Review is inconsiderate of people who may be in the market for a MacBook and don't have the budget for the higher-end models.
How, exactly?
If you don't have a budget for the higher-end model, we're telling you to buy the Air instead of the low-end 13-inch MacBook Pro.
I was impressed with this review. It explains that most people will probably be better off "downgrading" to the MacBook Air or upgrading to the 4-thunderbolt version. I don't understand how that analysis can be considered "inconsiderate" of anyone.
I don't like that Apple has fractured they 'pro' 13in line up. There is alot of buyers who would not know the differences between the low and high end but I assume they would know about the cpu and ports as this is listed in the tech specs. Most reviewers, even most tech blogs, fail to mention the differences. Apple is deceiving its consumers resulting in them not being honest. The buyers really have to do their homework before purchasing.
The higher end 13in's have: better speakers, better graphics, 2 fans, and of course, 10th gen cpu's, 4 ports,
How is Apple "deceiving" anyone?
You say that you assume that consumers know the difference between the CPU and ports options, so what's the problem? How is it misleading for the higher priced model to have better characteristics--when all of this is spelled out on the specs page?
Does the higher end model have better speakers? Apple doesn't say that, nor does this review. So I think you're just wrong about that assertion.
I think the take-away here might simply be that processors, memory and GPUs have, for the average user, surpassed their needs.
I mean come on! How many users need or want a 5K display much less a 6K?
Yes, there are those who need every ounce of power a machine can give. But, for most, the power of these already exceeds their wants and needs.
The analogy is: Should I buy a car that can do 180mph? Or, will one that can only do 150mph suffice? For most people -- the vast majority I think, the faster car is only for bragging rights.
I think the take-away here might simply be that processors, memory and GPUs have, for the average user, surpassed their needs.
I mean come on! How many users need or want a 5K display much less a 6K?
Yes, there are those who need every ounce of power a machine can give. But, for most, the power of these already exceeds their wants and needs.
The analogy is: Should I buy a car that can do 180mph? Or, will one that can only do 150mph suffice? For most people -- the vast majority I think, the faster car is only for bragging rights.
The take away is much more simple than that. The take away is people who want an Apple laptop should either buy the MBA if budget is a concern or buy the higher level MBP. They generally shouldn't buy the entry level MBP. To piggyback on your analogy. The MBA can do 150mph. The entry level MBP can do 156mph but costs as if it can do 170mph. Why buy it? Just get the 150mph MBA or the 180mph higher spec. It's squeeze by the MBA and the higher spec MBP. It's superfluous... like a 3rd nipple.
Review is inconsiderate of people who may be in the market for a MacBook and don't have the budget for the higher-end models.
How, exactly?
If you don't have a budget for the higher-end model, we're telling you to buy the Air instead of the low-end 13-inch MacBook Pro.
I was impressed with this review. It explains that most people will probably be better off "downgrading" to the MacBook Air or upgrading to the 4-thunderbolt version. I don't understand how that analysis can be considered "inconsiderate" of anyone.
Agreed. In my opinion, the decision is rather easy. I absolutely love the tactile qualities of the MacBook Air. It's such an overall comfortable computer to use and carry around, whether around your house, at work, or on the road. Given the choice from an ergonomic standpoint I always prefer the Air. With the new Air the performance penalty you're paying to enjoy the Air's ergonomics are very tolerable, maybe even a wash. Putting up with a 2-port MacBook Pro just to get a bit more processing capability over the Air isn't worth it for me at all. Too much lost for too little benefit. At least with the 4-port 13" MacBook Pro I wouldn't feel as put out by having to tolerate its added heft and square edges. But even then I'd still be tempted to go for the 16" Mac Pro because, if you're going to have to suffer with MacBook Air Envy, you may as well drown your sorrow in something that's going to dazzle you with its performance.
Apple hardware has variously been 1 to 5 (Mac Mini/Pro) years behind the industry's cutting-edge for a over a decade, while selling at prices at least slightly higher than the latest-and-greatest. The headline is accurate, but hopefully not a surprise to anyone.
