Best MacBook Pro alternatives for 2021 – CNET [CNET]

April 18, 2021 Thomas Giboney

As much as some of us may deride the MacBook Pro for its awful keyboard, annoying Touch Bar and overreliance on USB-C connections, its balance of screen quality, weight, battery life and performance had no Windows-based peer for a long time. But now that OLED displays have hit the market, that balance is tipping. OLED delivers true blacks, which means high contrast, as well as a wide gamut of colors and high dynamic range that can rival or outperform the MacBook’s Retina Display.

We’re just getting a sense of what the new M1-chip-based 13-inch MacBook Pro has to offer compared with Windows alternatives, so I’m sticking with my original picks for the moment. Performance is good, but there are still some compatibility issues — plus Apple’s jacked up the prices of the Intel-based models — which make it less of a slam dunk relative to Windows systems than it might otherwise have been.

The 16-inch MacBook Pro also changed things up a bit. It’s still the size of the 15-incher but slightly heavier and ditches the butterfly-switch keyboard in favor of a slightly better scissor-switch-based one (I still don’t like it). It’s basically the same, however, and still with no 4K options. On the other hand, like its predecessors, its performance beats similarly configured Windows systems on a lot of tasks.

But even an entry-level MacBook can stretch the limits of your budget, and those who’ve set aside a nice chunk of cash might want something a little more customizable. No one can deny that one appealing thing about Windows laptops is the variety. Even when trying to imitate the offerings of a MacBook (heck, or even an iPad or iPad Pro) there are all sizes of far less expensive Chromebooks, as well as 14- and 15-inch laptops that are slightly smaller and lighter than the 16-inch MacBook Pro, but not quite as small as the 13-inch MacBook Air, across the price spectrum. Plus, we’re seeing lots of experimentation with multiscreen designs.