Upgrading the Macbook Air
Now that my MacBook Air is about three years old, I wanted something better.
Introduction
I’ve had the MacBook Air for a little over three years now and I bought it with 16 GB back then. But now I wanted more performance and that could only mean investing in a MacBook Pro.
The MacBook Pro with the M4 processor is now available in various versions, but at least Apple has increased the minimum storage7 to 16 GB. With the MacBook Air, which only has a 256 GB SSD, I’ve always managed with the help of external drives.
Nevertheless, I asked myself whether it wouldn’t be cheaper to have more other reserves in this case. So, get the 512 GB version.
I also recorded a video about it:
Selection
After a lot of research on the Internet, including YouTube, of course, I decided on the MacBook with the M4 pro processor and 24 GB and a 512 GB SSD.
At the time of purchase, this version was offered by Apple itself for around €2400. However, some retailers were offering this version for around €2000, so I decided to go for it. I even paid a little extra for the silver version because the black space version is apparently sensitive to fingerprints.
Setup
Setting up, or rather transferring data and programs from the MacBook Air to the MacBook Pro, was actually very easy to do with the migration assistant.
The entire transfer of all programs and data actually only took 1 hour 20 minutes, compared to the original estimate of 4 hours and 45 minutes, although larger programs such as Photoshop, Lightroom and so on should be installed on the MacBook Air.
First impression
The build quality, especially of the keyboard, is a bit better on the MacBook Pro compared to the MacBook Air. Of course, the MacBook Pro is a good bit heavier. But that is certainly also because the display is larger, there is more battery power and ultimately there are a large number of ports directly in the device.
I bought the Calldigit USB hub for the MacBook Air at the time, mainly because the MacBook Air only has two USB C ports. This USB C hub is hardly needed now, however, because the MacBook Pro has three USB C or Thunderbolt ports, as well as a built-in card reader and an HDMI port and a 3.5 mm jack for microphone or headphones.
Performance
Even though I didn’t want to run any benchmarks, I naturally wanted to know where the MacBook Pro in the version I chose stood in terms of performance.
I have re-rendered the video for my article about DaVinci and YouTube. This video is 12:04 minutes long and is rendered on the MacBook Pro in 6 minutes. On my Windows PC with i7-14700 CPU, DaVinci only takes 4:36 minutes, but folks, we’re talking about a laptop.
I then used Lightroom to export 319 images from the Lumix G9 in full size to JPEG. The I7-14700 needed just under 45 seconds to do this, while the MacBook needed 1:40 minutes. I’ll have to look into this again, because I expected a faster time based on the results when rendering the video.
Conclusion
I am more than impressed with the MacBook Pro, both in terms of build quality and performance.
I am also convinced that this version, namely with the slightly stronger M4 pro processor and 24 GB RAM, was the right compromise between performance and price, because as usual, the extra costs for RAM and larger SSD are simply not normal.
Yes, that’s my first impression of the MacBook Pro, and I will certainly report more about my (longer-term) experiences soon.
ciao tuxoche
