Need help deciding a laptop

[belikemike747]

I am deciding whether to get the 2020 13 inch Macbook Pro i5/16gb/256 or the 2020 13 inch Macbook Air i5/16gb/256.

Looking to move on from my windows dell xps 13. I will be doing accounting work for my career so I will frequently be using email, adobe, mail, excel and word. I don't usually edit photos but I do mess with Audacity and stream Netflix, Hulu and apple TV. I use 5-6 tabs and somewhat of a heavy user. The one thing that I'm worried is the MBp has the old processor than the Air, but I was told the Mbp is still the faster and better system.

 

[hobowankenobi]

On paper...pretty similar. The biggest thing would be to see the difference between the 8th gen and 10tth gen CPUs, both for performance and power use/heat.

Benchmark for 2020 4 core 1.1 Air
Benchmark for 2019 4 core 1.4 MBP

I didn't find any benchmarks for the new 2020 MBP yet....but my understanding is the 8th gen CPU is the same as in older models, so I would expect similar benchmark scores.

As you can see, the Air wins on Single-Core, while the MBP does quite a bit better on Multi-Core performance. Overall, most tasks and apps should be able to use Multi-Core these days, so the MBP should be faster overall.

It's too bad that the lower end 2020 MBP still uses the 8th gen CPU. If it were the 10th gen CPU (like the higher cost models do), it would be the clear winner by a wider margin. But I expect the price would higher to reflect both the cost and the performance. If you want to future proof a bit more, you would have to move up to the higher end MBP with 10th gen CPU. Hopefully we will see benchmarks for them soon.

My hunch is the Air would probably get a bit better run time. If true, the trade-off would be longer untethered portability (Air) vs. better CPU performance (MBP).

 

[Lucas284]

Air has terrible cooling. Therefore it is thermal throttling. I’m in the exact same situation as you. I choose the MBP because of its better stability, I even get education discount

 

[hobowankenobi]

Found this over at 9to5Mac:

These numbers are for the "high-end" MBP, so not the entry-level with 8th gen, but the $1800 model with 10th gen CPU. Pretty good overall review and insight.