This is such a joke. The CPUs that Apple is using in the 10th Gen MacBook Pros are so new that they don't show up in Intel's online documentation. Apple is literally the first to use them. But sure, Apple is 1 to 5 years behind the industry.
According to this article, Apple is the only one using them. That's why you don't see them listed on Intel's database--they're made special just for Apple.
I think the take-away here might simply be that processors, memory and GPUs have, for the average user, surpassed their needs.
I mean come on! How many users need or want a 5K display much less a 6K?
Yes, there are those who need every ounce of power a machine can give. But, for most, the power of these already exceeds their wants and needs.
The analogy is: Should I buy a car that can do 180mph? Or, will one that can only do 150mph suffice? For most people -- the vast majority I think, the faster car is only for bragging rights.
The take away is much more simple than that. The take away is people who want an Apple laptop should either buy the MBA if budget is a concern or buy the higher level MBP. They generally shouldn't buy the entry level MBP. To piggyback on your analogy. The MBA can do 150mph. The entry level MBP can do 156mph but costs as if it can do 170mph. Why buy it? Just get the 150mph MBA or the 180mph higher spec. It's squeeze by the MBA and the higher spec MBP. It's superfluous... like a 3rd nipple.
This is a basic takeaway from the benchmark comparisons so far, but I'd like to see those results proven. Perhaps the most common use case for buyers of the premium $1300 to $1500 tier laptops would be to load up the machine with a lot of web browser windows, with advertising and Javascript code doing who knows what pegging the CPUs. I'd like to see whether the Ice Lake MBA does this better than the Coffee Lake MBP13 or not.
Apple hardware has variously been 1 to 5 (Mac Mini/Pro) years behind the industry's cutting-edge for a over a decade, while selling at prices at least slightly higher than the latest-and-greatest. The headline is accurate, but hopefully not a surprise to anyone.
This is such a joke. The CPUs that Apple is using in the 10th Gen MacBook Pros are so new that they don't show up in Intel's online documentation. Apple is literally the first to use them. But sure, Apple is 1 to 5 years behind the industry.
Ok, yeah, this specific part number isn't available yet. So what? 10th generation Ice Lake CPUs have been shipping in PC laptops since last September, while this is the first Mac with one. That 8 month lag is pretty typical and is what I was referring to.
Since the 2017 revision, the 13-inch MacBook Pro line has been a tale of two computers, and the 2020 refresh is no exception. But, there are some interesting "updates" in the new model, that puzzle us, and make us wonder why they were made.
Your Geekbench scores on the Ice Lake i5 are way too low. I get 1250/4400 for single/multi-core on my i5. Please re-run them as your posted scores make it sound like the 10th gen offer little if any improvement over the 8th gen.
Also, even the 8th gen i5 is significantly faster than the MacBook Air. Don’t be fooled by Geekbench, which primarily measures burst speeds. The 10W processors in the Air top out at 12W, so they can only Turbo Boost at around 1.5-1.6GHz for extended periods of time. Even the 8th Gen i5 can sustain about 2.9GHz, and the 10th Gen can sustain around 3.0 GHz (and processes 15-20% more instructions per cycle than the 8th gen), so both are much faster for anything CPU-intensive.
I think that what it's a so-called Pro computer should be the state-of-the-art in any single component it's assembled with.
It's embarrassing that this entry-level MacBook Pro has a processor that's almost two generations old, along with its slowest RAM – the two most important components on every single computer so far so good, aren't they?
Except the reality is that for CPU-intensive tasks, the 8th gen Intel chips in the Pro hold their own against the 10th gen. The base Pro is still considerably faster than the i7 Air because the Pro chips can easily ramp up to 25W and sustain 3.0GHz Turbo Boost speeds while the i7 Air can’t sustain more than 1.6GHz. At that rate, who cares if the RAM is at 3.7GHz or 2.1GHz?
