it's been about a month since we received our 15-inch MacBook airs and
now that we've had a lot of time to test it out to use it and to compare it to
the 14 inch pro this is my updated honest opinion on which machine you
should get and right out of the get-go I will just tell you that it doesn't
really make sense to buy the 15 inch but you still might want to buy one now you
guys could see that the 14 inch is clearly smaller I mean it's called 14
inches but size wise it's surprising how much smaller it is but with that it is
thicker and heavier and I want to say that is one of my favorite things about
the 15 inch air using it holding it the last month or so this thing is
impossibly thin and lightweight and I love it now the 14 inch isn't bad but
when you have both of them side by side or if you're holding this moving around
with it I'm mean you feel that difference now this thing has a lot more
packed into it we've showed you guys the Dual fans that are in there the six
speaker setup that is in there well it is impressive what they managed to pack
in including the display as well along with that we have all of the extra ports
and I think the one thing that I miss on the 15 inch air is that lack of an SD
card slot because of that you will need to buy some accessories if you work with
slots maybe a hub and I did a full video on the 13 inch air the best accessories
which you guys can go and check out but with a 410 inch you have a lot and you
have the HDMI but not everybody needs that same thing with display output now
personally I have not needed to connect this to a display and I think most
people don't need to do that so it's not a huge deal that it only supports One
external display compared to three on the 14 inch I think for most people
looking at this that won't matter now the next I want to talk about are the
screens because that's one area where the 14 inch is just much better if
you're looking at HDR content I mean the content just pops movies videos
especially if you're watching at night the mini LED just looks fantastic but I
have to be honest with you guys and say that it also might not matter for a lot
of people this video is going to keep heading that way because in most
scenarios in the daytime the 15-inch air screen still looks great the brightness
is great and other than watching at night it's really rare to feel like
you're missing out now as far as the speakers we have no grills on the 15
inch air but apple is still able to pack in six speakers into this laptop and the
difference compared to 13 inch with 4 is massive we had a separate comparison
there and using it I was happy all the time the volume is great if you're
watching movies it sounds really good but with that said you never get that
experience or that thought were like wow this sounds incredible like you get with
the 14 inch because the woofers just get so much deeper uh the mid sound better
here's a sound comparison for you [Music]
now I haven't needed to do any Zoom calls or meetings in this time with the
15-inch air but the camera quality actually looks better and I think the
microphones even though they're not as deep they also sound better go ahead and
look at this comparison now both these MacBooks have 1080p webcams this one
right here is the 14 inch MacBook Pro which has studio quality microphones and
this is the 15-inch MacBook Air now you guys let me know which one looks better
and which microphones sound better to you down in the comments and to me I do
notice that because the 15 inch is a little bit taller the angle is actually
a little bit better but the quality might be slightly worse so let me know
now another area that we have clear differences is battery life the 14 inch
pro isn't bad you can get eight to nine hours of battery life with real world
mixed use I know Apple quotes just a battery life with some web browsing but
that's a very simple tasks whereas the 15 inch air you'll get 10 to 12 hours of
battery life and then if you turn on the low power mode which I did a full video
on that that can extend up to 20 hours of battery life for this machine because
as a large battery even though it's thin and it saves a lot of power with the M2
Chip instead of the M2 Pro so if you care about battery life the 15 inch air
is definitely the clear when or not before I get into performance I want to
talk about just the general usability and the form factors I mentioned it a
little bit but this thing is just so pleasant to take with you to use to hold
I think it's in ultimate laptop for web browsing emails web apps that are simple
it is just so nice to use compared to this which is a little bit clunky or a
little bit heavy not bad but it is just not as Sleek as the 15 inch air and
that's what I love about it the most now getting into performance of course we
have the M2 Pro versus the M2 Chip and A lot of people wonder well is the M2 Chip
enough or should I spend some more money and get the M2 Pro now the interesting
thing is once you spec up the 15 inch to have 512 gigs of SSD to match the SSD
performance because the base 256 actually gets about half of the
performance and you upgrade the RAM well the price tag is very very close and you
can actually buy the 14 inch discounted on Amazon as well I'll have links to
that and a discounted 15 inch air down below if we look at single core
performance in geekbench it is basically the same and then for web browsing the
performance is identical as well and for heavy web-based applications like figma
which I tested and the project was brought to us by 500 designs one of the
best design studios in California smoothness was identical you could not
tell the difference at all and then rendering 12 high-resolution web pages I
was surprised that the performance difference was very minimal so for these
kind of tasks you will not notice a difference and you will not miss out on
any performance by going with a 15-inch model now when we start looking at
multi-core performance that is where the extra performance scores of 14 inch
start kicking in I saw a 24 difference in multi-core which sounds like a lot
but this is pushing the CPU with a lot of different tasks and just using the
computer tutor it feels great when you're pushing it now if we push the CP
to the Max and send a bench the difference is a lot bigger close to 40
percent and that's because the 15 inch air doesn't have a fan in it throttles
but even when it does throttle it doesn't slow down by a crazy amount
because this is a long stress test now in terms of graphics for metal Computing
we had a difference of 60 percent that is huge and this is something where
you're doing heavy effects or if say if you want a game or do something else the
difference starts to Pile in and this is where when I mentioned in the beginning
that doesn't really make sense to buy the 15 inch air over the 14 inch it just
doesn't because once you upgrade the ramen SSD the price tag is close and the
14 inch offers that display the ports you get the better speakers it just
makes better I guess Financial sense if you care about performance for
lightroom's denoise and enhanced AI feature here we had 51 seconds compared
to a minute and 17. so you see that the 14 inch air really goes ahead and the
same thing with a lot of other tasks that I tested in my full Hands-On
performance comparison if you guys want to see that but what I want to talk to
you guys about is how much performance do you really need because with a lot of
these apps the performance is so good that nobody will complain at all
especially if you're coming from an Intel based machine or a Windows laptop
the form stays the same whether you're plugged in or unplugged which is great
and it is incredibly incredibly fast so even though it doesn't make sense
financially the performance for the money compared to the 14 inch if you do
like the form factor you like the larger display which I do like and it is
noticeable well you are not going to complain unless you're absolutely
pushing the system to the max for example if you're doing like 500 good
raw Lightroom images we're maxing out the CPU and the GPU for a very long time
it's throttling well there starts to compare or doing like raw video editing
where the 14 inch definitely smokes the 15 inch but for regular 4K editing that
most people do the performance is super close and the export times are identical
so that is where it doesn't really make sense to get the 15 inch but I would
still recommend it to a lot of you guys after a month this thing is an amazing
machine that is selling very well that pretty much everybody will be happy with
and they will not complain about they yes the display is not as good but
you're not going to complain about it because it's better than a lot of other
displays the speakers are not as good but you're not going to complain about
it and if you're looking for a thin and light form factor with a large screen in
this price tag I would recommend it and the only people that I recommend a 14
inch to over the 15 inch this is weird to say because it logically doesn't make
sense but only if you're really gonna push the computer for a long time and
you're going to maximize the performance that's when it makes sense to buy this
um but even though it is better I think for daily regular use I would go for the
15 inch MacBook Air and it kills me to say that because I love performance but
this thing's just such a nice
well-balanced package so after a month I would say I would highly recommend the
15 inch if you're looking for something like this now you can go ahead and check
out my full detailed comparison right over there if you guys want to see it if
you want to see how this compares to a Windows laptop in depth for performance
let us know click the circle above to subscribe and I'll see you in the next
one [Music]
thank you