Is it really worth spending 413 Dollars extra on the macbook pro over the macbook air?

SIMILARITY:

The base macbook air with the m1 chip has eight gigs of ram 256 gigs of storage and the macbook pro 13 also with an m1 chip with 8 gigs of ram 256 gigs of storage. 

DIFFERENCE:

It's the base model as well and it'll cost you 1796 Dollars or 1300 pounds and there really isn't that much difference between them anymore and on paper at least really it comes down to the pro having an extra graphics core

A fan a slightly brighter screen bigger battery and better mic and speakers and in favor of the air it's a little bit thinner and lighter and also a fair bit cheaper

DESIGN:

So let's put these to the test and if we start with the design this shouldn't take too long because you know they're both beautifully well made all aluminium one finger opening premium laptops with chunky bezels they're pretty familiar by now and arguably getting maybe a little bit dated especially when you compare it to the likes of say the dell xps 13.

KEYBOARD:

But crucially we do have the fantastic magic keyboard on both now the macbook air is 100 grams lighter and tapers in toward the front so it's a little bit sleeker than the pro but we do miss out on the touch bar although personally i don't think that's a great loss.

SIZE, RESOLUTION, SHARPNESS AND TRUE TONE:

They also both come with two usb 4 ports with thunderbolt 3 support as for the screens well they're exactly the same size same resolution same sharpness and they both support true tone and also as it turns out they're just as color accurate as each other so if you're a photo or video editing and thinking oh For the more accurate screen, I'll definitely need a pro, but the air is just as nice, and I'd be glad to edit on either of them.

One tiny variation is that the pro actually peaks at 500 nits of brightness, whilst the air here maxes out at 400 nits, so while there is a distinction, I don't think it's a compelling reason to choose one over the other.

let's talk about battery:

Apple claims that the Pro has a slightly larger cell inside, with a 58 watt hour battery versus 49.9 in the Air, giving you an extra couple of hours of use however in my pretty extensive tests i found it to be neck and neck firstly i ran a long youtube playback test with both laptops set up exactly the same screens measured 150 nits i then left them overnight and in fact the air lasted 10 hours and 10 minutes versus 10 hours and 26 minutes on the pros just 16 minutes longer 

I wanted to run a slightly more realistic battery drain test as well and so starting with an hour of youtube and then an hour-long zoom call followed by some PUBG streaming a show on apple tv doing some office work in word and google sheets by which point they both died within literally a couple of minutes of each other

There wasn't much of a difference between them. Of course, it will depend on how you use it, possibly the apps you use, and while Apple claims that you'll get a little bit more out of the pro, in my experience, it's pretty much the same.

CHARGING SPEED

The pro does charge a little bit quicker although not by as much as you'd think given this has a 61 watt charger to the air's 30 watt whichever laptop or phone or tablet you're 

EXTENSION:

Use with a handy chrome extension desktop and phone apps you can get surf shark everywhere and it basically helps keep you safe online preventing tracking malware and other nasty things but it also lets you watch movies and tv shows

The big question is how much of a difference does that extra gpu core and also having a fan make in terms of speed and performance over the air?

There wasn't much of a difference between them. Of course, it will depend on how you use it, possibly the apps you use, and while Apple claims that you'll get a little bit more out of the pro, in my experience, it's pretty much the same.

Although running the opencl graphics test the pro with its extra gpu core takes a 12 lead so why is it then that in geekbench cpu tests these scored pretty much exactly the same but in cinebench this was about 12 faster well i think that all comes down to the fan and because cinebench r23s tests now run for 10 minutes which is much longer than geekbench it takes into account throttling because while they have the exact same processor with the same 3.2 gigahertz clock speed

The air has to throttle back sooner to avoid overheating so as i'm sure most of you guys probably guessed the big difference with a pro then comes down to sustained performance how fast it is over longer periods  and actually my gaming tests back this up when i ran PUBG for an hour during my battery test.