M1 MacBook Air vs M1 MacBook Pro - Full Comparison! By Max Tech

This video is sponsored by Squarespace the best way to make an amazing website. Hey guys. This is Vadim with max tech and right here in front of me, I have apple's base m1, MacBook Air and apple's bass and one MacBook Pro so a thousand dollars versus 1300 dollars and in this video we're going to find out if it's worth spending the extra three hundred dollars on the MacBook Pro, because there's not that much different as we're going to find out, and this one has the fan which the MacBook Air is completely finless. Not only are we going to be testing the performance, seeing if the MacBook Air thermal throttles and gets hot overheats using our thermal camera, but we're also going to test the differences that the spec sheet doesn't show you, like the differences in speaker, quality, the microphones, the displays and things like that, let's first get started with the physical differences. First off the weight is actually very similar between these two. You got 2.8 pounds on the MacBook Air and three pounds on the MacBook Pro. So, there's not really that big of a difference there in terms of the thickness at the thinnest points of the MacBook Air.

It is thinner, but it's actually thicker on the thickest point, which is actually pretty interesting. So if you think the MacBook Air is more portable, it's actually not they're, pretty much the same as far as the ports they're identical on both of these. They both have two USB 4 ports, which also support thunderbolt 3 as well. Now. One thing that's interesting is that the MacBook Air always used to have better battery life than the pro it used to have two extra hours.

But now the pro gets up to three hours more battery life than the MacBook Air, which is amazing, and the reason for that is because they both share the same n1 chip. But the pro has a physically larger battery, and on top of that, the MacBook Air only comes with a 30 watt, USB charger and the pro comes with a 61 watt. So it is gonna, be charging faster as well now before we get into the display, because there is a difference there we're going to talk about the keyboards and the trackpad. The keyboards are basically identical. They both use the same magic keys, but you do get a little more of a comfortable typing feel on the air, because the air actually kind of slopes downwards here.

So it's a little more comfortable, whereas with the pro it doesn't it's completely flat, so sometimes it can dig into your palm. But in my experience it's still not that bad. The main difference between This is that the pro gets the touch bar and the MacBook Air. Doesn't some people actually prefer the ear? Because of that reason now getting into the trackpads, they both use the same technology force touch like this is the best trackpad ever, but the size is a little different. Let me show you guys, as you guys can see, the pro gets a slightly larger trackpad, and I like that, I'm all about the larger trackpads, especially on the larger 16 inches as well.

Now, in the past, we did have a difference in the speakers between the air and the pro. So, let's just test it one more time and you guys, let me know the differences that you hear down below in the comments now I don't know about you, but it seems like the air actually has louder speakers, or at least the highs are quite a bit louder compared to the pro, but I did notice a little more bass, but in my opinion I would rather go for the louder air, because, when you're trying to watch a movie or something with vocals, it's better to have more volume- and it still sounds perfect in terms of the webcam quality apple- didn't really change them, they're, both the same 720p webcams on both of these as they were before, but Apple did add the new image signal processor, which does make the image look better. Now here we are on the MacBook Pro and Apple did say that they added studio quality microphones on the pro this year. So hopefully the microphone should be sounding better and different compared to the air. You guys.

Let me know down below moving on to display quality apple actually upgraded the display on the MacBook Air. They added p3 wide color gamut support. Just like we had on the MacBook Pro. As you guys can see right here, you should be seeing the WebKit logo on both of them, which wasn't like that in the past. This is going to be really nice for people trying to do photo, editing or color grading.

Now the only other difference is in display. Brightness, the MacBook Air is limited to 400 nits, compared to 500 on the MacBook Pro, as you guys can see in that top camera. But overall, in terms of the displays in the past, people had to go for the MacBook Pro if they wanted to do things like photo editing, but now you don't have to now you can get the MacBook Air if you want to with that, let's go ahead and get into performance. As you can see, we have geek bench 5 open right here, but first I want to give a huge shout out to Squarespace for sponsoring this video. If you've been thinking about making your own website.

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So here we are in geek bench 5 and, as you guys can see, we've got the MacBook Air with eight gigs of memory and the MacBook Pro also with eight gigs. I am seeing a difference here on the m1 on the pro it's clocked slightly higher 3.2 instead of 3.19, but let's go ahead and run this benchmark all right. We have our scores, and this is kind of funny, they're, basically the same within a margin of error, even though it has no fan the MacBook Air is getting basically the same performance in geek bench 5. Of course, that's not a stress test we're about to do that in just a moment, but before we run cine bench, r23 and bust out the thermal camera. I do want to test the graphics, so let's run the metal test now, while this is running, I do want to comment that the base air does come with only a 7 core GPU instead of the full 8 core GPU on the MacBook Pro now.

