Expert Picks: 6 Best Macbooks for Editing

This MacBook Pro is a powerhouse. The 2024 model is incredibly fast, with apps opening instantly and multitasking handled with ease. The display is stunning — bright, sharp, and with amazing color accuracy that makes everything from work documents to movies look incredible. Battery life is excellent, easily lasting all day with normal use, and the build quality is exactly what you’d expect from Apple: sleek, solid, and premium. The keyboard is comfortable to type on for long stretches, and the trackpad remains the best in the business. I’ve used both Windows laptops and Macs, and this machine is easily the smoothest computing experience I’ve had. Perfect for business, creative work, or just everyday tasks. If you want a laptop that delivers performance, reliability, and design in one package, this is it.

Very fast laptop, very long battery life. For the graphically interesting games natively compatible with it, very good graphics performance. The display is amazing and is capable of twice as many pixels as it shows you. It was a good value in a Black Friday sale (~$1400), but this (M4 Pro 12/16) chip is on par with or under performance of the prior generation M3 Max 14”, so if it can get one of those for a good deal refurbished or open box, there is no shame in it. As with all M1/2/3/4s, there are dedicated neural cores for Apple Intelligence to run, which allows for a personalized Siri who listens to you and watches you all the time, without sharing this information. You can disable Apple Intelligence and Siri, but after I got past the creepiness, I configured Siri as an Irish Female, and it makes everything lovely. There is a lot of integration with other Apple devices, like you can operate your iphone from a distance on your MacBook. You can also receive texts and Messages from your iPhone, and easily use it for tethering, as a substitute for your webcam (the webcam is pretty solid nonetheless). This model supports linking hearing aids and also supports airpods much in the same way the iPhone does. You can easily use your living room TV as a second monitor on the fly, and if you can plug in via HDMI, you can get the whole 4K@120hz. MacOSX is a great operating system, built on Unix, and with tons of room for customization for beginners to super users. Time Machine backups with your own plug-in hard drives and iCloud are incredibly convenient. Safari gets better and better, but the Mac versions of Chromium and Firefox also dazzle.For most programs that aren’t games, macOSX is widely supported, but if you just *need* it, parallels desktop and vmware can run windows for you.New users ought to pay close attention to Tips and go into settings and learn all the trackpad gestures. You won’t want to come back to a different trackpad, and until you want to game, you will not care to use a mouse.Anyway, I got this for my wife as a gift, partly because she needed a new computer and partly because I wanted to convert her. She seems pretty converted.

GoodV computer–everything works, although it sometimes seems a little bit slow to respond to input. Beautiful screen and picture quality (bright), ample battery life, good sound quality and seems to have good durability.

Arrived on time. Price was in-line with Apple. Very nice product and the perfect size to use while internationally traveling.

Great laptop. battery cycle was at 131, and battery health at 93%. runs like a dream and the mini led display is fantastic. my only complaint is that it doesnt come with a magsafe charger. just a plain type c cable and a brick that i dont even know the wattage on. Great value for what i paid, considering this was $2,500, 4 years ago, and still runs better than most macbook airs.

Arrived on time, as promised – Condition is basically “As New” except for the after market charger – Specs as advertisedI was a little nervous because I saw another seller that was constantly shipping wrong specs or product “not as described”.Super happy with this purchase. Highly recommend this seller.

This laptop is incredibly fast and handles all my video editing tasks smoothly. The display is gorgeous, and the battery life is surprisingly good for the power it packs. I’ve never experienced lag, even with multiple applications open. The build quality is top-notch, as expected from Apple. It’s a significant investment, but for professional work, it’s absolutely worth it.

I use this MacBook Pro for graphic design and photo editing, and it’s a dream. The M5 chip is a beast, and the 32GB of RAM means I can keep all my design programs open without any slowdown. The screen is color-accurate, which is crucial for my work. It’s a powerful machine that makes my workflow so much more efficient. I highly recommend it to any creative professional.

I love this computer! It can charge in two different ways, and it is lightweight and “clean” looking. I bought a nice, but tough case for it, and it looks super spiffy! The computer itself was easy to modify to my needs, and battery life is excellent.

Top of the line Apple. Does it all a trusted and top quality product.

These are still nice machines to work on. I use it mostly for Lightroom on large photo jobs, with some smaller jobs in between, and occasionally to do some lighter teaching work and administration. I’ve swiched my old machine over to doing most of that. This is still a pleasure to work on. Maybe the denoise will take a little less time on a newer machine, but it’s not enough for me to care. It never seems to choke and it’s always responsive, despite Adobe’s bloat.I’m coming from a 13″ retina i7 machine. This is an order of magnitude better. For smaller jobs, it’s nice to just stick the SD card in and ingest a set of pictures. Bigger jobs, I still like to use the CF Express reader with the Thunderbolt ports for the speed, and this has one more on the other side, so I can be more flexible in whatever random workspace I happen to be in. For me, portability is my main concern. This fits in the same bag, so it’s not very noticeably larger. I have a portable monitor, so I can make more screen space when needed. There’s an HDMI port, so I don’t need to carry that dongle. Not to mention that it’s an order of magnitude faster. This is the new equivalent of the 15′ Macbook pro, but it fits in the same bag as the 13″. This is excellent for me.Moving from the Retina 13″, the keyboard is a lot better. Just make the change. At this point, this is a bargain way into Apple Silicon. I did the very hard job of replacing the keyboard on the 13″ with an aftermarket one. That repair is not recommended for casual tinkerers, but it fixed all the usual complaints about the butterfly keyboard. I also replaced the battery, twice now. I actually like working on the retina now, but before it was always such a struggle between battery life and the keyboard. The 14″ is better on all levels and probably the best in the industry. The keyboard has excellent accuracy and feedback. The touch pad is the best in the industry. The color rendering is excellent out of the box with a setting for photographic work. I don’t need a custom profile like I did with previous generation machines. If you need a relative bargain, these M1 Pro machines are still very good to work on, and I don’t plan to upgrade for a long time.

Who would’ve thought I’d be able to find such a great price on a brand new, unopened 2021 M1 Pro MBP 10c/16g. Shipped and sold by Amazon, nonethelessIt’s been 6 months now and I haven’t had any issues. I was able to add AppleCare to it. The battery is phenomenal and shows 100% capacity. Guess I lucked out!