[dividedbyzero]

Get the Air then. More than plenty horsepower for regular office work, even thinner and lighter and quite a bit cheaper and prettier (do they still have the gold one? I wish they'd offer that on the Pros...) If someone buys a Pro for some Excel and web browsing, I'd imagine those $200-300 didn't break the bank. People sometimes get one even though the Air would have been fine precisely because of the Touchbar (says my little bit of anecdata.) Besides, I guess the Touchbar would be especially neat exactly for those people who never use Spotlight, because it's extremely discoverable. With Spotlight, you either need to know it's there, or discover it on your own (which is going to be hard); it's similar with keyboard shortcuts. Tap "Search" on the Touchbar? Way easier. You don't need to be good with computers to find out how to do that.

[pier25]

> Get the Air then. More than plenty horsepower for regular office work

The passive CPU cooling on the Air is a deal breaker.

[dividedbyzero]

For an office laptop? A few Excel sheets, a dozen or two browser tabs, maybe something like Slack?

[pier25]

Yes, even constant low workloads will make the fan audible.

See the NotebookCheck review of the i5:

> At around 30% CPU load (installation of OS updates), the fan is clearly audible and we are already above 40 dB(A), which is hard to understand considering the low performance level.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-new-2020-MacBook-Air-Core-...

[dividedbyzero]

Weird. At any rate, it doesn't seem to be an issue that deters companies from issuing those things to employees, and looking at the Windows machines some companies issue, that's probably fine; at least it's not a gargantuan brick with a super outdated Atom CPU and Windows 7. Reading the other comments, even some devs are happy with Airs.