What's astounding is that Amazon is actually discounting the MacBook Pro right now, so I'm going to leave a link down in the description below. So we have our scores right here, as you can see we're getting about 18 800 on the MacBook Air, with a 7 core and 22 000 on the MacBook Pro, which is actually really impressive, because that's reaching close to the 16-inch base. MacBook Pro score now, what's surprising about that score, is that the pro has 14 more cores eight instead of seven, but it's giving us 17 more performance, which is great now, of course, geek bench tests, a variety of different things, so let's run GFX bench metal and test the gaming performance. We've got our scores back, and this is actually very interesting because we're getting 69.8 fps on the air and 77.5 on the pro, that's actually only 11 faster. So it's not even that big of a difference in gaming.

Now, if you guys are interested in seeing how the real world gaming performance is, we actually tested that out in our intel, MacBook Air versus m1 MacBook Air video. We got some really crazy results, and we also played some iOS games as well with controller support. Now we are going to be doing a full gaming review and that is going to be with this MacBook Pro. So definitely click subscribe. If you want to see that now, let's go ahead and answer the biggest question that is on all of our minds.

Does the MacBook Air thermal throttle, and how much does a throttle? Compare to the MacBook Pro, which has the fan before we begin. I do want to get an initial thermal reading of both of these on the MacBook Air side. It's looking like we're sitting at 28 degrees Celsius compared to 26 degrees Celsius. The MacBook Pro is staying cooler at idle. Before I hit start, I have to mention that both of these are running extremely cool, especially compared to the intel models which you guys saw in those videos that we did over the past couple of days.

But let's go ahead and get started with the multi-core test. It's been about six minutes and the MacBook Pro is definitely faster than the air. Now, what's really impressive is that I still can't hear the fan at all. It's completely silent, just like the air, but it is performing better. So far the test is almost finished, and I want to get another thermal reading looks like we're sitting at around 39 40 degrees Celsius on the air.

Moving over to the pro we've got, 37 degrees Celsius. Interesting, oh, I think it just hit 36 as well yep. It did just hit 36. , it's hovering between 36 and 7. That's interesting, so we are getting a difference between these two of around two to three degrees Celsius.

It's just about finished, and only now after 10 minutes of full 100 CPU load. I can now hear it slightly. If I put my head down near the MacBook Pro, I can hear that fan and what's funny, is that the pro just finished, and the fan already turned off it's silent right now, and we're still waiting on the air to finish up. So what this basically means is that unless you're pushing the processor, the MacBook Pro to its limits for almost 10 minutes, it's basically finless, because the fan doesn't even turn on. You can't even hear it.

Alright, we've got our scores and this is actually pretty impressive because we're getting around 6 700 points on the MacBook Air and 7 700 points on the MacBook Pro. That's a difference of 14 faster for the pro now in the past. There would be a much larger difference when you're spending three hundred dollars to get the pro. This is actually very impressive because the air has no fan at all, and you're only getting 14 more performance for 300, and that is basically the biggest difference you're going to see in extreme cases, because in our previous comparison with the MacBook Air, we noticed that our first score was around 7 400. But after about 8 minutes, the thermal throttling was accounted for, and it was able to keep itself cool while at 100 CPU load.

So that's basically it 14 more on the pro now. On top of that, in the past, the MacBook airs would have slower SSDs compared to the pros, but as we're seeing here, they're basically the same around 2200 write, speed and around 2700 read speed. So no difference there. If you choose the air moving on, let's go ahead and test out photo editing. We have Lightroom classic open right here, and it's actually not updated for Apple Silicon.

It's still running using Rosetta 2 emulation. Now what I have open here are 42 megapixel photos. These are actually pretty tough raw photos. It's tough to edit on some computers, but let's see how it performs between the air and the pro let's zoom in and out. This actually does stutter on some computers and, as far as I can tell perfectly smooth on both of them now the next thing is switching between photos.

So, let's right now, there is a little of lag switching between photos, but these are massive files with a lot of editing done to them in between the two machines. I'm really not seeing much of a difference, so the MacBook Air man it's performing well now, let's go ahead and export 50 of these tough raw photos into JPEG. I have a timer right here, so export start. This export test is going to max out the CPU, and it's going to use the graphics as well. So this is going to be interesting, so it's been around two minutes and 20 seconds, and now I can actually hear the fan on the MacBook Pro.

