The 3 Best Laptops for Video and Photo Editing of 2025

Top pick

The 16-inch MacBook Pro is faster than any other laptop we’ve tested for photo or video editing, and it has truly impressive battery life, to boot.

Recommended configuration

The MacBook Pro has long been an industry standard for media editors due to its fast performance, high-quality display, and slim, refined design. The newest version, the Apple MacBook Pro (16-inch, M4 Pro, 2024), continues that tradition, but both Windows laptops and Mac laptops with Apple’s own consumer-level processors have started to close the gap in performance. The MacBook Pro remains a fantastic editing machine, with its impressively accurate display, the longest battery life for a laptop this powerful, energy-efficient performance, near-silent fans, and the integrations of the Mac ecosystem. But it isn’t the only option anymore.

The 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M4 Pro chip is the best Mac option for working professionals who need an editing suite on the go. If you work with abnormally large files or work in time-critical environments where shaving a minute off an export time is worth $1,000, you should upgrade to the M4 Max chip.

The M4 Pro chip is fast, but it has some competition. The M4 Pro chip performed well across most of its benchmarks but fared a bit worse than its Windows competition when exporting 4K video. In a standardized test in Adobe Premiere Pro, which we had just run on four other MacBooks updated to macOS Sequoia, the laptop with the M4 Pro chip exported video just seconds faster than one with the M4 chip and took nearly twice as long as the Asus ProArt P16. But in other tests, such as encoding video in Handbrake, the MacBook with the M4 Pro chip was the fastest by far: It processed the 4K video at 99 frames per second, in contrast to 70 fps for the P16 and 58 fps for the M4-based MacBook. We’re conducting more tests on the M4 Pro chip, but for now we can say that this performance doesn’t meaningfully detract from the overall competitiveness of the laptop.

All times are expressed in minutes:seconds.

The MacBook Pro has an excellent display. The 16-inch display offers a resolution of 3456×2234, just under the standard 4K resolution of 3840×2160. However, out of the box, Apple’s displays are impressively accurate, to the degree that most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the intended color and the “incorrect” color being shown, even if they had a reference image. Apple also has a tool to help calibrate the XDR display on the MacBook Pro, if you want to ensure the most precise color.

Color-accuracy test results

Lower numbers are better. The Calman color-calibration software generates these scores by using the Delta E 2000 equation to determine the perceived difference between colors. Scores under 2.0 indicate that inaccuracies can be found when the viewer closely compares the results against the original, and scores under 1.0 mean that inaccuracies are imperceptible to the human eye.

Its screen is bright enough for editing in bright conditions. The MacBook Pro’s backlight gets to about 400 nits, bright enough for most inside environments; beyond that, it uses an ambient-light sensor to increase its brightness up to 1,000 nits. You’ll probably want to leave the auto-brightness on, unless you’re always working indoors. This impressively bright backlight allows you to work in sunnier conditions than with any other laptop we’ve tested, and if doing so is commonplace where you work, we also recommend the optional nano-texture glass. Rather than a glass coating, the nano-texture is actually scratched or otherwise applied into the glass itself, so it diffuses light rather than deflecting it back. The nano-texture can cause a bit of a washed-out, diffused glare, but in the situations we tested, the MacBook Pro’s backlight was bright enough to overcome that glare. If you work primarily outside, the nano-textured glass makes the MacBook Pro far more usable for an additional $150.

It has an upgraded webcam. The new 12-megapixel webcam is sharp and much better in low light than previous MacBook webcams. It outputs 1080p resolution video and works well for video calls. Apple has also added Desk View, an option for attempting a top-down view of an object just in front of your laptop, such as a diagram on a notepad. We found the resolution to be a bit low, and the footage looked as if it were coming from a strange angle, but creative people are sure to put it to better use.

The MacBook Pro runs cool. We have little to say about the MacBook Pro’s noise and heat, mainly because we didn’t notice much of either. The system stayed cool even during our export tests, so we could easily keep it on our laps even when the computer was doing heavy lifting. In this regard, the MacBook Pro had an advantage over every Windows laptop we tested, all of which became warm to the touch and turned on an audible fan when the processor was under a heavy editing load.

It has some modern ports such as USB-C, but no USB-A. The MacBook Pro with Apple’s M4 chip has a MagSafe charging port, an SD card reader, an HDMI port, and three USB-C ports, in addition to retaining the headphone jack. We like that USB-C ports occupy both sides of the laptop, which limits the possibility of a chunky cable blocking valuable port space. All of the USB-C ports on the MacBook Pro are Thunderbolt 5 enabled, so you can charge your laptop, hook it up to external displays, and transfer data at the fastest speed available on either side of the laptop. You don’t have many Thunderbolt 5 devices or accessories to choose from at the moment, however. Also, the MacBook Pro lacks a USB-A port.

The laptop has great battery life. In our battery test, which simulates web browsing and video playback at a standardized brightness across every device, the 16-inch MacBook Pro was again the top performer. It lasted about 17.5 hours, around seven hours longer than the Asus ProArt P16.

It isn’t the most portable laptop, but you can still easily travel with it. The MacBook Pro is large, but it still fits inside backpacks with ease. The size has allowed Apple to cram a 16.2-inch display into the machine, as well as a 100-watt-hour battery, the largest allowed on domestic flights in the United States. However, the 14-inch version has a smaller, 70-watt-hour battery, which mostly accounts for its slightly shorter battery life.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

Repairing or replacing components is essentially impossible. Apple has soldered the processor, RAM, and storage to the computer’s motherboard. The inability to repair these parts shortens their lifespan.

The camera notch can be annoying. If an application has more than seven or eight menu tabs, the notch can block some of them. Apple has released a simple workaround, allowing you to switch certain apps to display their menu items below the menu bar.

There are no USB-A ports. That means older peripherals won’t work without a dongle. USB-C has been around for a while, however, and although fiddling with a dongle is a little annoying, we’ve found that few of our accessories still require the older cable.

It’s pretty heavy. The 16-inch MacBook Pro weighs 4.7 pounds without the charger or any additional accessories. If you’re tucking it into a Pelican case with other gear, that might not be a big deal, but the weight adds up in a backpack or bag. (The laptop actually weighs about the same as a standard brick. If you’re unsure about whether you can tolerate the weight, carrying around a brick in your backpack could be a fun test.) We’re recommending the 16-inch version of the laptop over the 14-inch model because it provides more real estate for video editing. But if weight is a concern for you, consider the smaller laptop.