Which MacBook should I buy?

The familiar glowing lid logo of the MacBook has become a fixture of lecture theatres, coffee shops, trains and living rooms up and down the country. Why? Fashion? Perhaps? Because they’re blooming great? Most definitely.

If you want to join the club, choosing the right MacBook model can be a tad daunting. With prices ranging from £849 to well over £2,000 with options, there’s a wide range to sift through, even with the dropping of the 17-inch edition. So we’ve put together this guide to tell you which MacBook is best for which task.

13-inch MacBook Air

£999, Apple Store

While the price tag might push your loan to its limits, there’s no denying that the Air is a great tool for any student: its supreme skinniness and barely-there weight make it easy to cart around campus and perch on your desk during lectures, and the 13-inch screen means you won’t be squinting at tiny text during those midnight oil-burning dissertation sessions.

Best for students

15-inch MacBook Pro

£1,959, Apple Store

The 17-inch MacBook Pro is but a distant memory, but video editors looking for a laptop would do well to opt for the 8GB, quad-core 2.6GHz 15-incher, to which we’ve added a 1TB hard drive and anti-glare screen. There’s a GeForce GT 650M with 1GB of memory to ably handle the video processing needs – and if you need more external storage you can add an ultra-fast Thunderbolt drive.

13-inch MacBook Pro

£999, Apple Store

Yes, the 11-inch Air is £150 cheaper, but the way the Pro is built makes it far cheaper to replace parts when the inevitable happens and the battery or hard disk snuffs it after a couple of years. So if you’re looking for a laptop for the long run, our money’s on the 13-inch entry-level Pro. With 4GB of RAM, a 500GB hard disk and a dual-core 2.6GHz Intel processor, it’s powerful enough to chew through any everyday task.

Best for video editing

15-inch MacBook Pro Retina Display

£1,799, Apple Store

The king of MacBooks (read our review) has an utterly brilliant, dare we say it “game-changing” Retina Display screen, but the average user won’t get much extra use out of those 5.1 million pixels due to the fact that very little content is available in the Retina Display’s 2880 x 1800 resolution. Digital photos, however, will look clearer and sharper here than on any other laptop on the planet, making it the ideal tool for anyone working with them. You may want to bolster the 256GB SSD with an external hard drive, though.

11-inch MacBook Air

£849, Apple Store

Apple’s smallest MacBook is absolutely tiny: a mere 17mm in depth and weighing in at just over a kilo, it’s the ideal companion computer for those “digital nomads” who are forever on the move but require a proper notebook rather than just a phone or tablet. The lack of ports and paucity of storage may frustrate at times, but the Air is so quick and adorable you’ll forgive it its sins.

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About

Dan is Editor-in-chief of Stuff, working across the magazine and the Stuff.tv website. Our Editor-in-Chief is a regular at tech shows such as CES in Las Vegas, IFA in Berlin and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as well as at other launches and events. He has been a CES Innovation Awards judge. Dan is completely platform agnostic and very at home using and writing about Windows, macOS, Android and iOS/iPadOS plus lots and lots of gadgets including audio and smart home gear, laptops and smartphones. He's also been interviewed and quoted in a wide variety of places including The Sun, BBC World Service, BBC News Online, BBC Radio 5Live, BBC Radio 4, Sky News Radio and BBC Local Radio.