(phone vibrating)
Hey, Tim.
Oh, yeah, I wasn't sure if we were still talking.
Bill?
No, Bill's just a friend.
No, I promise.
Okay.
All right, speak soon.
Bye.
So, guys, it's no secret that I really do love
my Apple silicon Macs, but it is important
not to get too entrenched and blindingly loyal
to a single brand or product,
and this means, maybe every now and then,
having a look at some of the other options out there.
So for this particular video,
I switched to a Windows laptop for seven days,
and I just wanted to give you guys
my opinion and my experience over the last couple of days.
Now, I think this is a really important comparison
to make at this point in time,
because I think up until now,
everyone's been kind of blinded
by the really poor performance of Intel Macbooks,
and not just Intel Macbooks, but Intel in general,
while in the background, companies like AMD,
with their Ryzen lineup, and also Nvidia,
with their RTX GPUs, have really been releasing
some awesome and really powerful products,
and laptops featuring these particular components
might actually be more competitive
with Apple silicon than you might think.
Now this is a Razer Blade 14.
It has a Ryzen 5900HX CPU and a RTX 3060 GPU.
Now the actual price of this thing is very similar
to an M1 MacBook Pro.
If you upgrade the M1 MacBook Pro accordingly
with one terabyte SSD and 16 gigabytes of RAM,
and if you actually do that,
you'll find that this particular model is
actually $100 cheaper than the
equivalently specced M1 MacBook.
Now this video is not about this Razer laptop in particular.
It's just about switching from an M1 MacBook
to one of the competitors
and talking about the experience.
If you want to see future videos on these topics,
such as the performance breakdown
between these two machines and other laptops,
stay tuned for that content.
So first things first.
Let's talk about the ecosystem.
So as you guys already know,
the MacBook, and just Apple in general,
has a awesome ecosystem.
So you get things like iCloud, app Handoff,
iMessage, and I've featured and talked about
these features a lot on this channel already.
So after seven days, the thing that I've realized
about the ecosystem is that,
if you use it very frequently,
so you're sending iMessages all day,
you're AirDropping frequently,
you will miss it, and you will sorely miss it,
because Windows, as good as it is,
and as good as Windows 11 may potentially be,
it just doesn't come close to what the Mac
and Apple has to offer, in terms of ecosystem
and Handoff and that kind of thing,
and I never think Windows will ever come close.
And probably the biggest realization
I had after spending a week switching
from the Mac to a PC is I don't actually use
this ecosystem as much as I thought.
And I also realized is that,
no matter what platform we're on,
whether it's Mac, PC, we tend to use the same apps anyway.
So for me, personally, I don't use the Notes app any longer.
I actually use Notion for that.
I also use Discord, Slack, and things like WhatsApp
to actually talk to people.
So I don't use iMessage.
And then if we actually talk about AirDrop,
I very rarely use that, because I'll
just use iCloud, which can be downloaded as a client
on the PC, by the way, to just sync folders
and files between my devices.
Now, this realization was a little bit surprising
for me, personally, because I really did think
I would use the Mac and Apple ecosystem
more than what I actually did,
and it took switching to the PC to realize that.
Now, again, like I said before,
if you are a heavy user of the ecosystem,
things like iMessage, AirDrop, Notes,
all that kind of stuff,
you definitely will notice a difference, switching,
but if you're kind of on the fence, like me,
the difference is not as big as you might think.
So moving on to the next biggest difference
I found, and for me, I do a lot of file management,
so I have, obviously, this YouTube channel,
so all the footage, the files, the thumbnails,
audio, and I've also got the business end of things,
so invoicing, emails, all that kind of stuff.
So I spend a lot of time managing files
and putting folders together,
and while the find app on the Mac works perfectly fine,
I don't really have any complaints about it,
I've found that File Explorer on Windows was
much more intuitive, and just easier to use,
for me, personally.
So for example, just a single click
on this PC will reveal all of your drives connected
to the PC and their available capacity.
I also found sorting and renaming files a lot easier.
And again, this is such a hard thing
to sort of put into words, because at the end of the day,
the differences between the two are very subtle,
and this is mainly going to come into effect,
if you're like me, and you do a lot of file organization.
Now, moving on to the next section,
which is gaming, yes, guys,
I know, obviously you shouldn't buy a MacBook
if you want to do a lot of gaming.
Get a PC for that.
But, guys, the reality is, for a lot of people out there,
their MacBook is their only computer
and they can't afford, or they simply just can't have,
another computer to play games on,
like a dedicated Windows PC or a laptop, for example,
and this makes total sense,
because a lot of the most popular videos
on my channel are actually gaming videos
featuring the M1 Macs.
So people are obviously interested in this topic.
Now it's pretty fair to say
that Windows laptops will destroy Macbooks
when it comes to gaming,
not necessarily because they're more powerful,
'cause you can get different configs,
but a lot of the time it's because the operating system,
and Windows is just a lot more gaming-friendly compared
to a MacBook.
And for example, this Razer Blade
here absolutely destroys gaming.
So I can play AAA-rated games like Warzone
on this bad boy and get around 100 FPS
on a 144 hertz screen, and there's
just no way that a Mac can come close
to this performance, even if you're using Boot Camp,
which you can't on Apple silicon Macs,
because it doesn't work.
So why is this big difference
in gaming performance important to me, personally?
Well, over the last couple of years,
one of the main things that has stopped
me from switching fully over to macOS is
that I just cannot game on it at all.
So it's great for casual gamers,
things like really old-school games,
or FortNite, things like that,
that you can still play on the Mac,
but if you want to play anything competitively,
so Rainbow Six Siege, Tarkov, Warzone,
you need a PC.
And so I've always had to have a dedicated gaming PC
on my desk or some kind of laptop
to play any kind of games with my friends.
And the result is, of course,
as long as I still play games every now and then,
I have to have two computers if I want
to continue using a Mac.
I need to have the Mac, and also a PC,
to play games on.
Now, moving onto the next section,
which is how you can sort of configure
and customize each of these products,
and I think, guys, this has given me a
really deep appreciation for Macbooks in general,
and just how solid of a product they are, all around,
and I really just don't think any Windows laptops out there,
at the moment, can come close to that overall package
and performance that the Apple silicon Macs can offer.
That being said, though, it is really nice
and really refreshing to have a
really wide range of products and configurations
and specs to choose from on the Windows side of things.
If you want a juiced-up laptop for gaming,
you have multiple options,
or if you want a super lightweight two-in-one PC,
like a Surface, there's that option, too.
I have noticed that Apple has been locking
down its products at an ever-increasing rate,
and to be honest, guys, it's getting a little bit worrying.
Macbooks are slowly becoming unrepairable
by anyone other than Apple,
and although Apple silicon is great,
I fear that it's going to allow Apple
to lock down its ecosystem even more,
as Apple silicon is obviously proprietary.
With these Windows laptops,
you can basically choose any configuration you want,
and when it comes to repairability,
on average, they are much more repairable than Macs.
So if this thing stops working or just dies,
you're not going to be as screwed
as you would be if this bad boy stopped.
Now it's only been seven days with these two machines,
and like I said, guys, I'm going to be doing a lot
of videos on not only this machine,
but other Windows laptops out there,
and also comparing them against the M1 Macbooks,
and also the future Apple silicon Macs,
like the M1X or an M2, for example,
and I think this is going to be really interesting,
'cause like I said before,
other manufacturers are catching up to Apple,
and we're going to have a really large battle
of the computers very, very soon, in my opinion.
Anyway, guys, thanks for watching this video.
Let me know down below if you have
any comments or questions.
And apart from that, I'll catch you in the next one.