I think the articles titled ‘yesterday’s tech for today’s prices’, perfectly sums it up, it’s price gouging by Apple really. No excuse not to include the latest Intel chips across the ‘whole’ range, Microsoft have done so with all its surface laptops / portable devices. I fail to see why Apple couldn’t, apart from to make more money out of the customer.
it certainly doesn’t bode well for an ideas of a new iMac design this year or next.. I believe the current design is now 10 years old or more!!!
and where the hell is WiFi 6 in the higher spec models with Intels latest chip? 6E won’t be out for a while yet.. every competitor has WiFi 6 in its laptops, but Apple only includes it on its iPads and iPhones... I’m not sure what I’d do with 6GB a second speeds on a phone.. but I’d use it on a laptop..
Apple hardware has variously been 1 to 5 (Mac Mini/Pro) years behind the industry's cutting-edge for a over a decade, while selling at prices at least slightly higher than the latest-and-greatest. The headline is accurate, but hopefully not a surprise to anyone.
This is such a joke. The CPUs that Apple is using in the 10th Gen MacBook Pros are so new that they don't show up in Intel's online documentation. Apple is literally the first to use them. But sure, Apple is 1 to 5 years behind the industry.
Where’s WiFi 6 on the new MacBook Pro’s then??... what MacBook users have no need for the latest fast WiFi??.. they don’t need to transfer large files around?
And before you say something like ‘real pros plug their laptops into a network’ well you can’t with a MacBook Pro can you, it has no Ethernet ports on it..
So yes in this regard Apple is way behind the competition I’m afraid, it’s mobile phones and tablets are more advanced with wireless communications!
The 10th gen CPU’s are also expensive at the moment, and Apple isn’t going to take the hit on margins to put them in the entry level devices.
HP, Dell, and Lenovo do this all the time to keep the prices down on some SKUs. I think Apple is only doing this out of necessity at this point.
Expect the 14” MacBook Pro in 2021 to be exclusively 10th gen CPU’s across all the SKU’s...
Right.. the elusive 14” MacBook Pro ALL the analysts claimed would be out this year including the apparently flawless Min Chi... yeah I’ll believe it when I see it.. and I’ll especially believe it when I see it for it to have all the latest tech..
Apple likes to price gouge on its computers. As this article says the MacBook Air is a far better choice.
Apple hardware has variously been 1 to 5 (Mac Mini/Pro) years behind the industry's cutting-edge for a over a decade, while selling at prices at least slightly higher than the latest-and-greatest. The headline is accurate, but hopefully not a surprise to anyone.
Yes. The Mac Pro especially is extremely overpriced and behind in performance for what you get.
After Effects
While Macs often perform fairly well, in After Effects there is simply no argument that a PC workstation is both faster and significantly less expensive. Compared to the $20k Mac Pro we tested, a $4k PC using an Intel Core i9 9900K and NVIDIA GeForce 2080 Ti ended up being about 5% faster overall, while a $5.5k PC using an AMD Threadripper 3960X is about 18% faster. Even compared to the much better priced iMac Pro, a PC that costs $1K less is going to be about 35% faster.
What this means is that you can get the same or faster performance from a properly configured PC at a quarter (or less) the cost of a Mac Pro. With an application like After Effects where you can distribute renders across multiple machines using plugins like BG Render Max or RenderGarden, this isn't even about just getting similar performance at a lower price point. You can decrease your render times by 4-5x by purchasing multiple PCs and using network rendering to split up the work between each system. This only improves render performance (not live playback), but also gives you a ton of flexibility to have renders running on multiple machines while simultaneously working on other comps on your primary workstation.
Or, you can simply save that $15k and spend it on a new car, home remodel, or a really, really fancy vacation.
Since Photoshop is largely unable to take advantage of higher CPU core counts, there often isn't much of a difference between most modern mid/high-end CPUs - and that applies for a Mac just as much as it does for a PC workstation. Overall, if Photoshop is your primary concern, you can get about 10% higher performance from one of our $4,200 Puget Systems workstations with either an AMD Ryzen 3900X or Intel Core i9 9900K compared to the $19,599 Mac Pro (2019) we tested.
Now, is 10% going to be a game-changer for your workflow? Probably not - it is right on the edge of what you might be able to notice in everyday work. The main takeaway here is not necessarily the performance alone, but rather how much you have to pay to get it. Even if you forget the Mac Pro and go with the much more reasonably priced iMac Pro, you are still likely to pay about twice the cost for equivalent performance.
