Is a Macbook Worth the Money? (The Truth!)

Are you looking to buy a new laptop and you are wondering if a MacBook is the right choice for you? Determining if a MacBook is worth the money is not an easy thing because Apple products tend to be expensive and they have built a massive fan base that is more than willing to throw their money at them.

MacBooks are definitely worth the money if you are going to use them as a workstation but most surely not worth the money if you need a gaming laptop. They are great for people without too many tech skills because macOS is very newbie-friendly, offers a great user experience, and is very stable.

In this article, I will do an in-depth analysis to really find out if MacBooks are worth the money for students, gamers, normal users, and for use as a workstation, so keep reading!

Is a Macbook Worth It for Gammers?

If you are a hardcore gamer and are looking for a gaming laptop then a Mackbook isn’t the right choice for you. Many triple-A games are absent on macOS and many of the games that are available aren’t well optimized. MacBooks don’t make for good gaming laptops!

If you are just a casual gamer and gaming isn’t one of the main reasons why you need a new laptop you need to know that you can have a decent gaming experience on a MacBook, this is true if your favorite games are on macOS, you need to check this.

Some popular games like CS: GO, Minecraft and Fortnight are available for macOS but there are many others like PubG that aren’t and you need to run them on a virtual machine with Windows on it, this will use some of the MacBook resources and if you have an M1 chip Macbook may have problems with compatibilities.

If gaming is important to you then a Windows laptop will be the way to go, even if you can still game on MacBooks it is highly unlikely you will have a good gaming experience unless you play only one or two games that are natively available on macOS.

Don’t be fooled by the increased number of GPU cores available on the M1 MacBook Pro, while they are very efficient when it comes to photo and video editing not many modern games will take advantage of them and in many cases, a MacBook Pro will not be a worthy contender for a good gaming laptop.

Is a Macbook Worth It for Work?

MacBooks are laptops designed with efficiency and productivity in mind, they make excellent workstations because macOS is well optimized and doesn’t require tech knowledge to perform day-to-day and work-related tasks. The lack of driver and software incompatibilities combined with a low virus threat allows you to focus on your work.

Yes they are on the expensive side but the build quality is premium, if you want to buy a Windows laptop with a similar build quality most surely you will end up in the same price category. The downside of MacBooks is that they don’t really offer low-budget alternatives.

Keep in mind that some software companies haven’t yet optimized their products for the new Apple silicon chip architecture, but most surely this problem will be fixed in the future.

Categoryes of Proffesionals That Have the Most Benefits in Using MacBooks

Due to their stability, reliability, security, and ease of use, MacBooks are most surely worth every penny regardless of your job and work responsibilities but still there are some professionals that have much more to gain than the others. And now with the new chips, M1 MacBooks have become real powerhouses while still having a good battery life!

This being said, a MacBook will be ideal for:

• Entrepreneurs: The good build quality and increased battery life make a MacBook ideal for business trips, the easy migration of data makes them easy to upgrade. The user-friendliness of the macOS makes them perfect work computers for employees without tech skills (if you can handle your smartphone you can operate with ease on a MacBook).
• Managers: The amount of applications with which macOS comes right out of the box is well suited for a busy manager and the battery life is ideal for long meetings.
• Freelancers: MacBooks are very reliable, they don’t enforce monthly updates and are well optimized so that you don’t need to turn them off too often, just flip the screen down and it will go in sleep more and tomorrow you flip it up and in one or two seconds you are exactly where you left off.
• Photographers: MacBooks are well optimized for photo editing and can easily handle large volumes of pictures edits and exports at the same time.
• Video editors: M1 Pro Macbook includes dedicated acceleration for the ProRes professional video codec, allowing playback of multiple streams of high-quality 4K and 8K ProRes video.
• Content creators: Many content creators prefer MacBooks because they are easy to use and offer great performance in photo and video editing tasks.
• IOS developers: This is a no-brainer, to develop IOS applications you need access to the IOS ecosystem.
• Applications and Web developers: The only troubleshooting you need to do is for your applications, no driver and system problems that will consume your time.
• Engineers: MacBooks are capable of running the most demanding engineering software and still being very power efficient, and their build quality will allow you to take them on-site and make changes to the design on the fly.

