if you're looking to buy a new macbook it's probably never been this confusing
to figure out which one you should buy especially now that the controversial m2
macbooks have joined the lineup but don't worry i can guarantee that if you
stick through this video to the end you'll know exactly which macbook is
right for you but before we get into explaining all of the differences
between these macbooks i've gotta talk about the prices for each one in the
lineup starting with the m1 air which retails for a thousand dollars but you
can find on sale on amazon for as low as 850 bucks then we have the redesigned m2
air for 1200 which hasn't went on sale yet the m2
macbook pro which retails at 1300 but is currently on sale for 1200 bucks the 14
inch macbook pro for 2 000 or 1800 on sale on amazon and the 16
inch macbook pro for 2500 or only 2 200 on sale which is a crazy
good deal and now getting into the differences the first thing i want to
discuss is the design and portability which in this case the new redesigned m2
macbook air is by far the fittest of them all and the most portable in terms
of the footprint being quite similar to the m1 macbook air while the 16-inch is
massive in comparison as well as being by far the heaviest at 4.8 pounds about
78 heavier than the empty air but in terms of the overall design itself the
air is basically a smaller version of the 14 and 16 inch macbook pros so it
looks amazing compared to the older looking m1 air and m2 macbook pro which
unfortunately did not get a redesign and don't come with max a fast charging
support like the others do now in terms of the keyboards and the track pads
they're all very similar with the newer style of magic keys which are very nice
however the m2 macbook pro is the only one that still has the touch bar which i
don't really care for because i prefer the function keys with the built-in
touch id sensor which all of them have and as far as the track pads they all
have basically the same one with larger track pads as you get to the more
expensive and larger macbook pros which is nice and they're force touch so they
beat out all of the other windows laptops out there now in terms of the
ports all three of the lower end m1 and m2 macbooks come with two thunderbolt 3
ports and a headphone jack while the newer m2 models do support high
impedance headphones and only the m2 air comes with the max safe 3 port in terms
of the bottom end and of course both the 14 and 16 inch come with the max a3 port
they actually come with three thunderbolt 4 ports which are faster and
on the other end they come with an sdxc card slot and an hdmi 2.0 port so these
are by far the best in terms of the actual ports and connectivity and
they're also the best in terms of the display support because they support
between two and four displays combining the thunderbolt ports with the hdmi port
while the lower end m1 and m2 models only support one external display
without using any additional extra hardware now moving on to the actual
displays there are a lot of differences to talk about but the biggest one is the
notch and notch list designs as you can see the m1 and the m2 pro have the old
design so they do not come with a notch which also means that they only come
with 720p webcams compared to 1080p on the m2 air and the 14 and 16 inch and
i'm gonna show you guys the differences in just a minute and in terms of the
actual knits or the brightness of the displays the m2 pro and the m2 air have
500 nits while the older m1 comes with 400 and these all have pretty good color
support with p3 wide color gamut while i think the m2 air does support 10 billion
colors in terms of the software support so that's really nice but the 14 and 16
inch come with much better mini led displays compared to the conventional
lcds which can actually go up to a peak of 1600 nits or a thousand that's
sustained across the entire screen with a white page for hours and hours on end
so that is really really nice for hdr editing or color grading but when you're
using them in normal use cases they're limited to 500 just like these m2
macbooks however you can download the vivid app using the link below to unlock
the full sustained a thousand nits of brightness all the time without any
risks or issues because that's how apple builds them to work so definitely check
that out but in terms of the actual display quality these mini led displays
look really nice because they give you better colors that pop out more and they
have much deeper blacks which go basically all the way pitch black
because the actual backlight is turned off in those areas with local dimming
zones so they look really nice compared to the lcd displays that have basically
gray all around the display and not only that but the 14 and 16 inch macbook pros
also support 120hz refresh rate promotion which means that when you're
browsing or playing games or whatever you get up to 120 hertz of refresh rate
so it looks super smooth and a lot more pleasant compared to these other lower
end macbooks that are stuck at 60 hertz all the time and now with that said
let's talk about the speaker quality now the m2 air did get a new system with
four speakers but to be honest it doesn't sound that much better than the
m2 pro or the m1 air in fact some people still think the m1 air sounds better and
that might be because there are no longer speaker grilles on the m2 air
because it got smaller but if you really care about speaker quality the 14 and 16
inch sound a lot better especially the 16 inch which has the most volume and by
far the most bass just hear it for yourself
[Applause] [Music]
[Music] and just like i mentioned before the m1
air and the m2 macbook pro are still stuck with the 720p webcams compared to
1080p on the m2 air and the 14 and 16-inch macbook pros so check out this
clip and also listen for the microphone differences as well this is the webcam
and microphone quality on the m1 macbook air this is the webcam and microphone
quality on the new m2 macbook air this is the webcam and microphone quality on
the new m2 macbook pro this is the webcam and microphone quality on the
14-inch macbook pro and this is the webcam and microphone quality on the
