some people would say choosing between a new macbook air or macbook pro is easy
and that was true last year when the air costs 300 less but this year it seems
like it's much more difficult not only did apple raise the price by 200 for the
m2 macbook air since they're still selling the m1 but if you upgrade the 8
core graphics to the same 10 core that comes with the pro you're at the same
1300 price tag and being that the pro has a cooling fan to get the maximum
performance from the new chip that's the
logical choice right no not so fast in this video i will explain every single
difference and give you my honest opinion on which one you should buy
depending on your use case let's start out with the design gone is the iconic
wedge shape with the new m2 air looking similar to the rest of the macbooks
while the pro looks the same as it did when it launched in 2016
and it still comes in those two classic colors compared to four colors now two
of which are new and i personally really like the new midnight on the air apple
says that the redesigned air is 20 smaller by volume which i'm sure is true
but the footprint has actually gotten larger it is actually slightly larger
than the macbook pro now but thinner at 0.44 inches compared to 0.61 but because
of the pros slimming tapered sides you might not be able to tell but you will
notice the lighter 2.7 pounds of the air compared to the 3 pounds now honestly i
do not think that any of this should sway your decision what matters more are
the displays the macbook air's always had a worse screen in multiple ways but
not anymore it is now larger at 13.6 inches thanks to the notch screen design
which has thinner bezels and adds vertical space this makes the 13 inch
macbook pro screen look outdated with its thick bezels but that's not the
worst part which is that it still supports 16.7 million colors compared to
a billion on the air which apple conveniently doesn't list in their
side-by-side comparison tool but it only shows up if you look at the individual
detailed technical specs so if you want the better screen for the first time
ever it's in the air now inside of the air's notch we have apple's 1080p laptop
webcam which lets in twice the light and is twice the resolution of the pros
six-year-old 720p webcam which now looks a lot worse honestly it is now
unjustifiable to be releasing a brand new macbook with this webcam now the air
no longer has the speaker holes on the sides of the keyboard like the pro has
but apple has upgraded it to a four speaker system that they say is much
better the crazy thing is that the previous air already had better speakers
than the macbook pro don't believe me take a listen for yourself
yeah not only was it louder but it also had deeper bass as well and now it'll be
even better while the pro stays the same as far as microphones the pro is staying
the same as before while the air has been updated to now include beam
forwarding tech now last year the airs mic sounded more boomy but were quite a
bit louder go ahead and take a listen this is the microphone quality of the m1
macbook airs microphones and the m2 macbook air has upgraded microphones and
this is the quality of the m1 macbook pros microphones and they're staying the
same with the m2 macbook pro so once again i'm expecting the aeris mics to be
improved over the pro now one area the pro had an advantage was battery life
because the battery was bigger this year the air's battery got just over five
percent larger but apple has kept the ratings exactly the same so you'll still
get two extra hours of rated battery life increase for simple tasks now i
know some people make a big deal about this but in my experience once the
battery life is so amazing you don't really notice going from 18 hours of
video playback to 20. with that said the macbook air now has fast charging if you
get the 67 watt charger so we'll charge to 50 in 30 minutes instead of taking
over an hour to get there using the pro with the same exact charger that is
thanks to magsafe which you do not get with the pro so even the same charger
the pro just doesn't support that fast charging option now max safe is not only
super convenient because it magnetically attaches and disconnects to prevent
damage to your mac but it also frees up having to use one of those usb type-c
ports to charge so technically both do have the same two thunderbolt ports but
you'll always have access to them with the air now if you're somebody that
loves the touch bar the m2 macbook pro is the only mac left that still has it
most people are happier with more
physical keys than the redesigned touch id but if you know that you like it then
keep that in mind this is where we get into performance because as most of you
guys know the macbook air is completely fanless which really scares some people
with the m1 macbooks we thought that the pro was the one for anybody that cared
about performance because of our previous experience with intel macbooks
and we did find that the macbook air could definitely throttle the
performance for long-term tasks and benchmarks but when it came down to real
world use we never really had a problem i've owned an m1 air and pro since they
launched and i consistently choose to use the air even for 4k video editing in
high resolution raw photo editing and that's even with me having the base 7
core graphics m1 air compared to 8 cores in the pro sound crazy well i did some
extreme tests to see just how much slower the air was i converted 542
megapixel edited raw files to jpeg in the air was just a few minutes behind
and then i exported 8k red raw video which maxes out the cpu graphics to 100
the whole time and the difference was just a few minutes which isn't really
noticeable in the real world when it takes around 30 minutes anyway unless
you're sitting there side by side with a stopwatch which i was doing and once we
did our thermal mod on the macbook air it actually outperformed the pro in some
tasks because the heat gets spread right away where apple holds the pro back
because it waits to spin the fan up until it gets super hot and already
starts to throttle now of course the m2 chip is more powerful but it's not using
much more power than the m1 and for most tasks you don't max out the chips for
extended links especially with the super powerful media engines included with the
m2 chip now if you know that you will be rendering for a super long time and you
want the best performance the pro will definitely be better but the question is
by how much and will it taking 27 minutes instead of 30 will that be
enough for you to deal with all the old parts and the old design personally i
think that if you know that you will be pushing it crazy hard consistently and
you'll also be upgrading your ssd and your ram from that base 8 gig with 256
which isn't enough for hardcore users and you start pushing up those specs the
price gets really close to the price of the 14 inch macbook pro which you can
buy at a discount now which is a much nicer and more powerful macbook i think
that for 99 of the viewers watching this video and trying to decide on which one
of these two to buy i would really push you to get the m2 macbook air it is a
brand new machine whereas the pro will be the next macbook to be replaced and
other than having the new m2 chip it is a really outdated laptop and if you're
scared of throttling get the base m2 chip with eight graphics cores at that
base price it won't use any more wattage than the m1 it'll likely have a better
heat spreader than the old air design that wasn't designed for apple's ships
initially i think that most people will be very happy with it if you have any
more questions on configurations check out my m2 macbook air buyers guide right
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see you in the next video [Music]