If you insist on having a MacBook with Apple’s highly polarizing Touch Bar, the 13-inch MacBook Pro is the only current Mac to feature one. You care about the Touch Bar (for some reason)

This makes the 13-inch model a nice middle ground in the current Mac lineup, as you’ll get more power and endurance than the Air for a pretty reasonable starting price of $1,299. We also got a couple extra hours of battery life out of the Pro, which clocked in at 16 hours and 30 minutes compared to about 14 hours on the Air. There’s definitely a difference between the two - in our testing, the Pro rendered 8K video files minutes faster than the Air, and we saw notably higher graphics scores on our benchmarks. It also has a fan built in, meaning it can let the processor work a little harder when the laptop is being pushed to the max during a heavy video export or big 3D render. The latest 13-inch MacBook Pro has the same processor as the Air but with an additional graphics processing unit (GPU) core that gives it a bit more muscle for visually intensive tasks. You want more power than the Air without paying a fortune The Air stayed silent for us even as we exported heavy 4K files and had 20 different apps open - and it didn’t get excessively hot either. The MacBook Air is the only MacBook in the current lineup without a fan inside, meaning it doesn’t run the risk of sounding like a jet engine when it’s under a heavy workload. Thanks to the M1 chip inside, Apple’s most affordable notebook was still able to juggle tons of apps with ease and export high-quality video in seconds, and it ran circles around many comparable Windows laptops in our performance tests. You want lots of power for everyday tasks - and a bit of heavy-duty workĭespite its relatively low price and small frame, the latest MacBook Air still delivers some of the best performance you’ll find in a mainstream laptop. It’s also the only MacBook that comes in gold, if that’s your thing. As its name suggests, it’s still the most portable and sleekest MacBook of the bunch, with sharp edges that slim down to just 0.16 edges and a lightweight 2.8-pound frame.

Apple’s entry-level MacBook starts at $999, and we’ve seen it dip a few hundred bucks below that during big sales. MacBooks aren’t exactly cheap, but the MacBook Air is the way to go if you’re looking to spend as little money as possible. You want the cheapest and slimmest MacBook Your CNN account Log in to your CNN account

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