The past five years haven't been kind to Apple's laptops. The trouble all began with the butterfly keyboard switch that debuted in 2015. It was an attempt on Apple's part to slim the MacBook even further and make the machine that much more portable, but the mechanism was so fragile that a single mote of dust could disable a key completely. Apple tweaked the design in following iterations, but the damage to the MacBook's reputation was done. The faulty keys eroded consumer trust and sparked several class-action lawsuits; plus, Apple's fixes were more like treatments than a cure.
That's no longer the case. With the new 13-inch MacBook Pro, the butterfly plague has finally been eradicated. In fact, with this machine's release, Apple no longer sells a laptop with the butterfly switch keyboard—the company has been phasing the design out with each new MacBook. And like Goldilocks with the third bowl of porridge, the last machine to get a refresh in the MacBook lineup is my favorite. The 13-incher is not as big and bulky as the 16-inch MacBook Pro, and it has more power (and more ports) than the MacBook Air. But not everything about the newest MacBook Pro is rosy. Its battery life is just OK, the aluminum body gets warm quite often, and the configurations of the machine that are truly useful are too expensive.
I'd be remiss if I didn't break down the different configurations of this laptop, because it's a bit perplexing. There are two main versions of the 13-inch MacBook Pro: one with two USB-C Thunderbolt 3 ports for $1,299, and another with four ports for $1,799. The number of ports isn't the only difference.
The more affordable MacBook Pro has a base 256 GB of storage (the pricier one comes with 512 GB) and slightly weaker graphics-card performance (Intel's Iris Plus Graphics 645 versus Iris Plus Graphics G7—and yes, the names are confusing). It also has slower RAM, and less of it (8 gigabytes of 2133-MHz DDR3 versus 16 gigabytes of 3733-MHz DDR4X on the pricier computer). Most importantly, the lower-end laptop sticks with an eighth-generation Intel processor, whereas the $1,799 model uses the latest 10th-generation chip. The choice of which version to buy is made all the more confusing by the fact that the base model's price is close to that of the MacBook Air.
I can help with that decision. If you mostly just use the web browser but want an Apple laptop, nab the base model MacBook Air ($999). If you need a little more oomph for the few dozen browser tabs you'll have open for work, get the base MacBook Pro ($1,299). Why not the $1,299 MacBook Air, which we previously recommended? Because the Pro has a brighter, more color-accurate screen, and the battery life and physical weight differences between the Air and the Pro are negligible. I'd say the only reason to get the $1,299 Air is if you hate the digital strip just above the keyboard of the Pro model (the Touch Bar) and would prefer to have physical keys there, which, fair. Still, these two options are the way to go for most people.
If you're like me and are frequently plugging dongles and hubs into your laptop, you use it for some video and photo editing, and some very light gaming, I can recommend the MacBook Pro model I've been using. Apple loaned me the $1,799 Core i5 version, which is a much better upgrade overall and not as much of a handful as the more powerful (and expensive) 16-inch MacBook Pro.