Since there are so many reasons why either a Mac or a PC may be right for you, we generally try to focus on the straight performance results and not tell you which you should purchase. But in this case, the Mac Pro is so underwhelming that it is hard to not simply say "Don't buy a Mac Pro for Premiere Pro".
This isn't like our Photoshop testing where the Mac Pro was only a hair slower than a PC, or our After Effects testing where a PC can easily be 20% faster at a much lower cost. This time, we are talking a PC being up to 50% faster on average for 1/3 the cost. We understand that there is a lot of benefit to staying in the Apple ecosystem if you also have an iPhone, MacBook, etc., but that is a huge amount of performance and cost savings you will be giving up to get a Mac Pro.
By skipping the Mac Pro and going with a PC, you could easily save $14,000 which could be used for a host of other things to improve your workflow. Maybe you can finally upgrade your reference monitor to a really nice Eizo or Flanders Scientific model. Or use it as an opportunity to move to a central NAS storage unit from LumaForge. Or just take a couple months off to recharge. And this isn't taking into account the amount of money you might be able to earn due to the higher performance of a PC.
To be fair, while the Mac pro is ludicrously priced, it is a bit rough to complain about it’s performance using Adobe bastardry as the benchmark. Bastardry since 1995.
I think the take-away here might simply be that processors, memory and GPUs have, for the average user, surpassed their needs.
I mean come on! How many users need or want a 5K display much less a 6K?
Yes, there are those who need every ounce of power a machine can give. But, for most, the power of these already exceeds their wants and needs.
The analogy is: Should I buy a car that can do 180mph? Or, will one that can only do 150mph suffice? For most people -- the vast majority I think, the faster car is only for bragging rights.
The take away is much more simple than that. The take away is people who want an Apple laptop should either buy the MBA if budget is a concern or buy the higher level MBP. They generally shouldn't buy the entry level MBP. To piggyback on your analogy. The MBA can do 150mph. The entry level MBP can do 156mph but costs as if it can do 170mph. Why buy it? Just get the 150mph MBA or the 180mph higher spec. It's squeeze by the MBA and the higher spec MBP. It's superfluous... like a 3rd nipple.
I was looking at it from the other side: Apple seems to be believe that the 8th gen processor in the base model is sufficient for at least average type users. Assuming that is true (and it is an assumption), then it implies that Apple believes that many or most users simply don't need and won't use the extra horsepower in the newer chips.
Most users aren't doing graphics, high end games, development, etc. and instead are using their laptops for web browsing, word processing, maybe some simple spreadsheets, etc.... And just don't need that extra power.
For myself, I haven't bought a new Windows laptop in many years and find the older processors meet my needs perfectly well. My financial computer is a 14 year old Core2Duo Thinkpad T60p hooked up to a dock and essentially running in desktop mode -- and it works perfectly well -- I would see very little benefit from a new computer with a new processor (although I am debating installing an SSD and upgrading it from Windows 8.1 to 10). But then all it needs to do is access my financial websites and run Quicken.
The 10th gen CPU’s are also expensive at the moment, and Apple isn’t going to take the hit on margins to put them in the entry level devices.
HP, Dell, and Lenovo do this all the time to keep the prices down on some SKUs. I think Apple is only doing this out of necessity at this point.
Expect the 14” MacBook Pro in 2021 to be exclusively 10th gen CPU’s across all the SKU’s...
Right.. the elusive 14” MacBook Pro ALL the analysts claimed would be out this year including the apparently flawless Min Chi... yeah I’ll believe it when I see it.. and I’ll especially believe it when I see it for it to have all the latest tech..
Apple likes to price gouge on its computers. As this article says the MacBook Air is a far better choice.
The price gouging is obvious -- if you only look at the hardware (which most make the mistake of doing).
The reality is that Apple spends considerable time, effort and money developing, maintaining and enhancing its own OS and ecosystem -- which doesn't come free to either them or their customers. If they switched to an essentially free WIndows 10 you would see their specs go up and their prices come down. But then, you would just have another crappy Windows machine.
