The 5 best MacBooks to buy in 2026

Read Mashable's full review of the 15-inch Apple MacBook Air (M4).

The 15-inch version of Apple's latest MacBook Air is beautiful, long-lasting, unexpectedly peppy, and priced very fairly, making it super easy to recommend for basically anyone wanting a near-perfect ultraportable. I think most people will make good use of its larger screen, but if you want a more portable (and even more affordable) option, there's also a 13-inch size — more on it below.

If you're still hanging onto a MacBook with an Intel processor, or even an M1 model, you're a prime candidate for an upgrade to the M4 MacBook Air. The performance jump alone will be night and day.

From a sheer performance standpoint, the M4 chip has effectively closed the gap between Apple's MacBook Air and Pro series. This 15-incher notched an excellent multi-core score of 14,992 in Geekbench 6's CPU test, our primary speed benchmark, making it less than two percent slower than the 14-inch M4 MacBook Pro. (The newer M5 version of the 14-inch Pro is about 17 percent faster, which still isn't a radical jump.) The more notable difference between the two models' performance lies in the way they handle the stress of multitasking. Heavy workloads are a breeze for the Pro, which has fans, but they make the fanless Air get hot to the touch.

Compared to older MacBook Airs, the 15-inch M4 MacBook Air is 22 percent faster than the 15-inch M3 model; 39 percent faster than the 15-inch M2 version; and 52 percent faster than the 13-inch M1 MacBook Air. At the time of writing, it outperforms 85 percent of the laptops in our entire testing database.

Apple could have easily used this power bump to justify a price bump, but the 15-inch M4 MacBook Air actually wound up being $100 cheaper than its predecessor. That also includes 16GB of base RAM (up from 8GB), a better 12MP webcam (up from 1080p), and open-lid support for two external monitors. More ports and a better refresh rate are on my wishlist for the next time Apple revisits the Air, but on the whole, it's a superb value in its current iteration. Mashable's Stan Schroeder christened it "the best-buy Apple laptop, period."

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Read Mashable's full review of the 14-inch Apple MacBook Pro (M5).

The brand-new 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro is for deeper-pocketed shoppers and power users who want to make as few compromises as possible without going totally overboard. For an extra $400+ and a slightly bulkier design (though not by much), it gets you cooler multi-tasking performance, nicer speakers, a brighter, higher-res display with that coveted 120Hz refresh rate, a better mix of ports, and a longer battery life compared to the Air.

You might still consider buying the M4 MacBook Pro if you find it on sale at a steep discount. Now that the M5 version is out, I expect third-party retailers like Amazon and Best Buy to regularly sell it for at least $150 off. (The Apple Store has discontinued it.) While the M5 MacBook Pro lasts significantly longer, there's only a modest performance difference between the two generations, so you can save some money without losing any new features. That said, if they're the same price when you go to upgrade, just take the M5 plunge for future-proofing's sake.

The 14-inch base MacBook Pro has always been the most well-rounded laptop in Apple's lineup. That continues to be the case with the new M5 model, even though it's almost a carbon copy of the M4 version. The addition of an OLED display or touchscreen capabilities would've made for a more exciting refresh — watch out for the M6 version, says the rumor mill — but it's a superb laptop nonetheless.

Performance and battery life are the most notable gen-to-gen changes, so let's get right into it. The M5 chip is now optimized for running on-device AI models, and most professionals will have a hard time stressing it out. With a Geekbench 6 multi-core score of 17,470, it's 15 percent faster than its predecessor. That's not a terribly exciting jump, but it's a jump nonetheless, and one that continues the MacBook Pro's reign as one of the fastest laptops out there. The only models in our database that outperform it are the 16-inch M4 Pro MacBook Pro and a few gaming laptops that cost $3,599.99 or more. The base M5 MacBook Pro starts at $1,599.

Even more impressively, the M5 MacBook Pro held out for 21 hours and 17 minutes in our battery life benchmark, lasting almost 30 percent longer than the M4 MacBook Pro. It's our new battery life champ, surpassing the 16-inch M4 Pro MacBook Pro by about 26 minutes.

The M5 MacBook Pro is slightly less portable compared to the Air, but not by much. (It's less than 0.2 inches thicker than both sizes and 0.1 pounds heavier than the 15-inch model.) Still, this affords it enough room for extra fixings like an HDMI port, an SDXC card slot, and a bonus Thunderbolt port, as well as an awesome hi-fi sound system with force-cancelling woofers.

