The ContendersĪpple has released two excellent laptops in the past year or so: the 2020 MacBook Air with the M1 chip and the 2021 MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro or M1 Max chip. Whether you’re shopping for a personal or professional machine may also impact your decision. Note: I also work as a data scientist professionally, but I was shopping for a personal laptop, not one for my job. Sorry to any Windows or Linux lovers out there.

I’ve been using the Apple ecosystem for years, so I didn’t seriously consider any other options.

I don’t use my laptop for any serious gaming or anything else too taxing.

Outside of hobby data projects, I do a fair amount of photo editing and occasionally some minor video editing.

I’ll explain why this might impact your decisions later. Occasionally I’ll train a deep neural network, but I usually work with more traditional modeling techniques.

I don’t work with deep learning models very often.

It’s rare that I’ll work with truly huge datasets in my personal projects.

My projects usually involve datasets that are small enough to fit in memory.

That usually means a lot of data processing, data analysis, and sometimes complex machine learning models.

I like working on data-related projects in my free time ( sometimes I write about them!).

To establish context, here’s some information about me and what I’m looking for in a personal laptop. The title of this post spoils the ending (I chose the Air), but I’ll provide recommendations for how to decide which option is right for you. In this article you’ll find a detailed comparison of the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro from a data scientist’s perspective, including benchmark tests for some common data-related tasks.

I was recently in the market for a new laptop and the main contenders were the 2020 MacBook Air and the 2021 MacBook Pro. It’s currently a great time to upgrade to a new Mac as Apple is rolling out their game-changing Apple Silicon (M1) chips.

Macbook pro user guide 2019