The 3 Best Apple Laptops And MacBooks of 2023 Reviews

The best Apple laptop we’ve tested is the Apple MacBook Pro 14 (2021), the smaller of the two ‘Pro’ laptops with Apple’s new design, Mini-LED display, and in-house SoC. The display produces deep blacks, gets incredibly bright, and covers the entire DCI P3 color space, making it suitable for viewing and producing HDR content. Its factory calibration is superb, so you likely won’t need to calibrate before doing color work. It’s also a ProMotion display, meaning it can dynamically adjust the refresh rate up to 120Hz to make motion smoother or lower it to extend battery life.

Port selection is outstanding; you get three USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 ports, an HDMI (2.0, sadly), a full-size SD card reader, and a high-output headphone jack for difficult-to-drive cans. Performance-wise, Apple’s M1 Pro and M1 Max SoCs have more than enough processing power to handle demanding tasks like video editing and 3D animation. The battery lasts around 12 to 13 hours of light use, although it’s much shorter if you perform intensive tasks. If screen space is more important than portability, the Apple MacBook Pro 16 (2021) is the obvious choice. It’s almost identical to its 14-inch sibling but with better-sounding speakers and longer battery life. The only downside is that it’s more expensive.

Apple has released the new MacBook Pro 14 and 16 with their M2 Pro and M2 Max chips. They’re identical in almost every aspect to the M1 models; you just get slightly better performance, HDMI 2.1, and increased memory support (up to 96GB). At this point, it’s better to just go with the M2 models since they start at the same price as their predecessors. Also, Apple no longer sells the M1 models on their website. You can probably find a good deal on an M1 model through third-party sellers and marketplaces, but know that they usually only offer the base configurations.