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00:00New MacBook Air with the M2 or MacBook Pro 14 with the M1 Pro
00:07What do we think?
00:08This is a question a lot of you guys have been asking me because once you spec the M2 Air with more RAM or more
00:14Storage it gets very close to the price of this. So which should you buy?
00:19Well, I can tell you straight away which one I wouldn't buy and that is the one I've not got here
00:24The 13-inch MacBook Pro with M2. It has the old design
00:28Which is basically from 2016 with the touch bar
00:30It's got the old rubbish webcam and it costs a hundred pounds more than the Air
00:35It does have some advantages though for starters. It comes with the 10 core GPU. Normally, that's a hundred pound
00:41Extra on the Air. It also has a fan for better sustained performance and also a slightly longer battery life
00:47So the Pro 13 has a very niche appeal
00:50It may be perfect for some people but for me I wouldn't trade all the quality of life
00:54Improvements you get with this design for a little bit extra performance and a little bit longer battery and actually if performance is something that you
01:01Are worried about then this is what you should be considering
01:03Anyway, so really it's gonna come down to should you buy the Air or the 14-inch Pro?
01:08Well, let's start with the price and this will set you back twelve hundred and fifty pounds here in the UK. Whereas this is
01:151,900 so straight off the bat that is quite a big difference
01:19650 quid more
01:20So, how could you possibly convince yourself that's worth paying the extra for?
01:24Well, I would say perhaps with the base model then it is kind of hard to justify but that's the problem with the M2 Air
01:31Realistically, you're gonna want to get more RAM or more storage
01:34And if you do spec the Air with 16 gigs of RAM and also the faster 512 storage
01:39Don't forget the 256 is significantly slower on the M2 Air. Although whether you'll actually be able to notice that difference
01:44I'm not sure but with those upgrades the difference then becomes just
01:49250 pounds and of course the cheapest Pro 14 still gets the 16 gig of RAM and 512 storage
01:55This is gonna be tricky. So what are the pros and cons?
01:58Well, let's start with the design because the main advantage of the Air is well, it's more portable
02:04It's 1.24 kilograms versus 1.6. And this is 11.3 millimeters thick versus 15.5
02:10So the Air is 25% lighter and 31% thinner. That is a fairly significant and noticeable difference
02:17Although in the Pro's favor, it does have a slightly bigger screen
02:2114.2 versus 13.6 and also the extra thickness means there's room for a fan and more ports. Both have MagSafe
02:29But while the Air only has two Thunderbolt USB 4s
02:31The Pro adds a third USB, an HDMI 2 and a full-size SD card reader
02:37Which for me I use every day for taking photos and videos of my camera
02:41Also, the Air is still limited to just one external monitor
02:45Whereas if you want a multiple monitor setup, then you can have to go for a Pro
02:49So it comes down to if you're happy to carry around a slightly thicker and heavier laptop
02:53It is a noticeable difference, but it's not exactly the Pro 16
02:56It's not gonna weigh you down in your backpack necessarily
02:59But the advantages are getting more ports are you getting that fan which will come out to in a second for the performance and also it
03:05Supports multiple screens, but if none of those things really bother you then go for the lighter M2 Air
03:12The keyboard and the touchpad are identical
03:14Especially now the Air has the full-size function row and touch ID on the power button
03:19The only visual difference is the Pro has this all black on black design
03:23Whereas the Air is black on whatever color you went for, midnight in this case
03:27In fact, the Air now comes in four colors including the snazzy new midnight and starlight
03:33Versus the Pro's two options which are bland and bland. I mean gray and silver
03:37We do also have this speaker grill flanking the keyboard on the Pro
03:41Which the M2 Air actually removed coming from the M1 Air
03:44The thing is though while this does have a new quad speaker setup and it's a marginal improvement over the M1 Air
03:50You can just about hear a little bit more bass and also at high volumes. It remains clearer than the M1 Air
03:56There's not much in it and actually this with its force cancelling woofers
04:00It just blows away both the Airs in terms of speaker quality
04:04Hang on, is that the same color as my shirt? Almost color matching with my MacBook Air
04:10Hang on, is that the same color as my shirt?