Don’t think that only the people that fall in the categories above will benefit from working on a MacBook. If you want to work without unnecessary distraction from viruses, drivers problems, software crashes, operating system errors then a MacBook is the right choice for you.

Reasons Why MacBooks Are the Best Choice for Workstations

Now let us examine what are the reasons why a MacBook will be worth the money if you use it as a workstation:

• Operating system stability, no driver problems, software conflicts, and other unnecessary complications resulted from OS.
• Fast computer boot-up time.
• Little to no virus threat.
• Comes with many features out of the box (mail app, color piker app, photo editing capabilities, etc).
• Very good built quality.
• Long battery life.
• Very simple to use, you don’t need to be a tech guy to perform the tasks from a normal day at work.
• You can easily migrate data in case of an upgrade, when you buy a new MacBook there are easy ways to migrate all apps and settings along with all your files on the new Macbook.
• Easy OS updates that take less than an hour and you can choose when and if you want to do them.
• Integrated cloud storage.
• Apple ecosystem, you can easily access documents and files with all your Apple devices, ease to share files with your iPhone.

MacBooks offer great value if you use them for work and they maintain their value over time, when you upgrade your old MacBook will still be worth decent money on the second-hand market.

Is a Macbook Worth It for Students?

If you need a laptop for university then you don’t need a powerhouse so buying a MacBook Pro will be a waste of money but a MacBook Air would be ideal, you would have a very light and portable laptop with very good battery life ( you won’t need to plug it in to get a full day of courses). Of course, this is true for the new M1 MacBook Air because the new M1 chip is very power efficient.

The MacBook Air is recommended for students because is very light and small, you can easily take it anywhere with you and due to its great built quality, you don’t need to worry that it will break too easily.

Getting an upgraded version of the MacBook Air would be again a waste of money, the base version will handle with ease all your university needs and will easily last you until graduation. I recommend that you look at refurbished options because they will be cheaper and will be like new.

An M1 MacBook Air will be lighting fast and you don’t have to be a tech guy to use it, no driver problems or software conflicts and you get to have access to the Apple ecosystem, practically you can share your documents between all your Apple devices.

If you have the money for it a MacBook Air with an M1 chip will be totally worth the money if you are a student, if you are on a very tight budget you can get a used one but you won’t get comparable performance with the M1 MacBook.

macOS is designed to be easy to use and to not give you headaches so you can focus on your work.

Is a Macbook Worth It for Normal Use?

If you are a normal user that only needs a laptop for basic day-to-day tasks like multimedia use, surfing the internet, sending emails, etc. you don’t need a powerful laptop to do that. For this kind of use, a MacBook Air will be totally worth it but a Pro version will be a total waste of money.

Because day-to-day tasks aren’t resource hungry you only need the base version of MacBook Air, don’t be tainted to get a higher-spec MacBook Air because you will not need the extra upgrades. Even if you need more storage space it is better and cheaper to get an external drive.

Now I will tell you why a MackBook Air will be worth the money even if you need it for day to day tasks:

• Great for watching movies: super-sharp display with vivid colors and great resolution, is one of the best displays for laptops at this price point.
• Good quality speakers: you can easily watch Youtube videos or watch movies and use the integrated speakers and still have a more than decent experience.
• Good keyboard (2020 and newer models): it is a joy to write on the MacBook’s keyboard (mails, messages, etc.).
• Very powerful for such a small machine: an M1 MacBook can easily play 4k movies and even edit 4k videos, so you will have more than enough power for almost any task.
• Very quiet: you will not be bothered by the sound of the fan when watching videos even if you hold it on your bead.
• Ease of use: you will encounter very few technical problems.
• Play the popular online games: while MacBooks aren’t recommended for gaming you can still play most of the popular online games without a problem.

As you can see even if MacBooks are fairly expensive they deliver great value and are well worth the money if you can afford them.

If you want to buy a Windows laptop and expect the same build quality, same quality of display, speakers, keyboard, etc. you will end up at least in the same price range if not higher. MacBooks are expensive because they are premium laptops designed to offer the best user experience, and they manage to achieve this lofty goal.

Conclusion

I hope that by now you know that MacBooks are totally worth the money if you aren’t a gamer or if you don’t add extra unnecessary upgrades to the base model if you are a student or a normal user.

Yes they are expensive but the build quality is well correlated with the price, it is very hard to get very good quality at low prices.