I bought this laptop primarily for college. As someone who has dealt with both devils by the name of Apple and Microsoft, the operating system differences don't bother me (although, one thing I did find is that when I go home and I'm not able to do any gaming, it can be a bit of an irritation, but that was never why I bought this laptop to begin with). The screen and battery life on this thing are amazing. My previous laptops had terrible screens and had a max battery life of about two hours. This laptop, between using it for school, doing photo editing, graphic design, coding, and video editing, can easily last me up to two days or even more. The one thing I will say is that frequently in order for me see things most of the time, I need the screen cranked up past 50% brightness most of the time. I like the touch bar, I barely use function keys in most applications and the apps that do use them have the buttons on the touch bar anyways. I will say though unless you care about the touch bar, a slightly larger battery, and a fan being inside this machine (which for the record, with all of my use of heavy exports and edits, has never once turned on), just buy the MacBook Air. For school especially, it will get you across fine. The 8 GB model is also superb in most of the tasks I need to accomplish. I mean, it has similar performance in what I need for compared to my PC with a Ryzen 3700X, and RTX 3070, and 32GB of RAM. There were a couple of times where webpages tried to use more than 8GB of RAM and that caused some trouble, but after turning on an ad-blocker I never had that issue again. macOS has superb memory management, which allows for someone semi-professional like me to get by with it just fine.