Best Mac Book Air For 2018
BestMacBookiMore2019
- The MacBook Pro — even the 13-inch model — is leagues ahead of the MacBook Air with a higher quality display and faster hardware. The most attractive part that the MacBook Pro might have over the air the display without bezels.
- MacBook Air review: Out with the old and in with the new, for better or worse The new 2018 MacBook Air is essentially the 12-inch MacBook, made larger.
You'd be hard-pressed to find any website that does as much deep-dive research into everything about Apple's Mac notebook lineup than iMore. We run every model, ever version through their paces (and then some) to determine which is the best MacBook for the average person and which one is perfect for the pros. Our best overall pick is the MacBook Air. With Touch ID, a retina display, and sleek and slim design, this is the one to beat.
The old MacBook's deep keys and multiple ports are gone. Sarah Tew/CNET While this reimagined MacBook Air fixes almost all of the previous design's issues, it adds a couple of its own.
Best Overall: MacBook Air
With a major update in 2018, the MacBook Air now has a faster processor, Touch ID, a Retina display, and is still thin enough to fit into a manila envelope.
The Retina display specs are 2560 x 1600 at 227ppi with an sRBG color gamut, and the bezels are slim, providing as much screen landscape as possible on a 13-inch Mac laptop.
Though you don't get the much-loved MagSafe charging port, you do get, in its place, two USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports along with the 3.5mm headphone jack. That means 40Gbps high-speed data transfer so you can move photos, videos, and huge documents between hard drives or other computers lickety-split.
The MacBook Air also now supports Touch ID for biometric security. Not only do you use it to unlock your MacBook Air, but also to pay for things online that use Apple Pay (it's such a time saver).
Pros:
- Retina display
- High-speed data transfer
- Touch ID
- Affordable
- 12-hour battery life
Cons:
- Only two Thunderbolt 3 ports
- previous-generation processor (8th-gen)
Best Overall
Best Macbook To Buy 2018
MacBook Air
The perfect Mac laptop for most people.
The MacBook Air has the perfect balance of features and affordability. As the lowest-price Retina display Mac in the laptop lineup, you're getting a hard-working computer without paying the premium price of the rest of the MacBook lineup.
Best value: 13-inch MacBook Pro (two Thunderbolt 3 ports)
The lower-priced 13-inch MacBook Pro is feature-rich without being too much computer for the average person's needs. It's got the highest-quality Retina display with 3DPI wide-color gamut, two high-speed Thunderbolt 3 ports for 40Gbps data transfer, and an ultra-fast processor chip. If you don't need more than two Thunderbolt 3 ports, support for heavy graphics, or daily lengthy video rendering, the smaller MacBook Pro has the best feature-to-price ratio, making it the best value of the MacBook lineup.
Pros:
- Portable
- Ultra-fast storage
- High-speed data transfer
- Retina Display
Best value
13-inch MacBook Pro (two Thunderbolt 3 ports)
The biggest bang for your buck.
When it comes to portability, the 13-inch MacBook Pro is just right. It's got the power of a top-of-the-line computer in a lightweight body you can take anywhere.
Best for pros: 15-inch MacBook Pro
For the pro on the go, there's the 15-inch MacBook Pro. This workhorse of a laptop can support up to 8 cores of Intel's latest Coffee Lake refresh processor chip with turbo boosts of up to 5.0GHz and SSD read speeds of up to 3.2Gbps. It's got four Thunderbolt 3 ports, the most in the entire Mac laptop line, and can be spec'd out to as much as 32GB of memory and a 4TB SSD hard drive with Radeon Pro Vega 20 graphics with 4GB of HBM2 memory. It's fast. It's powerful. It'll sing for you while it renders your videos (not literally).
Pros:
- Latest Intel processor (9th-gen)
- Improved keyboard
- Advanced GPU
- Up to 8 cores
- Touch ID
- Retina display
- True Tone
Best for pros
15-inch MacBook Pro
A pro laptop for the pro user.
If you need the most power and the best performance with the option of mobility and are willing to pay the premium price, the 2019 15-inch MacBook Pro is your pick.
Best for Versatility: 13-inch MacBook Pro (4 Thunderbolt 3 ports)
The four Thunderbolt 3 port 13-inch MacBook Pro starts about $500 higher than the two Thunderbolt 3 port model, but those extra ports may be the most important thing you'll need. It's got the highest-quality Retina display with 3DPI wide-color gamut, four high-speed Thunderbolt 3 ports for 40Gbps data transfer, and an ultra-fast processor chip. If you're going to be plugging in more than two peripherals that need Thunderbolt 3's fast data transfer capabilities, you're going to want to spend the extra money on those extra ports.
Pros:
- Portable
- Ultra-fast storage
- High-speed data transfer
- Retina Display
Best for Versatility
13-inch MacBook Pro (four Thunderbolt 3 ports)
Versatility at a lower price.
When it comes to versatility, the 13-inch MacBook Pro with four Thunderbolt 3 ports offers more flexibility for your dollar. You get high-speed data transfer from all four ports.
Bottom line
Because the MacBook Air has everything most people need for daily computer use tied up nicely in a small package, and because it supports Touch ID for biometric security and Apple Pay, it's our pick for the best MacBook in 2019. The fact that it's also the least-expensive Retina Display MacBook is just icing on the cake.
Of course, if you're looking for something with more power, but don't need the fastest, most powerful processor and graphics, the 13-inch MacBook Pro without Touch Bar has the most specs for its price, making it our pick for the best value.
Credits — The team that worked on this guide
Lory Gil is iMore's managing editor and has extensive knowledge of the MacBook lineup. Though she doesn't own every single MacBook ever, she's got a pretty decent-sized pile building up.
Rene Ritchie is iMore's resident Apple analyst and has studied every aspect of every MacBook. He puts his MacBooks through their paces and knows exactly what each one's limits are.
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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.
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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.
Macbook Air 2018 Weight
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)
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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