04:13Almost color matching with my MacBook Air
04:15Now the last thing to note about the design is that while they both have a notch
04:19It's the same size. The problem with this is it's still using an IPS LCD screen
04:25So when you're watching movies or videos or playing games and you've got a dark background like letterboxing at the top and bottom of the screen
04:31Those dark grey slightly washed out blacks stand out next to this true properly physically black notch
04:39Compared to this which has the mini LED screen and with much higher contrast and therefore deeper inkier blacks
04:45And so it blends in. It is a small point though. I don't think I would make my whole buying decision based on that
04:51But whichever laptop you choose make sure you also pair it with a good VPN
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05:45What I might base my buying decision on though, or at least a significant part of it is the screen
05:50This is a big reason to go for the pro
05:52It's mini LED, which is a say means much higher contrast and also much higher brightness
05:57It's HDR and we get ProMotion. So up to a 120 Hertz refresh rate
06:02The 14 Pro just has a better screen in every sense
06:06So firstly in terms of brightness according to Apple in SDR content, so everything that isn't HDR
06:11These both should be 500 nits. That's one of the upgrades with the air from 400 to 500
06:16So that should be about the same but actually with my lux meter wherever it's gone. I measured
06:21462 nits on the air versus 491 on the pros
06:25So even that everyday SDR level of brightness seems to be a touch higher on the pro
06:29But then when you do fire up an HDR video movie game, whether you're playing it or editing
06:34This isn't a whole lot of league with a peak brightness of
06:381502 nits according to my lux meter
06:41Now normally what I would say is how often you really gonna watch or play stuff in HDR most of the time when you're on
06:47The UI when you're in, you know websites doing everyday stuff, it's SDR
06:51So they're both gonna be around 500 nits thereabouts. Well, let me introduce you to this little app called vivid
06:57I met the developer of this when I went to Apple Park for the unveiling of the MacBook Air and
07:02He actually has created an app that actually unlocks that HDR
07:061000 nits across the whole of Mac OS the entire UI
07:10It'll simply drain your battery a bit quicker and use more of a CPU
07:13But for me, it's this little hack that unlocks the brightness throughout that makes a huge difference to everyday usability
07:20And once you pair that brightness with the almost infinite contrast of the mini LED screen
07:25All be it with some blooming and light bleed
07:27Although it's much better than the iPad Pro 12 9 and colors blacks and even those pesky letterboxing
07:32It all looks so much richer and more vibrant on the pro top it all off with promotion
07:38Which dynamically adjusts the refresh up to 120 and if you've ever used a 120 Hertz PC monitor
07:43Laptop, it's tough to go back to 60 just moving the cursor or scrolling through websites or scrubbing around in my timeline
07:50Everything is smoother
07:52But if you can go into an Apple Store and try them for yourselves and see what you think
07:56But I think across the board it's a big win for the pro when it comes to display. It's brighter. It's smoother
08:02It's got much higher contrast and actually it's slightly higher resolution as well. We're looking at about 253 PPI versus
08:09224 I think so. I'm not sure if you really better see the difference there
08:12But this is technically a little bit sharper as well
08:15One thing you don't have to think about though is the webcam because they're pretty much the same setup same 1080p resolution
08:21Same three mic array. There really shouldn't be much in it here
08:24And I don't believe there are any significant improvements with the M2's ISP over the M1 Pro
08:30So let me know if there's any difference in the comments, but this should be pretty much the same
08:34Okay next question M2 versus M1 Pro which is faster
08:38well
08:39essentially the M1 Pro is the same as the M1 that you get in the basic MacBook Air but with a media engine and a
08:44Much beefier GPU and more unified memory and then the M1 Mac
08:48So you have the option to pay more and get with this is basically two M1 Pro's
08:52Stuck together and that's the technical term plus the pros get a fan built in which should help improve performance over time
08:59It will reduce throttling now
09:01We come to the M2 which is built on the same 5 nanometer architecture as the M1 and the Pro and the Max
09:06But compared to the M1 they've added that media engine which was previously exclusive to the Pro and the Max
09:12They've also doubled the memory bandwidth and also the processor clock speeds are a little bit higher
09:17And in my review of the M2 Air while the synthetic benchmarks weren't all that impressive in my real-world tests
09:24I found it to be about 25 to 30 percent faster overall and that's with the base model
09:29But we are not talking about the M1 Air
09:31We are talking about the M2 versus the M1 Pro and in single-core the M2 is actually 5% faster on average
09:39However, the M1 Pro is a more substantial 18% faster in multi-core and it's also about 10% faster in passmark
09:46Which isn't really a significant upgrade, but if we then bring in the 3DMark wildlife graphics test here
09:52We're looking at a 36% optic in Shadow of the Tomb Raider
09:56We're averaging 70 FPS on the M1 Pro which is 67% faster
10:01Let's fire up a bit of Premiere Pro and I've downloaded the Puget Test which runs through a range of effects, exports, timeline
10:07Playback and across the standard and more intense extended tests the MacBook Pro 14 scored
10:1590% higher
10:16That can't be right 90%