What sets Apple computers apart is less about their hardware and mostly their OS's and ecosystem. Without those, its just another computer -- yawn....
Review is inconsiderate of people who may be in the market for a MacBook and don't have the budget for the higher-end models.
How, exactly?
If you don't have a budget for the higher-end model, we're telling you to buy the Air instead of the low-end 13-inch MacBook Pro.
I think this recommendation is really poor advice, and is what I take issue with in the AI article. For people who are price conscious, the 2 TB port MacBook Pro 13” is much better value, for only $200 more compared to the 256GB Air upgraded to the quad core i5.
According to the Geekbench 5 browser, the 2020 i5 Air gets around 1057 in single core and 2657 for multi core. (AI’s numbers here seem to be WAY off what others are reporting). The 2020 Pro base model with 2 TB ports gets 929 and 3831 respectively. Sure, it is 12% slower in single core, but it is 44% faster in multi core performance, compared to the quad core Air!! That is a huge increase in performance! AI implies that the performance difference is negligible, which is very misleading.
Furthermore, AI completely neglected to mention that because of the lower wattage of the Air’s processor, not to mention the very poor cooling, where the heat sink is not even connected to the fan (!!) under sustained loads like installing applications, performing updates, exporting files etc. the performance difference is even greater! The base model 13” pro performed 63% faster in Cinebench, compared to the quad core i5 Air. Regarding graphics, even though in synthetic metal tests the Air performs better, in real world tests like the Unigine heaven benchmark, the base model pro actually outperforms the Air, even though it is less powerful spec wise (again likely due to the poor cooling and low wattage of the Air). The Pro also has about 40% faster SSD read and write speeds.
It is irresponsible and misinformed for AI to report that the Air is similar in performance to the base model 13” pro, when the pro performs up to 63% better. Comparing the cheapest quad core Air ($1100 custom config) to the entry level 13” Pro ($1300), for $200 more you get: 44% faster multi core geekbench, 63% faster Cinebench, better real world graphics performance, faster SSD, a much better screen (wider color gamut and much brighter) and the Touch Bar. Meanwhile the Air is only negligibly lighter (2.8 vs 3.1 lbs) and is actually thicker at its thickest point than the pro.
I think for anyone who is price conscious, the base model Pro is inarguably a better buy than the Air. The difference in performance between the i5 Air and the base model 13” is actually GREATER than the performance jump going from the 2xTB port Pro to the 4xTB port Pro. The Air only makes sense for the outlier cases of someone who really wants the gold color, has a hard price cutoff of $1100, or who absolutely hates the Touch Bar.
The people over at MaxTech on YouTube, who I believe used to work for this site did a much more thorough analysis between the 13” laptop models Apple is currently offering.
Review is inconsiderate of people who may be in the market for a MacBook and don't have the budget for the higher-end models.
How, exactly?
If you don't have a budget for the higher-end model, we're telling you to buy the Air instead of the low-end 13-inch MacBook Pro.
I think this recommendation is really poor advice, and is what I take issue with in the AI article. For people who are price conscious, the 2 TB port MacBook Pro 13” is much better value, for only $200 more compared to the 256GB Air upgraded to the quad core i5.
According to the Geekbench 5 browser, the 2020 i5 Air gets around 1057 in single core and 2657 for multi core. (AI’s numbers here seem to be WAY off what others are reporting). The 2020 Pro base model with 2 TB ports gets 929 and 3831 respectively. Sure, it is 12% slower in single core, but it is 44% faster in multi core performance, compared to the quad core Air!! That is a huge increase in performance! AI implies that the performance difference is negligible, which is very misleading.
Furthermore, AI completely neglected to mention that because of the lower wattage of the Air’s processor, not to mention the very poor cooling, where the heat sink is not even connected to the fan (!!) under sustained loads like installing applications, performing updates, exporting files etc. the performance difference is even greater! The base model 13” pro performed 63% faster in Cinebench, compared to the quad core i5 Air. Regarding graphics, even though in synthetic metal tests the Air performs better, in real world tests like the Unigine heaven benchmark, the base model pro actually outperforms the Air, even though it is less powerful spec wise (again likely due to the poor cooling and low wattage of the Air). The Pro also has about 40% faster SSD read and write speeds.
