I'll have some money soon and I'd like to get a Macbook, should I get Pro or Air? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by cheese_greater@lemmy.world to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.ca

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I want to eventually develop apps but I wonder if I could do just as well with an Air and just maxx out the specs.

Under what circumstances should a Pro overrule the Air for my use case?

(Can linux also be dual-installed to be able to run some flavor of linux alternatively/parallel to MacOS? Might get a Framework one eventually as well

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[-] cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Develop "apps"? Like as in for phones? Air will be fine. Pro is overkill and you're just throwing money away at that point.

[-] Shadow@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 day ago

No you can't run Linux effectively on anything higher than an m2 (yet).

An air would is fine for most people.

[-] blitzen@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Most people can get by just fine with an Air. Actually, most people can get by with the new Neo. I can certainly do well with the Air, but I went with the Pro with nano texture screen because the screen and audio are just better. Like getting a luxury car.

Honestly, you should at least consider the Neo. Air if you think you need the RAM. But what you’re describing definitely doesn’t need the Pro.

[-] cheese_greater@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Is that true about audio? Are they actually not only better but objectively like "good" enough to justify the extra cost?

[-] blitzen@lemmy.ca 2 points 14 hours ago

Audio, screen, and performance are all objectively better than the Air, and the Air is already pretty good.

Any one of those metrics good enough to justify the extra cost? Probably not (especially if you don’t need the horsepower), but taken together it did justify the additional cost for me.

[-] cheese_greater@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago

Whats the weight difference qualitatively?

[-] blitzen@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

Good question. Answer is, significant.

13” Air: 2.7 lbs.
14” Pro: 3.4 lbs.
15” Air: 3.3 lbs.
16” Pro: 4.7 lbs.

I have the 16”, again, for luxury. The 13” Air is probably the best value overall while being very nice, but the 14” Pro is a nice upgrade while still being very portable.

[-] Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 day ago

If you need to compline code into a binary file, having a faster CPU will make it faster. If you’re just running python scripts, you won’t need to worry about that.

this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026

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