10:18Well, the reason there I think is because this has that ProMotion 120Hz screen and in that Puget Test
10:24That actually factors into the live playback score
10:27Which arguably makes sense because you are getting a smoother visual experience when you're using this
10:32But I don't think it's really fair when it comes to comparing the hardware. So dropping this down to 60 Hertz
10:38So they are level and running the tests again. We're still seeing a significant 63% jump on average
10:44That's pretty big. Now in terms of just export times
10:48The Pro 14 was around 25% quicker, which is enough to shave off nearly two minutes
10:53Then in Final Cut Pro with an h.264 export the M1 Pro was a little bit quicker
10:58But with a ProRes export it was around three times faster
11:02I repeated it three times on each and the times were similar. In Blender
11:06The Pro 14 was nearly four minutes quicker to render 500 frames and finally firing up a bit of light room
11:12The M1 Pro was a good four minutes quicker here
11:15So I think it's fair to say the MacBook Pro 14 with the M1 Pro
11:19Comfortably wins when it comes to performance, which is surprising to pretty much no one. We've got more cores
11:25We've got a much faster GPU. We've got more memory in here. This is 16 gigs
11:29This is 8 gigs
11:30And of course if you were to pay extra and get 16 on here and also the two extra GPU cores
11:34Then that would close the gap a little bit
11:36But what I'm also seeing with the M2 Air is that it's hitting its thermal ceiling a lot quicker even compared to the M1 Air
11:43So this is gonna have to throttle back a little bit
11:45Whereas the fan on here can just wear up and sustain those peak performances for much longer, which is why the M2
11:5313-inch Pro will be a bit faster than this
11:55But as I said at the beginning
11:56I don't think that's really worth the trade in terms of design and quality of life improvements that you do get but that's not all
12:01Because there was something else that surprised me here
12:04You know how we now know that the base 256 gig version of the M2 Air comes with a single memory slot module
12:11So it's actually slower, quite significantly slower than even the base M1 Air. These two are both 512 gig storage models
12:19So I was expecting the speeds to be roughly the same, but they're not. This is about twice as fast
12:24Could you actually tell? Well, most people probably not but it's still a significant and surprising difference
12:31Okay, last question because it's about 37 degrees outside and I am melting in the studio. Which one lasts longer?
12:37Well, this is gonna be nice and quick
12:38The Air does. In my everyday
12:40General use test of FaceTime and Google Docs and a bit of gaming and a bit of editing just normal moderate stuff
12:47This lasted me 10 hours and 15 minutes. This lasted 8 hours and 5 minutes. To be fair though
12:53I've used this quite a lot and the battery life is not something I worry about on a sort of day-to-day basis
12:58And if I am gonna be doing any more intense editing then I'll probably bring the charger anyway
13:02But in terms of just pure length of battery life and just not having to worry about it at all
13:06Yeah, the M2 Air wins and you're probably gonna get an extra two, two and a half hours out of this over this
13:11So let's wrap this up. Which one should you actually buy?
13:14Well, you know how youtubers usually sit on the fence and say well, it's up to you. It depends what you want
13:18I'm gonna give you a conclusion. I'm gonna say
13:21Get the 14-inch Pro if you can. You shouldn't have to, that's the problem. When the M1 Air came out a couple years ago
13:27Everyone was saying, including myself, this is the best laptop in the world
13:31Ignore everything else unless you want, you know to play games. Go for the M1 Air
13:35It's not as simple now because the M1 Air still exists for $999 and you can get some quite significant discounts on that as well
13:41So I think for most people if you're coming from any old Intel
13:45Powered Mac, even a MacBook Pro 16 with an i9, even the M1 Air, let alone the M2 here, is gonna be a significant upgrade
13:52You probably don't need this. Also, if you do think you'll be hitting the limits of this in terms of performance
13:57Then there's no question really you absolutely should be going for this
14:00Don't pay over the odds for the Air when you could get a Pro which comes with a much better screen
14:04Much better speakers and much better performance
14:07But if you've watched this whole video and if you have I appreciate it and you thought I'm not gonna use any of that power
14:12I'm not blendering, rendering or editing every day. Then no, you don't need it
14:17It's overkill and why not go for a more portable, more lightweight, sleeker laptop instead?
14:23And so if you're like a fancy student with some deep pockets and just want a nice
14:27Everyday laptop and you want a little bit of a better experience than the M1 Air
14:30Then yeah, grab yourself one of these and probably just stick with the base model
14:34I know the 256 gig storage is slower, but you're not really gonna notice
14:38I don't think. But given the price difference once you up the spec of this one a little bit
14:42I think the entry-level model of this, the base 14-inch Pro with the M1 Pro is almost the perfect laptop
14:48I love this thing. But what do you reckon? Which one would you go for or none of the above?
14:53Let me know in the comments below. If you've got any questions at all, let me know as well
14:55Make sure you have hit that subscribe button as I have my Dell XPS 13 Plus versus MacBook Air video coming very soon as well
15:02There's tons of other videos actually. It's a bit hectic at the moment and I'll see you next time right here on the Tech Chap
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