Cnet reviews apple macbook

Apple MacBook Pro review: Apple MacBook Pro

With the MacBook Pro, Apple hasn’t radically redesigned the PowerBook form factor, it has just made a few refinements to it. Measuring 15.4 inches wide, 10.4 inches deep, and 1 inch thick, the sleek, aluminum MacBook Pro looks very similar to the 17-inch PowerBook G4 it replaces. At 6.8 pounds, the 17-inch MacBook Pro is a hair lighter than its predecessor and the lightest laptop of its size on the market. With its AC adapter, which like other Apple laptops connects magnetically to the case, the MacBook Pro weighs 7.9 pounds. For the sake of comparison, the Dell Inspiron E1705 weighs 8.2 pounds, while the Toshiba Qosmio G35 weighs 10.2 pounds.

Apple MacBook Pro

The Good

The Bad

The Bottom Line

Underneath the lid, the MacBook Pro extends the tradition of the PowerBook’s minimalist design. The MacBook Pro has just a power button, a big keyboard framed by stereo speakers, a very large touch pad with a single mouse button, and a handy built-in iSight camera that sits above the display. Though the keys are a bit shallow, they’re comfortable to type on, and we love the keyboard’s backlighting feature, which adjusts to changes in ambient light levels. We don’t like that the keyboard is located 5.4 inches back from the laptop’s front edge; we wish it were centered to encourage a more ergonomic typing position. The touch pad lets you scroll through long documents, Web pages, and spreadsheets by dragging two fingers down or across the pad, a terrific feature that’s unique to Apple laptops. Arguably the 17-inch MacBook Pro’s most stunning feature is its display: the large wide-screen display features a fine 1,680×1,050 native resolution.

The 17-inch MacBook Pro offers a decent selection of ports and connections, though it comes up a bit short of what you’ll find on a similarly sized PC laptop, including the Inspiron E1705. That said, the MacBook Pro features three USB 2.0 ports; FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 ports; an ExpressCard slot; and a DVI port (VGA with included adapter) for connecting to an external monitor. It’s also equipped with Bluetooth 2.0+EDR (enhanced data rate), and you can access the Internet via 802.11g Wi-Fi radio, and Gigabit Ethernet. As with the PowerBook, the MacBook Pro features a slot-loading SuperDrive that plays and burns DVDs and CDs. One new extra is the Apple remote that controls the included Front Row multimedia player; we wish, though, that the MacBook had a storage slot for it. Unlike most PC laptops, the MacBook Pro lacks a built-in media reader for flash memory cards, and there’s no S-Video output or built-in modem—both of which the PowerBook had.

The MacBook Pro ships with Mac OS X Tiger, highlights of which include the incredibly cool Spotlight search utility and the customizable Dashboard, a collection of handy desktop tools. Also included is the robust iLife ’06 software suite, Front Row media center software, and a handful of other apps. In addition, the beta of Boot Camp lets you turn the MacBook into a dual-boot machine that runs full versions of Mac OS X and Windows XP (though you need to purchase a full version of Windows separately).

The 17-inch MacBook Pro comes in one default configuration that costs $2,799. Though there aren’t a lot of upgrade options, our review unit included RAM and hard drive enhancements that brought the price up to $3,099. For that much money, you’d expect some pretty high-end specs, and the MacBook delivers; it has a fast, 2.16GHz Intel Core Duo processor; 2GB of speedy 667MHz DDR2 RAM; an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics card with 256MB of VRAM; and a blazing 7,200rpm, 100GB hard drive. Still, the MacBook Pro is a bit more expensive than similarly configured Windows laptops; for example, an Inspiron E1705 with comparable specs costs $2,889.