It is irresponsible and misinformed for AI to report that the Air is similar in performance to the base model 13” pro, when the pro performs up to 63% better. Comparing the cheapest quad core Air ($1100 custom config) to the entry level 13” Pro ($1300), for $200 more you get: 44% faster multi core geekbench, 63% faster Cinebench, better real world graphics performance, faster SSD, a much better screen (wider color gamut and much brighter) and the Touch Bar. Meanwhile the Air is only negligibly lighter (2.8 vs 3.1 lbs) and is actually thicker at its thickest point than the pro.
I think for anyone who is price conscious, the base model Pro is inarguably a better buy than the Air. The difference in performance between the i5 Air and the base model 13” is actually GREATER than the performance jump going from the 2xTB port Pro to the 4xTB port Pro. The Air only makes sense for the outlier cases of someone who really wants the gold color, has a hard price cutoff of $1100, or who absolutely hates the Touch Bar.
The people over at MaxTech on YouTube, who I believe used to work for this site did a much more thorough analysis between the 13” laptop models Apple is currently offering.
I have watched their videos. In my opinion, theirs is the flawed opinion and focuses on minutae too much -- Cinebench is a very, very specific benchmark, with a very, very specific use case. 99.5% of the users on the planet have a use case more similar to GeekBench, and we feel, like we did when they worked here, that their assessments don't cover a package as a whole.
The Air's cooling is sufficient for what it is for. We feel that the "Pro" looking for a "Pro" machine is much, much better served with the higher-end 13-inch MacBook Pro given the price of upgrades to more RAM and SSD, and the "non-Pro" is better served with the Air.
Keep in mind, at no point did we say that the lower-end 13-inch MBP was a terrible machine. In fact, we specifically said that it is a nice machine, measured in a vacuum. We just don't feel that it's a good choice given proximity to other, better choices, and is an extra step in Apple's product lineup.
FTA: "If we weren't comparing this to the MacBook Air, if it existed in an ideal vacuum, we'd give this machine a four out of five for its design, feature set, and performance. But with the MacBook Air in such close proximity, occupying the same market segment, the entry-level Pro doesn't warrant more than a 3.5."
You, and they, are welcome to have a different opinion, of course. That is the whole point of reviews - opinions, and this is ours. This said, I am glad that they improved their work in the last year.
Adding to the questionable value of the base model, sometime in the past few days Apple doubled the price of a RAM upgrade from 8GB to 16. What was originally $100 is now $200.
Comments
You say that you assume that consumers know the difference between the CPU and ports options, so what's the problem? How is it misleading for the higher priced model to have better characteristics--when all of this is spelled out on the specs page?
Does the higher end model have better speakers? Apple doesn't say that, nor does this review. So I think you're just wrong about that assertion.
I'm not so sure the MBA would do this better.
Ok, yeah, this specific part number isn't available yet. So what? 10th generation Ice Lake CPUs have been shipping in PC laptops since last September, while this is the first Mac with one. That 8 month lag is pretty typical and is what I was referring to.
HP, Dell, and Lenovo do this all the time to keep the prices down on some SKUs. I think Apple is only doing this out of necessity at this point.
Expect the 14” MacBook Pro in 2021 to be exclusively 10th gen CPU’s across all the SKU’s...
Also, even the 8th gen i5 is significantly faster than the MacBook Air. Don’t be fooled by Geekbench, which primarily measures burst speeds. The 10W processors in the Air top out at 12W, so they can only Turbo Boost at around 1.5-1.6GHz for extended periods of time. Even the 8th Gen i5 can sustain about 2.9GHz, and the 10th Gen can sustain around 3.0 GHz (and processes 15-20% more instructions per cycle than the 8th gen), so both are much faster for anything CPU-intensive.
