Now that the M2 MacBook Pro has been released,
how does it stack up against the beloved M1 MacBook Air?
Is the M1 MacBook Air better value?
Which MacBook will suit your needs better?
Well in this video I'm going to attempt
to answer this question by comparing the two
in everything from coding,
Adobe workflows, video editing, general productivity,
3D workflows, gaming, thermals, and more.
Because let's be honest,
1300 U.S. Dollars is a lot of money.
So can you save a few bucks by going
with the cheaper M1 MacBook Air?
Well let's find out.
Okay, let's start with the most important factor first
and that is price difference and value proposition.
Now let's be honest.
Most people buying these laptops aren't
going to be doing anything more intensive
than web browsing and emails.
I'll touch on this later on but
both MacBooks do this very well.
So this video is going to focus
more on performance differences.
So if you want to do some coding,
light video editing or gaming, for example.
So traditionally the MacBook Pro has always been
300 U.S. Dollars more expensive
than the M1 MacBook Air and it's the same
with the new M2 MacBook Pro.
But don't forget that because the M1 MacBook Air
is now almost two years old,
there are a ton of really good deals you can find
especially on the used market.
Right now, you can buy a relatively lightly used
M1 MacBook Air for around 700 to $800.
There are also even deals or sales for new
and refurbished models from the official Apple Store
and big retailers like Best Buy.
Which means you can often find M1 Airs
for around 800 to $850 brand new.
So instead of the value difference between
the M1 MacBook Air and M2 MacBook Pro being just $300,
it's now between five to $600 instead.
So just keep that in the back of your mind
when we look at performance differences later on.
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Okay, let's take a second to chat about
the physical differences between these two MacBooks.
There really isn't much
obviously the Air is slightly thinner and lighter.
And some people enjoy the tapered chassis on the Air
that doesn't press on your wrists while typing
like the MacBook Pro sometimes can.
But you do get a couple of nice features
on the M2 MacBook Pro that aren't on the Air
like the touch bar,
slightly brighter screen,
slightly better battery life,
and better speakers, microphone, and headphone jack.
But the biggest difference is that the M2 MacBook Pro
has an internal fan while the Air is of course fanless.
Okay, let's start looking at the performance differences
between these two laptops.
Note in this video I'm comparing the base models.
So neither MacBook has any Ram or SSD upgrades for example.
Starting with a CPU,
both the M1 and M2 have a very similar eight core CPU.
It's just that the M2 CPU is ever so slightly improved
and is actively cooled by a fan which boosts performance.
For multi core performance,
there's only about a 25% difference between the two,
which is a really impressive result from the M1 Air.
Moving to single core,
both are almost exactly the same.
So you won't see much of a difference in applications
that rely on individual core speeds,
like Photoshop for example.
Now, if you are a coder or developer
for short code compiles,
the difference is minimal.
The M1 MacBook Air is about 10% slower.
But when you move to a larger project,
in this case compiling the Firefox code base,
the M2 MacBook Pro really starts to pull away
due to the more powerful cores
and active cooling from the fan.
But even then I don't think this difference
is too big especially when you consider
the price difference between the two.
Apple Silicon in general is just quite good
at anything coding and development related.
Moving on to music production,
you'll see a slight improvement on the M2 Pro
but you likely won't even notice it.
And what about Adobe apps?
Well starting with After Effects,
neither machine will run super well
because after effects typically wants
at least 16 gigabytes of RAM.
But looking at a 2D animation I sometimes use,
the M2 MacBook Pro is faster,
but only just.
With Premiere Pro however,
the M2 MacBook Pro is significantly better
than the Air when looking at real life workflows.
And if we break these scores down even further
you can see why
particularly with exporting
where the M2 MacBook Pro is almost 70% faster.
And effects which is almost twice as powerful
when compared to the Air.
Also just general timeline scrubbing and playback
will be around 30% better on the M2 Pro.
Now if you're wondering about Photoshop and Lightroom,
both of these apps perform about 20% better
on the M2 MacBook Pro compared to the M1 MacBook Air.
But again there,
I don't think you'll notice a massive difference
between the two because if you just editing
cashed photos on light room for example,
or you've only got a few layers on Photoshop,
you won't notice a difference between the two.
Moving on to video editing,
one of the biggest differences in the M2 Chip
is the addition of ProRes hardware support
and the ProRes encode and decode engines.
Now don't forget the M1 already has something similar
but only for H264 and HEVC.
So what this means is that if your workflow consists
of at least some ProRes footage,
you will see a significant benefit.
Also remember that the M2 MacBook Pro
has an additional three GPU cores
and doubling of the memory bandwidth
when compared to the M1 Air.
And it also has a fan.
So starting with a real life Multicam project
in DaVinci Resolve,
which to be quite honest is probably overkill
for either of these devices,
Here we have four streams of color corrected 4K footage
from assorted GoPro, Sony, and Blackmagic cameras.
The most important factor for video editing
is timeline performance.
So, let's look at that first.
The M2 is better in every way.
Real time scrubbing and playback is smoother
with less dropped frames.
But when it comes to rendering,
the difference is there but not quite by
as much as you'd expect.
The 3D and effect stuff
The M2 is far superior though.