CNET Labs compared the 17-inch MacBook Pro against a number of older Apple laptops running the PowerPC processor as well as other Core Duo-based Macs. Unsurprisingly, the MacBook Pro trailed behind a PowerBook G4 when running Sorenson Squeeze, which requires the Rosetta translation program to run on the new chipset. But its ample amount of RAM and quick hard drive helped it power through our Photoshop CS test, in spite of Rosetta. (We expect the MacBook Pro’s performance to even out once software publishers release more so-called universal binary apps; however, we recommend checking if your applications are or will soon be Intel-compatible before buying any new Apple system.) Of course, on native applications such as iTunes, the 17-inch MacBook Pro saw significant gains over the previous generation of PowerBooks. Likely due to its discrete graphics card, the 17-inch MacBook Pro displayed very respectable Doom 3 frame rates, though its 23.2 frames per second (fps) can’t compete with the 56.5fps achieved by the Inspiron E1705 we tested. In our DVD battery-drain test, the MacBook Pro lasted 2 hours, 54 minutes—quite respectable for a desktop replacement that’s not likely to see too much time away from the wall socket.

Apple backs the MacBook Pro with an industry-standard one-year warranty that covers parts and labor, but toll-free telephone support is limited to a mere 90 days—well short of what you’ll typically find on the PC side—unless you purchase the $349 AppleCare Protection Plan, which extends phone support and repair coverage to three years. By way of contrast, you can upgrade most PCs’ warranties to three years of support for about $200. Apple does offer online troubleshooting, and its Web forums are a good resource for getting tips from other users and downloading the product’s printed manual.

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MacBook Air M1 review: Big changes from Apple silicon and Big Sur

The classic MacBook Air gets the biggest makeover in Apple’s new M1 chip Mac lineup, going fanless and adding hours battery life.

Going hands-on with the new M1-powered Apple MacBook Air feels very different from using any previous MacBook Air, even the early-2020 Intel version I tested alongside it. But that mostly comes from the new MacOS Big Sur experience, more than the hardware changes inside. Big Sur is a huge change for the Mac, with new visual flair, new controls and new ways of interfacing with your Mac. Once you account for the big OS update, the day-to-day experience will be familiar to anyone who has used a recent MacBook Air. That, by itself, is a big point in favor of the theory that switching Macs, especially the MacBook Air, from Intel CPUs to the new Apple-designed M1 system-on-chip will be overall a smooth transition.

Apple MacBook Air M1

• Big boost to battery life
• Performance in benchmark tests shows the M1 Air easily outperforming Intel versions
• Fanless design runs cool and quiet

Don’t like

• No external design or feature changes
• App compatibility is an issue for early adopters
• No mobile broadband options, 5G or otherwise

For such a popular laptop — I often call the MacBook Air the most universally useful laptop you can buy — continuity of experience is incredibly important. That’s true for Air users, who are usually looking for a sleek, reasonably priced machine that just works, as well as for those who use MacBook Pro laptops, the iMac, the Mac Mini or the Mac Pro for professional design, editing, photography or music work. Right now, only part of the Mac line is switching to Apple silicon. The rest, I’d expect to come sometime in the next year.

A familiar experience

There are a couple of things working in the M1’s favor when it comes to continuity of experience. The first is that much of what we do on our computers, again especially for the typical MacBook Air buyer, is done online, through cloud-based and browser-based tools.

Email, social media, shopping, video streaming, even workplace collaboration through Slack or other online tools — it’s all cloud- or browser-based, and for the most part highly platform-agnostic. The differences between the Mac and Windows capabilities of most laptops have narrowed significantly with this shift, and it’s rare — although not unheard of — that a casual or mainstream user runs into the old problem of not having the right OS for the tool they need.

In situations like the above, the new M1 MacBook Air feels very much like an Intel MacBook Air, which is a big selling point to anyone concerned about the wholesale platform change.

The Rosetta factor

Assisting in this is the Rosetta 2 emulation technology, which automatically installs itself the first time you attempt to install a non-native app (as in, an app not optimized for the M1 platform). So far, it’s let me install things like Adobe apps, including Photoshop and Premiere Pro, Steam for gaming and Google’s Chrome web browser.

