Still, it’s not cheap, and for many students, it’ll be overkill. The battery life has also increased – Apple says you can watch over 20 hours of video on a single charge.įactor in the incredible performance and power efficiency of both the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips, and the 16-inch MacBook essentially becomes a powerful, desktop-class workstation that you can take anywhere. Then there’s the display, which gains an extra couple of inches to make it ideal for watching movies. Apple’s largest MacBook doesn’t offer any drastic improvements over its smaller brother, but it does come with a fast charger as standard. You can take everything we said about the 14-inch MacBook Pro and apply it to the 16-inch version, too. Oh and if you’re a student, you can also save money year-round with the Apple Student Discount. Naturally, the most powerful MacBooks are better suited to complex tasks, making them among the best laptops for coding, but you’ll find plenty of bang for your buck with M1 laptops too. From Pages, Numbers, and Keynote for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, to Garageband for audio editing and iMovie for video, there’s plenty you can do with a Mac right out of the box. So, what makes a MacBook one of the best laptops for students? Not only is the hardware and software more in tune than Windows machines, with a variety of trackpad gestures and clever features like MagSafe charging, but macOS offers a powerful set of built-in apps. After that, it’s the M2, then M1, although year-on-year performance gains are more incremental than the jump from Intel to M1.

Next, it’s the M1 Max, which can be found in MacBook Pros, and then the M1 Pro, which is another MacBook Pro chip. At the time of writing, the M1 Ultra is Apple’s most powerful chip, but it’s only found in desktop computers.

As a result, your best bet is to keep an eye out for M1 or M2 processors.

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