16-inch macbook pro now in terms of battery life the m2 macbook pro is going
to give you the best because with the m2 chip it has four efficiency cores which
are combined with a pretty decently sized battery and a small 13-inch 60hz
display which uses less power than these larger machines now beyond that you're
going to get better battery life with the m2 air and then following the m1 air
and then finally the 14 and 16 inch macbook pros have the least amount of
battery life in terms of the general lineup and now with that said getting
into the cpu performance we have some differences here of course the m2 chips
are clocked the highest with the latest technology so they have the fastest
single core performance and that actually helps make the whole system
feel snappy and load things up faster as well as giving you faster web browsing
performance which is actually really impressive compared to even the 14 and
16 inch macbook pros now because these chips have more performance cores they
also have the most multi-core performance and even the bend base model
14 inch m1 pro has a lot more performance than the m2 chip so keep
that in mind for all of your programs like let's say xcode programming or
running a lot of tracks and logic pro you also have the lightroom photo
editing as well which is now using a bit more of the gpu but still it relies on
some cpu so if you have some tasks that rely on the cpu of course the 14 and
16-inch macbook pros are gonna be the best now in terms of graphics we have a
similar story the base m1 air is gonna have the least amount of performance
because it has a seven core bend model which you can upgrade to the eight core
but of course the m2 air comes with that 8 core already at the base price and
it's quite a bit faster honestly than it was last year now the m2 air can be
upgraded from an 8 core to a 10 core but because it's fanless you might not see
that big of gains so we honestly don't recommend upgrading to the 10 core on at
least the air model and of course the 14 and 16 inch have the m1 pro and m1 max
with insane numbers of graphics cores up to 32 on the m1 max so if you care a lot
about graphics performance you definitely want to stick with these two
and if you're confused on which one you should buy in terms of the m1 the m2 the
m1 pro and the m1 max chips i would honestly say that these ones especially
the m1 max are really only for the people who are very serious about
productivity work and also for those who use their macbook for business where
time is money and it's worth spending more to get your work done as fast as
possible but for everybody else honestly the m1 pro is definitely more than fast
enough and even the m2 chip is more than fast enough for the majority of people
out there and now with that said i do want to address some of the issues that
we've been seeing with the m2 macbooks first of all if you're getting the base
256 gigs of storage you could have some slow downs in terms of the actual
transfer speeds because this m2 macbook air and the macbook pro in terms of the
base storage is actually two times slower than the base m1 error which is
cheaper in terms of the read speed so you could actually get some lower
multitasking performance if you're doing some productivity work so keep that in
mind and because of that we recommend upgrading to at least five twelve gigs
of storage on these m2 machines you don't necessarily have to do that on the
m1 air because it does have the faster ssds in the base model so that's nice if
you're really trying to save money but these two machines the 14 and 16 already
come with 512 which is a pretty decent starting point and of course you can
upgrade to one terabyte on these machines which is worth it if you're
already spending that much money now in terms of the ram these machines come
with eight gigs standard while the 14 and 16 come with 16 gigs which i would
say is a decent area to stay at unless you're doing a lot of productivity work
then you might want to upgrade but in terms of these if you're doing a lot of
productivity work and multitasking i would definitely recommend going up to
16 gigs of ram however that creates an issue because with the m2 air if you
upgrade to the 512 gig ssd and then you also upgrade to 16 gigs of ram you're
looking at 1600 while of course this 14 inch macbook pro
you can get on sale for 1800 and it has a ton of advantages over the m2 macbook
air so i would say if you really care enough about productivity to upgrade the
ram on the m2 you might as well just be looking at these higher end machines so
with that said let me get into my buyer's guide portion where i recommend
who should buy each one of these macbooks now starting with the m1
macbook air this is perfect for the person who's just trying to get into
apple laptops and wants to spend a little bit of money because you can buy
it for 850 dollars which is a killer deal basically destroying all other
windows laptops so if you have light usage or some light business use this is
great now as far as the m2 macbook air i think this one is for those people who
really want the fresh redesign who like the new design who like the notch the
better display that is for those people that are willing to spend the money on
the extra design now in terms of the m2 macbook pro
that's for the people who don't want to go up to the 14 inch they absolutely
can't spend 1800 but they do want a fan for extended workloads which honestly i
would really recommend going for the 14 inch if you're considering the fan with
the m2 macbook pro but of course it's there for those people who just cannot
squeeze out any more budget now of course the 14 inch i would say is the
overall best value of all if you're doing productivity work definitely and
the 16 inch is for those who really love the large display they love the better
speakers the better battery life that you can get compared to the 14 inch and
of course those who really want to go all out with the m1 max chip trying to
get as much possible performance as they can get so with that said i have links
down below to all of these macbooks all the sales that you can find especially
the crazy good deal 2200 for the 16 inch or 850 for this m1 macbook air
[Music]