Adobe adds its own warning message, letting you know you’re still installing and running the Intel versions of these programs while the M1-native versions are being worked on. A version of Lightroom is coming later in 2020, Photoshop and other apps are not coming until sometime in 2021. As Adobe apps and Macs really go hand in hand, it’s a bit shocking to me that zero Adobe apps are ready in their native forms on Day 1 of the M1 era. I’d have suspected Apple would keep a team of Adobe engineers chained in the basement of 1 Apple Park Way to make sure at least Photoshop or Illustrator could be a Day 1 native app.

That said, the emulated versions worked fine. Some of my colleagues would never deign to use Photoshop on a MacBook Air. I’ve used it for minor picture editing for years and the emulated version felt as robust as the native version on my Core i5 Air.

The new M1 Air next to the 2020 Intel Core i5 Air.

One disappointment was that Mac gaming remains, much as it ever was, an afterthought. After some big claims about cult favorite new RPG Baldur’s Gate 3 running on M1 Macs, I could not get the Mac version to run via Steam — I got an error message on each of the M1 Macs I tested. Larian, developer of BG3, tells me that it’s working on a Rosetta-ready patch for the Steam version of the game right now.

Emulating software, especially games, is always a roll of the dice, but at least that’s the only app I tried that wouldn’t even launch in Rosetta mode. That said, the Steam interface itself ran sluggishly. I hope there’s a native version of that in the not-too-distant future as well.

Testing several other MacOS-compatible games from my Steam and GOG.com libraries, I got two out of six to work, so at the moment, I’d consider this even less of a gaming-friendly machine than its predecessor, but hopefully that’s an issue that can be patched or updated away soon.

But I wouldn’t call that a dealbreaker (unless you’re specifically buying a new Mac to play Baldur’s Gate 3 right now. ). The truth is, the x86 app compatibility on the M1 is night and day different from my experience on Arm-based Windows PCs, including similarly high-end ones like the Surface Pro X . Those Arm-based PCs simply refuse to run all but a modest handful of software and while I like a lot about the Surface Pro X, it’s a productivity stopper that got in my way a lot. It was impossible to ever really forget you were using a non-Intel computer, while with the M1 MacBook Air, it was (almost) never an issue.

Call me a fan of fanless

Of the three new M1 Macs, the MacBook Air is the most different from its predecessor. That’s because the system is finally truly fanless, replacing the cooling fans with an aluminum heat spreader inside, as well as taking advantage of the highly efficient M1 chip, which Apple says will produce less heat, do more work per watt and generally outperform even high-end Intel Macs.

If you’ve never thought of the MacBook Air as a particularly loud laptop, try letting your 9-year-old play Roblox on it for a while; the fan really kicks in. Having a fanless version — something still rare even in ultrathin Windows laptops — is a big internal change.

The M1 version inside the Air is nearly identical to the ones in the MacBook Pro and Mac Mini. On paper the only difference is that the base model has a seven-core GPU on the SOC versus eight GPU cores in the higher-end M1 machines (including in the higher-end M1 Air config). Previously, there was a lot more daylight between the MacBooks, with the default $999 MacBook Air using a relatively wimpy Intel Core i3 CPU.

That’s a huge vote in favor of the Air versus the Pro if you’re looking for the most performance for the least money. Considering the entry-level $999 (£999, AU$1,599) M1 MacBook Air and $1,299 (£1,299, AU$1,999) M1 MacBook Pro are both machines with 8GB RAM and 256GB solid-state drives, I know which one I’d suggest as your starting point. For the extra $300 on the Pro, you’re getting a slightly brighter screen; the Touch Bar (even as the Air retains the best Touch Bar feature, the Touch ID fingerprint sensor); a few more hours of battery life (according to Apple’s claims); and a larger body with «active cooling,» otherwise known as a fan, which can allow the M1 MacBook Pro to run at peak speeds for longer without throttling down.

