compare macbook and macbook pro

MacBook
Apple’s new MacBook is designed for portability over everything else. It’s just 13mm thick, weighs under 1kg and manages to pack a 12-inch Retina display and full-size keyboard into a smaller frame than the 11-inch MacBook Air. Its battery lasted 7.5 hours in our extensive tests, and due to the fanless design, it’s exceptionally quiet too. It even sports a Force Touch trackpad for even more control when you click. There are compromises – a less-capable processor, but you won’t notice it in everyday use because the flash storage and 8GB RAM mean OS X and apps like Pages and your web browser work quickly and flawlessly. However, it will struggle with more demanding tasks, and does occasionally stutter in surprising places, such as using Google Maps in Safari. If you’re looking for more power from a thin and light notebook, then the MacBook is outclassed by its Air sibling, but if you want something feathery light that will run basic tasks all day while unplugged from the mains, this is it.

MacBook Pro 
The MacBook Pro sees Apple successfully square the circle of portability and performance. While its 13-inch models with Retina display step things up from the less capable MacBook, cast your glance at the recently refreshed 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display if you want the power of a desktop on the move; its quad-core processor may be an older generation (Haswell), but it still delivers comparable performance to the 5K iMac. The MacBook Pro’s flash storage is exceptionally quick, and graphics performance is also decent, with the top-end model sporting an AMD Radeon R9 M370X chip with 2GB discrete memory. Apple’s even managed to eke more life from the battery at the same time as boosting performance – in our real-life tests, the 15-inch model lasted for over six hours, which isn’t far short of the 13-inch MacBook Pro. And while it’s twice the weight of the entry-level MacBook, the 15-inch MacBook Pro is still svelte enough that you’ll be able to carry it around.