Stuck trying to find the right MacBook

[Technicstat]

Hey! I'm a student and I'm trying to ditch my Thinkpad T480. It's not that I hate it, it's an amazing machine. However, it's not quite doing what I need it to. It's 8th gen i7 and now primitive IPS display struggle as soon as I start anything that begins with "Adobe" and I kill my battery in a day without issue (new batteries, cycle count on both <90). In Windows I use 3 desktops. One for school which contains about 25 chrome tabs, one for work which has Slack and 10 Firefox tabs, and one for personal. In the personal desktop, I normally just have Firefox, Signal, and Spotify open, but its not infrequent that I whip out Illustrator, Photoshop, FL studio, Visual Studio, CLion, RekordBox, or even Premiere Pro. As you can imagine, this doesn't go so well and my battery life seems to reduce to 25 minutes.

I decided, even as an engineering student, that I will need to buy a MacBook. Once I start doing engineering stuff for school in a few years I'll have to buy a windows workstation, but for now it's gonna be Mac. For the first time ever. I'm torn between the 13" M2 Air (512, 16gb), a refurbished 14" mbp (m2), and a refurbished 14" m1 pro. What's the best move? Battery life is important, but so is the ability to run photoshop and illustrator. Portability wise, any of these would work. My bag is already heavy enough. I get the apple education discount, and I also work at best buy, which means the Geek squad refurbished m1 would come to $890 pre tax. That means, unless I wanna spend $2,000 for the m2 mbp I would be deciding between the air and the pro, but at that price difference the air is actually more expensive. Is that m1 pro mbp better than an m2 mba? I'm guessing fans and battery life would play a big difference there but I'm not sure how big. If I have the money, I'll get the m2 pro, but otherwise what do you all think is the best move?

 

Thanks!

[igormp]

9 minutes ago, Technicstat said:

Is that m1 pro mbp better than an m2 mba? I'm guessing fans and battery life would play a big difference there but I'm not sure how big.

The battery has some extra juice on the mbp afaik. It's also cheaper for you, so I think that's much of a hassle to decide.

9 minutes ago, Technicstat said:

If I have the money, I'll get the m2 pro

I do have a MBP M2 pro with 32gb and I don't think it's worth it over the M1 Pro given the price difference.

 

Can you get a model with more RAM by any chance? Given you usage, I believe you would be running out of ram pretty quick. The 32gb on my mbp are barely able to handle my workloads.

[Technicstat]

4 hours ago, igormp said:

Can you get a model with more RAM by any chance? Given you usage, I believe you would be running out of ram pretty quick. The 32gb on my mbp are barely able to handle my workloads.

I tried to look for models with more RAM but given that its a refurb I couldn't find anything...

 

[Darkseth]

M1 Pro > M2.

Better Display, almost same batterylife, better ports, better speakers.

 

Performance difference can be there, if you do very heavy work and 100% Load situations (rendering a video). Then the Fan will help keeping performance up.

During everyday stuff (aka NOT 100% Load), battery will seem to last forever. In this Situation you will probably struggle to empty the battery in less than 8-10 hours.

 

When it comes to "best batterylife while doing work", there's no way around the Macbooks.

 

If the Air is enough or if you should go for the 14" Pro, idk. Depends on your Workload. If you can afford the M1 Pro / M2 Pro, i don't think it's a bad choice.
If it's same prife than the M2 Air, get the 14" Pro. Only get the Air (same SSD/Ram), if it's significantly cheaper. Like 100-200 bucks maybe.

[igormp]

1 hour ago, Darkseth said:

In this Situation you will probably struggle to empty the battery in less than 8-10 hours.

tfw just emptied it today in 7 hours (had lots of meetings tho).

 

Still pretty awesome nonetheless.

[Koolholio]

The MBP is possibly a little more future proof..

the M1 has its own “niggles”…

The Air… the name itself says a bit (as light as)

It might be an idea to do your research into which model is fully supported by which version of OS…