The M5 MacBook Pro looks as spectacular as it sounds, as per tradition. (Apple hasn't made any drastic design changes to it since 2021.) Its mini-LED "Liquid Retina XDR" display offers a resolution of 3024 x 1964 pixels, a peak brightness of 1600 nits in HDR, and a 120Hz refresh rate. Compared to the M4 MacBook Air's standard Liquid Retina screen, it's crisper, brighter, and smoother when displaying visuals in motion — not necessary for all users, again, but nice to have if you can swing its price. It can hit the $2,000 mark pretty fast if you tack on more RAM, storage, and its nano-texture (matte) display option.

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Compared to its 15-inch counterpart, the 13-inch M4 MacBook Air is a better pick for college students because of its greater portability and even cheaper price.

Apple's education discount makes it just $900 to start, but third-party retailers frequently put it on sale for even less. It usurps the M1 MacBook Air as my top budget pick whenever it's marked down to $749, its lowest price on record.

The 13-inch MacBook Air downgrades a couple of the 15-incher's specs to come in under $1,000 without being a dramatically worse laptop. One of said specs is its M4 GPU, which has eight cores instead of 10. You can remedy this for $100 more, but it's unnecessary if you're just using your MacBook for standard everyday tasks like browsing, emailing, and word processing.

If you are willing to spend a little extra, I'd splash out on 512GB of storage instead, which is what most top public universities recommended for college students entering the 2025 fall semester. With the 256GB base model, you'll probably need to get an external hard drive eventually.

The other key difference between the 13- and 15-inch M4 MacBook Airs (besides their screen size) lies in their sound systems. The 13-incher has four speakers, while the 15-inch model has six with force-cancelling woofers. I haven't personally listened to anything on the former, but according to our sister site PCMag, that quad-speaker setup "[produces] decent sound, enough to enjoy the occasional movie or video call without headphones." For $999 (or less), I'm content with that — in my experience, tolerable laptop speakers are few and far between.

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Read Mashable's full review of the 16-inch MacBook Pro (M4 Pro).

Apple's bigger MacBook Pro, powered by the upgraded M4 Pro chip, is a blisteringly fast laptop with a price tag that's just as high as its Geekbench 6 multi-core score. As such, only creative pros like animators, graphics designers, and photo and video editors should look into it. It's excessive for the other 99 percent of the population.

It's fast. It's just so, so fast.

More specifically, the 16-inch, M4 Pro-powered MacBook Pro is the best-performing laptop in our entire testing database — not just the best-performing MacBook. There's really no competition either. With a multi-core score of 22,758, it blows past the $3,599.99 Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 (Gen 10), our second-place winner with a score of 20,369. Throw whatever you want at this thing. It's certainly "not designed for amateurs like myself — people who think 'intensive' means opening 100 Google Chrome tabs and praying one's laptop doesn't self-combust," wrote Kimberly Gedeon, Mashable's former tech editor. "No ma'am."

Impressively, it's also the second-longest-lasting MacBook we've ever tried, running for almost 21 hours on a single charge. Its power efficiency is unreal.

There are some external differences between this larger M4 Pro model and the 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro. It has a higher-resolution display; three Thunderbolt 5 ports, the latest version of the Thunderbolt connectivity tech; and a thicker, heavier build. At 4.7 pounds, it's about as hefty as your average gaming laptop — leave it at home.

That it costs significantly more than the regular M5 MacBook Pro should be obvious. It starts at $2,499, and our upgraded review unit with 48GB of RAM, 2TB of storage, and the glare-reducing nano-texture display upgrade costs $3,649. Maybe you can put it on the company card?

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Read Mashable's full review of the 13-inch Apple MacBook Air (M1).

For shoppers on the strictest budgets, the 13-inch M1 model is the cheapest Mac laptop you can still reliably buy new these days. (As of early 2026, it's almost always on sale for $599 at Walmart, Apple's exclusive retailer partner.) Its ideal buyer will have a very basic workload that generally involves one task at a time.

That said, the 13-inch M4 MacBook Air has been on sale for as cheap as $749 before. If the two models are within $150 to $200 of each other when you're ready to buy, and your budget has some flexibility, the M4 version is the indisputably better pick.