Best MacBook in 2019

Best MacBook iMore 2019

Best Overall: MacBook Air

With a major update in 2018, the MacBook Air now has a faster processor, Touch ID, a Retina display, and is still thin enough to fit into a manila envelope.

The Retina display specs are 2560 x 1600 at 227ppi with an sRBG color gamut and the bezels are slim, providing as much screen landscape as possible on a 13-inch Mac laptop.

Though you don't get the much-loved MagSafe charging port, you do get, in its place, two USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports along with the 3.5mm headphone jack. That means 40Gbps high-speed data transfer so you can move photos, videos, and huge documents between hard drives or other computers lickety-split.

The MacBook Air also now supports Touch ID for biometric security. Not only do you use it to unlock your MacBook Air, but also to pay for things online that use Apple Pay (it's such a time saver).

Best value: 13-inch MacBook Pro (without Touch Bar)

The 13-inch MacBook Pro (without Touch Bar) is feature-rich without being too much computer for the average person's needs. It's got the highest-quality Retina display with 3DPI wide-color gamut, highs-speed Thunderbolt 3 ports for 40Gbps data transfer, and an ultra-fast processor chip. If you don't need support for heavy graphics or daily lengthy video rendering, the smaller MacBook Pro has the best feature-to-price ratio, making it the best value of the MacBook lineup. The lowest-price base model MacBook Pro is the same price as the base model MacBook.

Most portable: MacBook

The MacBook Air is no longer the thinnest in the Mac laptop lineup. Instead, Apple's MacBook holds that honor, weighing in at just a tick above two pounds (2.03 pounds, to be exact), it's the thinnest, lightest, and smallest of the bunch. It may be small, but it packs a mighty punch.

Best for pros: 15-inch MacBook Pro

For the pro on the go, there's the 15-inch MacBook Pro. This workhorse of a laptop can support up to 8 cores of Intel's latest Coffee Lake refresh processor chip with turbo boosts of up to 5.0GHz and SSD read speeds of up to 3.2Gbps. It's got four Thunderbolt 3 ports, the most in the entire Mac laptop line, and can be spec'd out to as much as 32GB of memory and a 4TB SSD hard drive with Radeon Pro Vega 20 graphics with 4GB of HBM2 memory. It's fast. It's powerful. It'll sing for you while it renders your videos (not literally).

Best on a budget: Non-Retina MacBook Air

If you really want to join the MacBook ranks, but just can't bring yourself to spend more than $1,000, you can still buy the non-Retina MacBook Air from Apple, brand new. It may have an older graphics card, but it's also got the older legacy ports, which include two USB-A 3.0 ports, a Thunderbolt 2 port (with 20 Gbps data transfer speeds), a MagSafe 2 charging port, and an SD card slot. It's not nearly as speedy nor does it have the quality display of the latest MacBook Air, but it's still a great low-cost, entry-level Mac laptop.

Bottom line

Because the MacBook Air has everything most people need for daily computer use tied up nicely in a small package, and because it supports Touch ID for biometric security and Apple Pay, it's our pick for the best MacBook in 2019. The fact that it's also the least-expensive Retina Display MacBook is just icing on the cake.

Of course, if you're looking for something with more power, but don't need the fastest, most powerful processor and graphics, the 13-inch MacBook Pro without Touch Bar has the most specs for its price, making it our pick for the best value.

Credits — The team that worked on this guide