Except the reality is that for CPU-intensive tasks, the 8th gen Intel chips in the Pro hold their own against the 10th gen. The base Pro is still considerably faster than the i7 Air because the Pro chips can easily ramp up to 25W and sustain 3.0GHz Turbo Boost speeds while the i7 Air can’t sustain more than 1.6GHz. At that rate, who cares if the RAM is at 3.7GHz or 2.1GHz?
it certainly doesn’t bode well for an ideas of a new iMac design this year or next.. I believe the current design is now 10 years old or more!!!
and where the hell is WiFi 6 in the higher spec models with Intels latest chip? 6E won’t be out for a while yet.. every competitor has WiFi 6 in its laptops, but Apple only includes it on its iPads and iPhones... I’m not sure what I’d do with 6GB a second speeds on a phone.. but I’d use it on a laptop..
And before you say something like ‘real pros plug their laptops into a network’ well you can’t with a MacBook Pro can you, it has no Ethernet ports on it..
So yes in this regard Apple is way behind the competition I’m afraid, it’s mobile phones and tablets are more advanced with wireless communications!
Apple likes to price gouge on its computers. As this article says the MacBook Air is a far better choice.
The price gouging is obvious -- if you only look at the hardware (which most make the mistake of doing).
According to the Geekbench 5 browser, the 2020 i5 Air gets around 1057 in single core and 2657 for multi core. (AI’s numbers here seem to be WAY off what others are reporting). The 2020 Pro base model with 2 TB ports gets 929 and 3831 respectively. Sure, it is 12% slower in single core, but it is 44% faster in multi core performance, compared to the quad core Air!! That is a huge increase in performance! AI implies that the performance difference is negligible, which is very misleading.
Furthermore, AI completely neglected to mention that because of the lower wattage of the Air’s processor, not to mention the very poor cooling, where the heat sink is not even connected to the fan (!!) under sustained loads like installing applications, performing updates, exporting files etc. the performance difference is even greater! The base model 13” pro performed 63% faster in Cinebench, compared to the quad core i5 Air. Regarding graphics, even though in synthetic metal tests the Air performs better, in real world tests like the Unigine heaven benchmark, the base model pro actually outperforms the Air, even though it is less powerful spec wise (again likely due to the poor cooling and low wattage of the Air). The Pro also has about 40% faster SSD read and write speeds.
It is irresponsible and misinformed for AI to report that the Air is similar in performance to the base model 13” pro, when the pro performs up to 63% better. Comparing the cheapest quad core Air ($1100 custom config) to the entry level 13” Pro ($1300), for $200 more you get: 44% faster multi core geekbench, 63% faster Cinebench, better real world graphics performance, faster SSD, a much better screen (wider color gamut and much brighter) and the Touch Bar. Meanwhile the Air is only negligibly lighter (2.8 vs 3.1 lbs) and is actually thicker at its thickest point than the pro.
I think for anyone who is price conscious, the base model Pro is inarguably a better buy than the Air. The difference in performance between the i5 Air and the base model 13” is actually GREATER than the performance jump going from the 2xTB port Pro to the 4xTB port Pro. The Air only makes sense for the outlier cases of someone who really wants the gold color, has a hard price cutoff of $1100, or who absolutely hates the Touch Bar.
The people over at MaxTech on YouTube, who I believe used to work for this site did a much more thorough analysis between the 13” laptop models Apple is currently offering.
The Air's cooling is sufficient for what it is for. We feel that the "Pro" looking for a "Pro" machine is much, much better served with the higher-end 13-inch MacBook Pro given the price of upgrades to more RAM and SSD, and the "non-Pro" is better served with the Air.
Keep in mind, at no point did we say that the lower-end 13-inch MBP was a terrible machine. In fact, we specifically said that it is a nice machine, measured in a vacuum. We just don't feel that it's a good choice given proximity to other, better choices, and is an extra step in Apple's product lineup.
FTA: "If we weren't comparing this to the MacBook Air, if it existed in an ideal vacuum, we'd give this machine a four out of five for its design, feature set, and performance. But with the MacBook Air in such close proximity, occupying the same market segment, the entry-level Pro doesn't warrant more than a 3.5."
You, and they, are welcome to have a different opinion, of course. That is the whole point of reviews - opinions, and this is ours. This said, I am glad that they improved their work in the last year.