For many years, this Apple laptop was everyone's favorite laptop. It was reasonably priced, thin, light and built like a tank. It could last for years and take lots of falls and bumps. For any college student or coffee shop creative type, $999 would get you sorted. 

Then time passed the Air by. Its fell behind average Windows laptops. The components were rarely updated. Fortunately, the Air got a huge refresh and now the MacBook Air looks and feels very much like a MacBook Pro. Most importantly, Apple MacBook Air laptops are back down to that magical $999 starting price (which is currently $899 at some retailers). 

The M1-powered Air doesn't have any vents, which means there are no fans and no fan noise -- perfect for classrooms and conferences. You only get two Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports, but for most people that's enough, as long as you can get a whatever-to-USB-C dongle.  

The difference this year is that the new MacBook Pro laptops have better displays, faster processors and more ports, including HDMI and an SD card slot. But if you want those, you're looking at double the starting price. 

If you're a college student, a would-be entrepreneur, a writer or just looking for an all-around laptop on the high end of casual, it's tough to go wrong with the MacBook Air. It'll rightly be Apple's laptop default starting point for a lot of people.

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When Apple updated the Air with its M1 chip in late 2020, it also updated the 13-inch MacBook Pro. Unlike the Air, though, the Pro has fan vents, which help keep this M1 MacBook Pro cool when processing your raw photo edits or cranking through your video exports. 

The switch to M1 means software is ideally rewritten to take advantage of the new M1 chip hardware. Fortunately, Apple's Rosetta 2 software allows Intel-native versions of applications to run normally with the M1 chip. In our testing, the performance difference was negligible if at all. 

This is now the last Pro to have the Apple Touch Bar, which isn't as useful as Apple would have you believe but not as useless as everyone else thinks. I use it all the time for screen brightness, volume control and a few other contextual buttons, like when using the calculator app. But in the latest 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros, the Touch Bar is gone, so this 13 inch MacBook Pro is the last holdout. 

Since the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro model are close in price, you might be tempted to get the less expensive Air over the Pro -- after all, they look and feel similar and share a lot of the same features. And for many people, that's the right call, or if you're a power user, consider stepping up to the new 14-inch Pro.

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The new-for-2021 16-inch MacBook Pro is the biggest, most-powerful MacBook you can buy. It's a true desktop replacement and a worthy heir to the , last seen in 2012. 

Both this and the new 14-inch version add the same , new Mini-LED display, MagSafe power connection and . Both are available with either the , which are precisely what a slice of the creative pro market has been waiting for. These new chips offer up to 36 GPU cores (and up to 10 CPU cores) and replace the need for both an , a combo previously found in only a few high-end Macs. In other words, after a long wait, professional video editors and 3D modelers have a new MacBook aimed squarely at them.

The border around the display here has gotten so thin that there's not even room for a webcam any longer. Here the camera gets slotted into  at the top of the display. Yes, just like an iPhone. And like the iPhone, it's annoying and too obvious at first. But it's worth the tradeoff, as the higher-res 1,080 camera will spoil you quickly if you're used to the lower-res 720p cameras in other Macs (and most Windows laptops as well).

With a starting price of $2,450, just keep in mind that if you're not specifically going to use these new GPU capabilities and just want the latest, coolest MacBook, this is a pretty expensive way to get an HDMI port and SD card slot.

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From a distance, the new 14-inch MacBook Pro looks a lot like the  or  you might already be using. Look again and the differences pop out. It has a bigger screen (obviously), slimmer bezels and a new keyboard color scheme. 

Thinking of this as a successor to the 13-inch Pro, the screen size jumps from 13.3 to 14.2 inches. It's what Apple calls a Liquid Retina XDR display, which is basically a Mini-LED screen, as in the 12.9-inch iPad Pro.It also has the same HDMI, SD card and MagSafe ports as the 16-inch, and the same 1080 webcam. 

Both the M1 Pro and M1 Max available in the 14-inch, and it can be configured with the same 64GB RAM and 8TB storage as the 16-inch Pro. But what you can get on the 14-inch are a couple of lower-end Apple M1 Pro options not available for the 16-inch, with fewer CPU and GPU cores. 

If you're a college student, coffee-shop writer or other mainstream laptop user, consider that this is a hefty premium to pay for a better screen and webcam and more ports. It might be like buying a sports car just for driving on city streets. Bring in all-day, every day web video meetings, you might be able to make a good case.

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