Last month, Apple refreshed the 14-inch MacBook Pro with the latest M6 chip. It’s powerful, has great battery life, and the mini-LED screen is bright. There are all kinds of great attributes about this laptop, but you probably shouldn’t buy it. At least, not right now.
While the updated M6 is a perfectly capable laptop in its own right, it fits a bit awkwardly into the current lineup of MacBooks. It’s identical to the previous-gen M5 model, which came out in late 2025. But here’s the problem: Despite having the exact same laptop specs (save for the chip difference), you can currently get the M5 for $200 less on Amazon and Walmart.
If you’re thinking that upgrading from the M5 to the M6 must be worth $200, I’m not so sure. The M6 comes with two additional CPU and GPU cores, which is the origin of most of its gains. While that’s not nothing, it’s one of the smaller gen-over-gen Apple Silicon performance bumps in the past six years. The main difference is in AI performance, thanks to the second 16-core Neural Engine and faster memory bandwidth on the M6. In day-to-day work—or even in content creation workflows—I just don’t think the difference will be very noticeable between the two models. That’s especially true since the base 14-inch MacBook Pro isn’t a true pro laptop in terms of performance. It uses the same M5 chip that’s in the MacBook Air and iPad Pro, after all. The only other real difference is in wireless connectivity, where you get the bump to Wi-Fi 7 with the M6 model.
If you’re going to buy the 14-inch MacBook Pro M5, though, you should also be considering the 15-inch MacBook Air. The main difference between these two laptops is the quality of the display. The mini-LED panel on the MacBook Pro is much brighter and more colorful, allowing for some very impressive HDR performance. It also has more ports, such as HDMI and an SD card slot. My favorite small feature is its USB-C ports on both sides of the laptop, allowing for charging from either direction.
The 15-inch MacBook Air is actually on sale today, too. The model with 16 GB of memory and a terabyte of storage is at its lowest price since June: $1,549. That’s $150 off Apple’s retail price.
So, whether you opt for the thinner 15-inch MacBook Air M5 or the 14-inch MacBook Pro M5 with its better screen, you have great deals to enjoy. The same just can’t be said as of now for the M6 MacBook Pro.
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