Considering the similar benchmark scores, there’s a strong case to be made for sticking with the new MacBook Air and throwing in another $200 for either 16GB of RAM or a 512GB SSD. Also worth noting, the M1 versions of the MacBook Pro have the same set of two Thunderbolt/USB 4 ports. You’ll need an upgraded Intel version of the Pro (starting at $1,799) to get back up to four ports.

In my hands-on with all three new Macs , you can find more performance and testing details, and find out why the little Mac Mini may be my favorite Mac right now.

Comparing the new M1 Macs with their Intel counterparts at the CNET Labs Brooklyn outpost.

That’s probably the biggest letdown of the new Air — it’s new on the inside, not so much on the outside. Still just two ports. No edge-to-edge screen. No 5G . No touchscreen. Basically, all the things people prognosticate about in new-MacBook-Air prediction lists remain hypothetical. This is a transitional product. Once the new platform and software compatibility are well-established, design and feature changes may follow.

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Apple MacBook Air (2017) review: An old friend shows its age

Editors’ note, Oct. 31, 2018: Apple has announced a new version of the MacBook Air , which starts at $1,199 (£1,199, AU$1,849) and features a Retina display, Touch ID and USB-C ports. The version reviewed below remains on sale, for now, and still starts at $999 (£949, AU$1,499). The original review, published on Aug. 17, 2017, follows.

Apple MacBook Air (2017)

The Good

The Bad

The Bottom Line

Apple’s MacBook Air is as close to iconic as a piece of consumer technology gets. It’s the single laptop model you’re most likely to see everywhere, from college campuses to airports to coffee shops and even offices. And it’s been that way for a very long time.

That’s the problem. Not counting an incremental spec bump in mid-2017, this is still internally almost the same MacBook Air as the last refresh in 2015, and externally, it’s had basically the same design since 2010 (when the original 2008 design got an overhaul). In technology terms, that’s roughly forever.

But it’s also a testament to what a strong product the Air was in its heyday. To have a laptop that looks and feels the same as it did for so many years while still a maintaining a loyal following, that’s a rare achievement. The MacBook Air is no longer the best-for-almost-everyone device it once was, but it’s the least expensive way (by far) to get MacOS on a laptop, so there’s certainly still a place for it. Note that the Air we tested had a Core i7 CPU and 256GB SSD upgrade, for a total of $1,349, £1,234 or AU$2,039. The Air still starts at $999, £949 and AU$1,499, and can be found for even less online.

SYSTEM NAME

Price as reviewed	$1,349, £1,234 or AU$2,039 (starts at $999, £949 or AU$1,499)
Display size/resolution	13-inch, 1,440×900-pixel display
CPU	2.2GHz Intel Core i7-5650U
Memory	8GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz
Graphics	1,536MB Intel HD Graphics 6000
Storage	256GB SSD
Networking	802.11ac Wi-Fi wireless; Bluetooth 4.0
Operating system	MacOS 10.12.6 Sierra

Still kicking

And a lot about the MacBook Air still works. As a long-time Air user, but also someone who hasn’t spent a lot of time on one over the last few years, firing up the 2017 version felt like visiting an old friend.

There’s the just-right size of the 13-inch screen, still the best balance between viewability and portability; the rock-solid aluminum body, which can stand up to years of abuse; and the chunky island-style keyboard, itself now extinct across the rest of the MacBook line, replaced by super-shallow butterfly keys that lack this level of tactile feedback.

The Air also scores points for being the last MacBook with a good, old-fashioned USB-A port. You know, the kind that every mouse, memory key and other accessory you own fits into. The MacBook Pro and the 12-inch MacBook have both gone all-in on USB-C, which is forward-looking to be sure, but a limiting frustration for many.

