high-end games. Windows ultrabooks provide as good or better performance, more kinds of ports, and more storage at or below the price Apple charges for the MacBook Air. Budget Chrome OS and Windows laptops are a better choice if you have only $500 to spend. And Windows gaming notebooks, while larger and bulkier than any MacBook, usually have newer and faster dedicated graphics processors than Apple’s laptops do (and you can buy some of them for less than half of what a 15-inch MacBook Pro costs).
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The Best Laptops
From budget-friendly options to thin-and-light ultrabooks to powerful gaming laptops, we’ve spent hundreds of hours finding the best laptops for most people.