4 Best MacBooks for Video Editing: Expert Picks

This MacBook Pro is an absolute beast for video editing. I’m working with 4K footage from my drone and Red cameras, and it handles everything thrown at it with ease. The M5 Pro chip is a significant upgrade, making renders and exports noticeably faster than my previous M2 Pro. The Liquid Retina XDR display is breathtaking; colors pop, and the brightness is incredible, making color grading a dream. Battery life is also phenomenal – I can usually get a full day of editing out of it. Worth every penny if you’re serious about video production.

– Alex R.

The performance of this machine is simply outstanding. Editing complex timelines in Final Cut Pro feels instantaneous, and multitasking with other apps like After Effects and DaVinci Resolve is seamless. I love the fast SSD, which loads media and projects in seconds. The build quality is top-notch, and the keyboard and trackpad are as great as ever. If you’re looking for the ultimate video editing laptop, this is it.

– Sarah L.

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.

– Customer A

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.

– Customer B

Good 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.

– Customer C

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

– Customer D

This is my first Mac ever! I have iPhones and iPads though. This computer is great, fast, and looks awesome. I’m coming from a probably 12 year old windows computer. It took me a second to get used to, I didn’t know how to scroll etc lol but I figured it out. I also downloaded the Sims 4 on it and it was probably the fastest download I’ve ever seen. I was also super happy even though I purchased Sims originally for my windows computer it was still able to download all on Mac (through EA), so that was a big plus (not sure if that’s common knowledge but still). I originally was going to purchase the pink Neo but chose this one instead and glad I did, a pretty color doesn’t matter as much as having a better computer for only a couple hundred more. I did get starlight color but I’m getting a pink case anyway so it’s not that big of a deal. Worth the buy though!

– Customer E

I’m a long time MacBook user and this MacBook Air is an economical update to my 2017 MacBook Pro that is no longer supported by current Operating System updates. I mostly use a 27” external monitor but the 13” is sufficient for most work. My older Mac’s fan would turn on frequently due to my multitasking. The Air is more capable and operates without a fan. Battery life is greatly improved. Setting it up was easy. Before using it I connected a cable between the two laptops and used the onboard migration assistant on both machines to copy files to the Air.

– Customer F