That's interesting, because cine bench didn't do that, all right, both of them just finished, and it's interesting that the MacBook Pro's fan turned off as soon as it was done. Here is the difference in the scores the MacBook Pro finished, the export in two minutes in 58 seconds and the MacBook Air finished in three minutes and eight seconds. So it's only a 10-second difference, which is actually really impressive for the air. That's killer performance without a fan now, just to put those scores into perspective, our 2020 27 inch iMac, the 8 core model for 2 300, with eight gigs of ram, took three minutes and 55 seconds much longer than both of these mac books running under Rosetta. It's not even optimized for Apple Silicon.

Now, one thing we notice about Lightroom classic is that it's heavily dependent on ram like on that iMac when we added more ram the performance drastically improved. So it's interesting to see if we're going to get better performance on these m1 mac books with the 16 gig version. That's actually going to be the next video that we're going to be working on, because I know a lot of you guys are asking for that and trust me. We're going to be working on that video next, so definitely subscribe down below and enable the notifications. So you guys don't miss out on that.

Moving on a lot of you guys were asking about logic, pro performance right here we have the new logic benchmark, as you guys can find by just searching it up on Google and in our previous comparisons between the intel mac books and these new m1 mac books. We found out that around 95 tracks is the limit. So let's run this test and see if the MacBook Pro can handle more than the MacBook Air. All right we've got 95 tracks. Let's run it sounds a little weird: oh okay, they both overloaded.

Let me disable just one of those tracks and try 94. , oh okay. They both overloaded at 94. , maybe 93. All right.

This is interesting. The MacBook Air just overloaded, but the pro is still going. Let's see if it's going to make it to the very end and pass the test, it did not pass the test. It did last a little longer, but it failed. Let's go ahead and just test out 90 tracks and see if they handle it.

The MacBook Pro is almost done with 90 tracks. The air actually failed 90. So I'm trying 89 right now: let's see there, you go the MacBook Pro just passed: 90 tracks and the air just failed on 89. , that's interesting, because before we were able to get around 93 to 95, so maybe there's a difference on if there's some kind of background task running which we close everything. But maybe there is something like that, so the performance between these two for logic is almost identical.

We're running an insane amount of tracks compared to the old intel models which only ran about eight tracks, so going from eight to above 85 tracks is incredible and so far from what we're seeing from all these tests, you're really not sacrificing much by going with the MacBook Air, because it's performing so well and so far the fan hasn't really been that big of an advantage for the pro. Now before I give you my final verdict: let's do one more test: video editing in Final Cut Pro. This is gonna, be pushing the CPU and the graphics to its limit, so we might actually see a difference there. Let's go ahead and open it up. This right here is a five-minute test.

It's standard, 4k h.264 footage which most people most YouTubers are going to be filming in and editing, and there are a couple of effects like added film grain and color corrections and some cuts so far from what I'm seeing their, both playing this back perfectly smooth now, what's really impressive about this, is that neither of those intel mac books could do this. They would both get really hot, and they would start stuttering, and you would not get perfect playback like we're seeing right here now, let's go ahead and export this 5-minute 4k project and see if the pro finishes faster. Alright, it's almost done, and they're basically neck and neck 96 97. Let's see it's just about to finish, and there you go, they both hit a hundred percent. At the same time, this is kind of crazy because the MacBook Air is performing so, so well.

So both of these finish, this export in around three minutes and 5 seconds, which is mind-blowing because the 16-inch MacBook Pro took over 3 minutes and 20 seconds and what's even more interesting, is that we thought that the MacBook Air would be throttling in video editing but based on this test, it's not now. If you're interested in seeing more video editing results, definitely check out max's channel max Yuri. I have a link down in the description below because he tested out da Vinci, resolve Final Cut Pro and premiere pro and there's some fascinating results there. So there you guys go. That was all the testing and overall, I am just shocked, blown away by the MacBook Air because it is performing basically neck and neck with the MacBook Pro which we did not expect.

So, basically, if you're thinking about getting the MacBook Air, maybe for the gold color or the different design or the lower price, a thousand dollars instead of 1300, then I'd say, go for it. So if you want to buy one of these awesome new m1 mac books, we have links down in the description below and if you're interested in seeing if there's a difference between 8 gigs and 16 gigs of ram we're going to be making that video so definitely click the circle about to subscribe and check out our other videos over there, comparing these to the intel versions. Thank you guys for watching, and we'll see you in the next video.

Source : Max Tech