Yeah, that’s a silly, clickbaity headline. I’d never write something like that. WAIT.
Had a chat with a mate today — he’s a techy — about which chip to go for in his next MacBook. We went back and forth, compared specs, workloads, all that jazz. End result? He ordered a fully-loaded M4 Max MacBook Pro. Gangnam Style.
That convo got me thinking about modern Apple Silicon. Specifically, what you really get when you go all-in on the Max.
I’ve been daily driving a MacBook Air M4 (10-core CPU/10-core GPU/1TB), even though my main workhorse is a fully-spec’d M4 Max MacBook Pro (16-core CPU/40-core GPU/64GB RAM). And you know what? The Air is impressively good. I’m typing this on it right now — on low power mode — and it’s sailing through everything.
Let’s talk numbers:
👉 MacBook Pro — £4.2KGBP
👉 MacBook Air — £1.4KGBP
Big price difference. And yet… in day-to-day use? Not a huge gap.
Office apps, Remote Desktop, browsing, notes, light creative work — all feel the same. Seriously. But surely the Max must do something better, right?
Definitely. It wins in two areas:
👉 Speed — How quickly it chews through big tasks.
👉 Scale — How much I can do at once before things start lagging.
Not general responsiveness. That’s basically the same on both.
Speed sounds obvious, but it’s nuanced. Regular apps don’t push either machine, but batch export a few hundred 120MB RAW files from Lightroom? The Air does it (which is nuts in itself), but it’s noticeably slower. The Max flies through the job while I carry on doing other things.
Same deal with 4K video editing in Final Cut Pro. Editing is fine on the Air. Exporting is where the Max shines — especially with complex timelines.
Does it matter if an export takes 10 minutes or 30? Depends. If you’re doing it daily for work, then yeah, time is money. Otherwise? Probably not a big deal.
Scale is where the Max really stretches its legs. I can be exporting video, running Windows in Parallels, editing docs, tweaking photos — all at once — and the Pro just handles it. That’s the power of more RAM and more cores. The Air hits memory limits way before CPU limits from what I’ve observed so far.
How often am I doing all that simultaneously? When I’m in work mode — sure. But for general use? Rarely.
Truth is, the current Apple Silicon chips are phenomenally capable. Yeah, benchmarks show big leaps between M1 → M4, but in real-world use, most software hasn’t caught up. Outside of AI and Large Language Models, do we need this much power in a laptop? Maybe not.
Still, I know I’ll be eyeing the M5 Max Turbo Nutcase the second it drops.
There are practical differences too. My Pro runs three external 27″ monitors — the Air can’t. That matters to me. But otherwise? There’s not much I can’t do on the Air that I can only do on the Max.
Let’s talk Intel. I’ve got a Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro 360 — one of my favourite Windows laptops. Great battery life, and pretty decent performance… if it’s plugged in. Unplug it, and performance drops off a cliff. Classic Intel trade-off.
MaxTechOfficial just did a video comparing the M4 Air vs a new Intel Lunar Lake Zenbook S14:
M4 MacBook Air vs Zenbook S14 – R.I.P. Intel Lunar Lake?
Now look, MaxTech is basically sponsored by Cupertino, even if they pretend not to be. But still, the battery and performance gap is real. Intel’s still chasing.
No tidy wrap-up here, just a musing: maybe we’ve reached a point where hardware is sprinting ahead, and software needs to catch up.
Oh, and my video just finished exporting on the Air. While writing all this. Bonkers really. My old i9 MacBook Pro would’ve lit the desk on fire by now and probably have tried its best to crap its fans out.
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