Like when adding stabilization to a
2.5 minute 120 FPS 4K clip.
Now again if your workflow contains a lot of ProRes,
the M2 is the easy choice right?
Because of that new ProRes hardware support.
For example look at the difference when editing
and then exporting a ProRes only project on Final Cut Pro.
The M2 absolutely smokes the M1 Air.
So all in all,
I think the M2 MacBook Pro was clearly
the better performer when it comes to video editing.
Although I was still surprised to see just how well
the M1 MacBook Air held up in comparison.
And again,
remember the M1 MacBook Air typically costs
about five to 600 us dollars less.
So I think if you just do a little bit
of video editing every now and then
and you stick to mostly relatively simple 1080P
and maybe 4K timelines with not a lot of heavy effects,
I think the M1 Air is actually going to
be a really good choice for you.
Moving on to 3D workflows,
let's start with Blender.
I'm using the 3.2 version here
and when running the CPU benchmark
there doesn't seem to be much of a difference.
The GPU benchmark on the other hand tells a different story.
The M2 is noticeably more powerful
and over time this difference increases.
Again, due to the fan.
For shorter renders that only take a few minutes,
There's not a massive difference.
Although once you start getting into
more than about 10 minutes render time,
the M2 MacBook pro really starts to pull away
as you can see here.
And this is the same story with other 3D software
like Octane X or even Cinema 4D.
You'll see about a 20 to 40% improvement on the M2
depending on the software and length of render.
Now, for all the gamers out there,
this is going to be a really easy comparison.
The M2 smokes the M1 by anywhere from
40% to a massive 50%.
This is due to the GPU cores not only being clocked higher
but being increased from 7 cores to 10.
The reason for this huge difference
is unlike other workflows.
The GPU cores are under full load
the entire time while gaming.
And the addition of the fan
or active cooling on the M2 MacBook Pro
is going to start to really make a big difference over time.
Now while on the topic of gaming,
I'll also compare fan noise and thermals.
Obviously the Air does not have a fan
but the fan noise on the Pro really doesn't get that loud
and certainly isn't obnoxious like some other laptops.
The CPU and GPU cores reach similar temperatures
on the two when under load,
but the Pro can mitigate these temperatures much easier
by ramping up the fan when necessary.
The external temperatures are also different
with the chassis of the Air
getting noticeably hotter than the Pro.
If I flip them around and look at the base of the chassis
which is the part often on your lap,
again the Pro is much cooler
and might be more comfortable
for those that don't like warm laptops.
Although either MacBook only gets warm
when you're doing something intensive,
like gaming or rendering.
In fact when using the Pro,
the fans rarely even need to turn on.
Moving onto SSD speed,
the 256 gigabyte SSD on the M1 MacBook Air is actually
much faster than the M2 MacBook Pro by about 50%.
This is because the Pro only has one NAND chip
installed for some reason versus two on the Air.
Now if you want to learn more about this
and why this was done,
I made a whole video on it if you want to check that out,
and I'll also link it down below.
But in a nutshell,
transferring files or reading them
from your SSD will be slower.
And multitasking is also slightly affected
by the slower speeds.
Which brings me to my next section.
General productivity and battery life.
So does this slower SSD have any noticeable effect
when it comes to day to day usage?
Well kind of,
but only when you're doing it really heavy multitasking.
Again, that video I mentioned before
goes into this in more detail.
So even though the M2 MacBook Pro
is faster in everything else,
including its new DDR5 RAM compared
with slower DDR4 on the M1 MacBook Air.
When it comes to just switching between apps,
loading Google sheets on Safari,
or browsing websites for example,
they're both about the same
and I doubt you'll notice a difference.
And this also translates to battery life.
It is technically better on the M2 MacBook Pro
but the M2 chip also consumes more power
than the M1 when under load.
So they kind of cancel each other out.
And for simple usage like watching YouTube videos
or just doing emails,
you'll get a few more hours out of the Pro,
but nothing too crazy.
But in the grand scheme of things,
the battery life on both of these machines
are just so good to begin with.
I think once you start getting past
about 15 hours on a laptop battery,
you kind of stop caring about a few hours
difference here and there.
So yeah really interesting to compare these two,
I think in terms of just pure value,
it has to go to the M1 MacBook Air.
For its currently discounted price which is only going
to get lower and lower,
you get a pretty sweet bang for your buck.
And in a lot of areas it keeps up with the brand new
M2 MacBook Pro quite nicely
especially with anything CPU related.
And let's be honest,
most people will be using either of these machines
for relatively simple just day to day tasks
like emails, your web browsing, word documents,
all that kind of stuff.
So all of these performance differences and graphs
are probably useless to 90% of people buying these machines.
But again, once you start getting into GPU heavy stuff
like gaming or video editing,
that's where the M2 Pro really does start to pull ahead
and might be worth the extra cost for some people.
For me personally,
if I had to buy one of these machines
brand new from Apple right now,
I'd probably go for the M2 MacBook Pro
for the fan and also the increased performance.
But if I was looking on the second hand market
at say an eight or $700 M1 MacBook Air
versus the M2 MacBook Pro,
I would definitely go with the second hand M1 MacBook Air.
But apart from that guys,
thanks for watching this video.
Hope you enjoyed and I'll catch you in the next one.