Picking it up, I was reminded of another reason I loved this particular laptop line for so long: the MagSafe power connection. The plug, which automatically pulls away from the body when you yank the cord or trip over it, remains one of the most brilliant bits of consumer PC engineering ever.

It’s since been replaced by USB-C power connections, which are handy for sharing data, power, video and other connections through the same port, but not nearly as flexible. That classic MagSafe has rescued many, many laptops from a grim fate over the years, and that’s just the ones I’ve personally almost killed.

Feeling its age

But using a MacBook Air, even a brand new one, in 2017 feels like getting stuck in a bit of a time warp. The processor is years out of date compared to newer slim laptops — even though the big update for 2017 is a slight base CPU uptick, from a 1.6GHz Intel Core i5 to a 1.8GHz one, or in our case, an optional 2.2GHz Core i7. All are from the same fifth generation of those chips, while Intel is about to announce details of the upcoming eighth-generation Core CPUs.

I’d argue that for websurfing, video streaming and social media, it’s not a huge deal to have an older-generation processor, but for a thousand bucks and up, you’re not wrong to want something newer. It is great, however, to get 8GB of RAM as the default now, over the previous 4GB. The optional Core i7 in our test system helped the Air keep pace with, or beat, some slim laptops with newer Core i5 CPUs. But much more importantly, the Air is still a battery life king, running more than 10 hours.

A 13-inch Pro vs. the 13-inch Air in a battle of the bezels.

The single biggest thing that keeps the MacBook Air stuck in the past is its display. This is a 1,440×900-pixel display, the same as the Air has used for many generations. It’s also not an IPS display, the in-plane switching technology found in newer laptops that helps with off-axis viewing. For anything above an ultrabudget laptop, it’s not wrong to expect a higher resolution, especially in 2017, where even bargain basement televisions have 4K panels, and a growing number of midrange laptops are shooting past 1,920×1,080 towards 2,560×1,440 or even 4K.

So many new devices have shaved down the bezel, which is what we call the outer border around the screen. TVs and phones are nearly bezel-free today, and high-end laptops like the Dell XPS 13 or Samsung Notebook 9 are following the same path. By comparison, the wide silver border around the 13-inch MacBook Air screen may be the single most dated thing about the design.

Two years ago , I said: «On the Air, you have a very thick bezel, the dead space between the edge of the display and the edge of the lid . giving you a less premium look and feel.» The feeling is even more pronounced now, especially as the MacBook and MacBook Pro combine great higher-resolution screens with much thinner borders.

It’s a price thing

I know it sounds like I’ve judged the MacBook Air harshly for not keeping up with the times, but there’s an important mitigating factor that could still make it the right choice for a great many shoppers.

The original MacBook Air launched in 2008 (with a single USB port and a slow non-SSD hard drive!) at $1,799 in the US. Over time that came down to $999 for the base 13-inch Air, which is where it still sits today. That’s $300 less than either a 12-inch MacBook or the lowest-end 13-inch MacBook Pro (both start at $1,299, £1,249 or AU$1,899), making this the most affordable MacBook by a wide margin.

Spending around the same on a new Windows laptop will get you a better display, newer processor and probably more RAM and SSD storage (and even a hybrid hinge and touchscreen ) — but if you’re determined to buy a MacOS laptop over a Windows 10 one, this is the least expensive option.

From left to right, the MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and MacBook.

Even better, while Apple sells the 13-inch MacBook Air for $999 and up, it’s often easy to find at many US retailers for $899 or less, or $100 off the higher-end 256GB SSD configuration. Pre-2017 models, which are essentially identical in almost every way, can be found for as little as $799.

Years ago, I called the MacBook Air the most universally useful laptop you could buy, because of its great design, long battery life and decent specs. Today, its appeal isn’t quite as broad, and the design is definitely showing its age. But the lower prices available from some retailers, plus performance that’s decent enough and battery life that still tops 10 hours, has given the Air another shot — perhaps its last one — at avoiding the old laptop retirement home.

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