MacBook Pro 13″ review: Should an Android user buy an Apple laptop?

We're doing something a little weird today, and diving into Apple's MacBook Pro 13″ laptop. Apple is pretty well-known for making very high-quality laptops that are more than a little divisive. They're definitely expensive compared to the competition, but in exchange, Apple promises an experience that you just won't get on a Windows laptop.

They're not wrong about that, either, but is it worth paying the Apple tax for a different experience? We'll take a look and find out if it's worth buying a MacBook while owning an Android phone.

Sleek design

There's a pretty common, undeniable theme with Apple products. You can rag on the features, the price, or any number of foregone ports, but you can't say their design team isn't still one of the best in the business. The MacBook Pro here is no exception.

It's just a laptop, but it is a sleek laptop. The top features the Apple logo front and center, but otherwise, it's just a blank piece of hardware. The bottom features nothing but four rubber feet to keep the laptop from scraping, and it all looks so clean.

For comparison, I've also got an HP Spectre x360 13, which is also a very well-designed Windows laptop. It looks like an extremely modern, professional laptop with its sharp curves and blue-and-gold color scheme, but it somehow still just looks a little bit cheaper next to Apple's MacBook, even though they're priced very similarly. Sometimes less is more, and I think Apple understands that better than anyone.

On the left side of the laptop you'll find two USB-C ports (which can also charge the laptop) and on the right side is a headphone jack. On the base model, that's all you're getting. There are no external speakers, webcam killswitches, regular USB ports, ethernet connections, or anything. Apple's banking on you using USB-C peripherals, or, more likely, totally wireless gadgets and cloud services.

Opening up the laptop still looks definitively Apple, but the lightweight keys and big trackpads have caught on in other segments of the market by now. Touch ID is a brilliant spot, I think, residing above the keyboard and next to the Touch Bar. It lines up a little better with where you'd naturally want to put your finger, as opposed to my Spectre's position beside the trackpad.

MacBook Pro performance

This entry-level model MacBook Pro sports an 8th-gen Intel Core i5 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. We'll be real with you here, that's a complete ripoff at its price point, considering my Spectre has a similar 8th-gen Intel Core i7 CPU with 16GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, and some Intel Optane memory for good measure. I even paid less for the Spectre thanks to some deals on HP's website.

You'd really expect the HP Spectre (or any other similar laptop) to just stomp Apple's offerings, but depending on what you're doing, that might not be the case. The MacBook Pro is quicker to wake up, for example and seems to handle web browsing a little more efficiently, especially if you start factoring in trackpad performance. Apple's trackpads are still so, so much better than anything else I've used, and I desperately want a Windows OEM to catch up.

If you start getting into gaming, video rendering, or other things that simply need brute force, though, you're going to see Apple's laptop fall behind. It doesn't have many fans and likes to throttle back to stay cool, so if you need something to edit videos, you're getting a much better bang for your buck with nearly any Windows laptop. At this price point, you're almost guaranteed an Intel Core i7 or Ryzen 7 CPU.

But in your average stuff, it's pretty crazy to see the MacBook genuinely hold up and even do a better job in some cases. That shouldn't happen, but there's clearly some better allocation of resources in MacOS. We can talk all day about hardware/software integration with Apple controlling so much more of the chain than any Windows OEM, and that would lead to ARM Macs, but that's a topic for another time. If you just want something for everyday tasks and mid-level workloads (think photo editing, light gaming, writing, etc.) then this is surprisingly capable, no matter what the specs tell you.

Toss in some other things like that phenomenal trackpad with extremely responsive and intuitive gestures built right into the OS, a Touch ID fingerprint scanner that works in an instant, and an absolutely gorgeous screen that'll make your home theater jealous, and Apple's put together a solid package here.

MacOS and Android

But you don't (or at least you shouldn't) buy a MacBook Pro because the hardware is a great value. No, you're buying this because you want MacOS. There are some good reasons for that, too.

MacOS feels much more like a mobile operating system than Windows does. It's much more cohesive, and different things talk to each other a bit better than they would on Windows. When you're using Safari, for instance, you can autofill in your saved passwords with Touch ID on the laptop directly. Other laptops kinda sorta allow some workarounds sometimes, like using Windows Hello to login to LastPass Premium. There's no equivalent for things like Apple Pay, however.

You can unlock the entire laptop with a connected Apple Watch, too, similar to using a smartwatch trusted device to unlock your Android smartphone, but this is just so integrated across Apple's ecosystem that there's really no comparison on the Android/Windows side of things. You can even use an iPad as a wireless secondary monitor with your MacBook, and it takes all of about four seconds to set up. It's not that you can't do this with other devices, you just can't do it this easily.

The Touch Bar is probably the only real miss on the laptop. It's cool, yes. It's a little screen that's fully touch-sensitive and colorful and you can use apps to change what it does in some ways. But unless you've got a workflow that works very well with some of the shortcuts or interactions here, it's hard to see this as more than a fun party trick for most people Having it act like an autocorrect keyboard is kind of neat, and you get more granular control of your volume and now playing music, but overall, that's a big eh. Certainly not worth the price and other compromises.

But basically almost none of this works with an Android device. I think the only actual service that Apple offers on your Android phone would be Apple Music. By default, you'll even need some extra software so MacOS can read your phone to transfer music or anything.

If you're rocking an Android phone, you're going to have to make some compromises or go third-party. If you want your bookmarks to sync, you'll need to use Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge, which does break some tie-in functionality with the hardware, like Touch ID or certain trackpad gestures. You won't be able to use iMessage or anything, and all of Windows 10's new RCS/SMS tricks aren't available here.

If you live in Google's ecosystem you can still pretty reliably use Google Photos or Google Drive. Dropbox and OneDrive work pretty well here, but again, not as well and integrated as iCloud Drive does. You'll be using the web browser for a lot of things regarding your media because Apple generally only gives you access to things inside their garden, and then you start to wonder why you paid so much for the MacBook instead of something that fit better with your lifestyle.

A bunch of functionality with Apple's hardware here really is just centered around the iPhone as the key piece of your ecosystem. Using it to quickly shoot and upload photos to your laptop, syncing your documents back and forth, using Touch ID for saved passwords, watching your purchased TV shows, and so many other things really tie into making you want to buy an iPhone. That's the point, pretty obviously.

Worth it?

This one's tough. As a standalone piece of hardware, I think most people should pass on this one and stay in their Windows/Chrome OS lanes. You're getting an expensive laptop where you can't use all of the cool features because your phone doesn't talk to this at all. You can complement Apple's services with Google and Microsoft's, but at the end of the day, you need a foot in the door with an iPhone to really enjoy what's here. If you just love the design, smooth performance, guaranteed updates, and overall cohesion that Apple offers, I totally get it, and it's still a great laptop. It's a very slick machine, but it's arguably not worth the asking price.

But this is for someone who's already invested in some of what Apple offers, or someone that's willing to jump the fence. And trust me, using this laptop for a couple of weeks is definitely going to make you at least peek on the other side just to see what's up with all those iPhone users.