No need for 500 nits brightness to work outside

so M1 MacBook Air still wins!

Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash

As of the current month (March 2021), many tech reviewers seem to agree that the single most important reason you may consider in favor of buying an M1 MacBook Pro versus an Air would actually be a very small detail in the two notebooks’ specification: the screen’s maximum brightness, 500 nits Pro vs. “only” 400 Air.

(Performance difference matters only if you have huge workloads to throw to the computer often, and the +10% battery and faster charging do not count if both notebooks would otherwise last for the entire day. Finally, Pro model’s Touch Bar, isn’t really needed in so many cases; some folks even think it’s actually as a “flaw” instead!)

I’m going to get an M1 Air soon, but until I’ll be able to test its brightness for real, I still couldn’t help thinking about this a lot, myself. And as (finally) today the weather also helped a bit, bringing the first kinda warm day of this spring, I could actually move and do some work outside.

For the test I’ve used my old (early 2015) MacBook Pro Retina which, according to Apple’s specs, has a maximum brightness of an even lower value: 300 nits!

And here is what I’ve found: with brightness option set to be automatically updated (and without having the max value reached — I’ve checked) I could still easily engage into my normal deep programming “trance” and worked just fine, for as much as an hour, like I was still inside.

With sunlight falling right over the screen: sideways or even from head’s behind!