MBP 16" M3 Pro or 15" Air with M4? (same price)

[Kuskah]

So for basically the same price, I can have either the 16" MacBook Pro with 18/512GB M3 Pro chip (clearance but still new product, not used), or the 15" Air running M4 with 24/512GB.

From what I gather, going for Pro gives me a better display, larger port selection and active cooling, at the cost of increased weight. Am I missing some other important feature?

Which would you recommend?

 

[okkibs]

The bigger Macbook Pro has better hardware specs across the board at the expense of being relatively heavy even compared to other (Windows) laptops of the same size. For a good reason of course as the 16" is an actual workstation-class laptop with a huge battery on top.

For portability these two Macbooks are opposites and unless you use this Macbook mostly stationary at a desk or you only shuffle it back and forth between home and work with your car you might end up regretting the size and weight especially if you carry it in a backpack every day.

Just to reiterate, 16" in a laptop are big. I have the 14" version that's probably about as heavy as the 15" Air and that is honestly the most I like to carry even if it's just walking down the hall to a conference room. I have no need for the larger display so a 16" would only be an inconvenience to me. Of course you don't have the choice of a 14" in the first place as that's not what is offered on clearance.

To sum it up if weight is irrelevant and you just want the best possible hardware at clearance sale pricing then buying last year's Macbook Pro is a great idea.

You might be wondering why it's on clearance in the first place, at least I am. I suspect these base model specs with the small SSD and relatively little memory make no sense for what's supposed to be one of the best and somewhat expensive high-end workstation laptops. I think anyone who actually needs such a beefy workstation laptop would want much more storage and RAM. That's why it kept sitting on a shelf at MSRP or slightly below.

And that's what I'd consider too - according to your profile you now have a M1 Macbook Air. If you ever noticed issues with running out of storage you might imagine that 500GB aren't very "future proof" and if your memory is already at the limit now then the 18GB won't be of much help. I'd want at least 1TB or 2TB and 32GB of RAM would be the absolute minimum I'd be willing to buy going into 2026.

If you know for a fact that memory isn't an issue and you won't run out of storage either then you can ignore all that. All I am saying is that there's a good reason it's on clearance, if you ever wanted to use the full power of the M3 Pro you might run out of memory or the files generated by whatever "Pro" app you use might fill up the storage.