Surface Laptop 4s vs M1 MacBook Air: You'll Be Shocked! By Max Tech

Oh, no, oh! No! No! No! What hey guys its max! We just got in the brand new surface laptop 4, and we not only are going to compare it against apple's, m1, MacBook Air, but also against the surface laptop 4 with the AMD processor. So I am super excited to see how apple's m1 compares to intel and AMD, and we're not only going to compare things like the keyboards trackpads speakers, webcams. We're also going to look at that CPU performance in real world tasks and how the thermals compare between intel and AMD. As always, we have links down in the video description and I have a link to this m1 MacBook Air that you can buy for 900 on sale right now, which is crazy, and I also want to mention that you guys can click that subscribe button down below. That would help us out because we're trying to reach 1 million subscribers before the end of the year and about 77 of you guys are not actually yet subscribed. So that would mean the world to us: let's go and jump in and these both weigh 2.8 pounds. So as far as weight, it's identical, but you can see that the surface laptop 4 is physically larger than the MacBook Air and the biggest reason.

Why is the display? And along with that, we have some major display differences that are quite shocking, which we'll talk about in just a bit, and surprisingly, the surface's body is actually thinner than the MacBook airs, but once you add in the lid, it is just slightly thicker overall now, as far as ports, our MacBook Air has two thunderbolt 4 ports, so they're super quick, whereas the surface laptop 4 has one USB type-c port and an USB type, a port plus a headphone jack on the left-hand side. And then, if we flip over to the other side, the MacBook has its headphone jack and the surface has the Microsoft Surface connector, which you can use to charge and connect docs. Now I have to say we are transferring files to the surface and unfortunately, this USB port on here it's not thunderbolt 4. It is not thunderbolt 3, it's not even 10 gigabits per second USB type c, so our transfer was going at a super. Slow 350 megabyte per second compared to my other AMD laptop, which actually transferred at about 730, so double the speed and then, of course, with thunderbolt 4 on the mac.

It goes at over 2000 with that same exact drive, so that definitely is a disappointment. Now. The only reason why I think they could be doing this is to sell their very expensive surface connector docks, because you need to use their own without thunderbolt on this machine in order to get good speeds. So that is a major disappointment now with their charger, it actually comes with a faster 65 watt charger, and they do give you one more USB port. Both these have nice one-handed hinges, and I love that we have windows, hello on this laptop it logs you in automatically, whereas the MacBook you do have to use touch ID to log in or of course, if you have an Apple Watch, you can do that as well.

Now our intel surface does have this Alc?ntara material. That's soft touch! It is not cold to the hand, so it does feel nice feels more cozy. If you want to say that, but it can capture grease, but if you want to spend a little more get a higher end version of the surface, you actually do end up getting full aluminum, which does feel more premium as far as keyboards. The surface laptops does feel really nice, it's click, it's responsive, but it is not as good as the magic keyboard on the MacBook Air just feels a little more tactile, I would say, and as far as trackpads, the MacBook Air definitely has the better trackpad. You can't really compete with this force.

Touch or 3d touch trackpads with that said, even though the surface does have a diving board, design trackpad, it feels surprisingly even all around, and it is also very responsive with Microsoft's trackpad drivers, and now it's time to compare the speakers. Our MacBook Air has these speaker grilles. So the speakers are up firing, whereas the surface- you don't see speaker, grilles anywhere, so I'm sure they're, probably flying from maybe behind the keyboard or somewhere over there. So I'm curious to see if Microsoft has made an improvement with this new laptop. So let's go ahead and compare these, and I will say this is going to be the last time that we are using this song.

I know a lot of you guys are tired of it. So go ahead and enjoy hearing this song for the very last time put on a pair of headphones and let's go ahead and take a listen, bring me back all right guys. Let me know your thoughts down in the comment section below which one sounded better and in what way I'll give you guys my opinion, I don't think the surface laptop 4 had a speaker upgrade from the laptop 3. With that said it still sounds good. It is really loud for a windows' laptop.

It has good bass, good mid. The highs could be a little sharper, but overall, I think anybody's going to complain with that said. The MacBook Air sounds better in every way. The vocal clarity is definitely better. It is definitely louder.

The bass is also a little more rich, so the MacBook Air is definitely the winner, and now it's compared the webcam and microphone quality. This is the quality you can expect from the MacBook Air's 720p webcam and the built-in microphones, and this is the quality of Microsoft's 720p webcam. Looking at it right now, it actually looks a lot better to me, but you guys, let me know which one looks better side by side down in the comment section below, along with which one sounded better. As far as the microphones and now, let's compare the displays where we have a lot of differences. The first one you'll notice, is that the surface laptop 4 uses a more square display.

It's a 3x2 aspect ratio which I really like on a small 13-inch laptop gives you a lot more usable. Space 16 by 10 is also not bad. Now, as far as detail or sharpness, the MacBook Air has about a 4.1 million pixel display nice and sharp, and then here we actually have 3.3 sounds worse, but in reality this display is much better than a lot of 1080p displays its nice and sharp. So as far as detail, there are no issues. Now this display is also a touch screen which of course, Apple does not put touch.

Screens on their macs now as far as brightness, the surface is actually brighter than the MacBook Air. It is now 500 nits, so it's brighter than before, which is great and the MacBook Air is running at about 400 nits of brightness, but unfortunately, Microsoft did not improve the reflectivity, so it's almost like a mirror, if you're in a dark room, and you're watching dark content or if you're, in a bright room with stuff in the background or even outside, and along with that, we also have a huge difference, in contrast, whereas the MacBook Air's display is a lot more contrast with more accurate colors and finally, let's get into performance. I have all three laptops here: we have the AMD surface laptop four. Of course, we have the m1 MacBook Air and then the intel surface laptop four. This one right here is the mid-spec i5 model um 11 gen, but it is actually very close to performance to the i7.

We checked online uh and then this is actually the best AMD version of the surface laptop for you can get. I purchased it on the business website because they don't let you get the best CPU on the mainstream one for some reason. So let's go ahead and get started. I'm starting off with the speedometer 2.0 test to see how quick and responsive the web browsing is, and both surface laptops are actually plugged in. We will be doing one test unplugged to see if they maintain their performance, all right guys.

We are done, and this is interesting. I honestly wasn't expecting this. The AMD actually got worst. They got last place 139 compared to 158 and 225. So of course the MacBook Air smoked, the others.

It is super quick and responsive. It was actually 42 faster than the intel laptop and then 62 faster than the AMD, and then the intel was actually about a 14 or so faster or 16 than the AMD, and that's because it does have a faster single core performance compared to having eight actual cores in this AMD laptop and now, let's see how these CPUs perform in a variety of different tests, so we're using geek bench five here and once again the two surface laptops are plugged in. Furthermore, it's interesting, the AMD is actually loud. You guys can probably hear that where these were silent, and they actually got done first, which is really weird all right. We have our scores, and now I know why the fans were spinning up.

We have a score of 7096 multi-core, that is by far the fastest I've ever seen in a windows Ultrabook. That is incredible, and it smokes the 5018 that our intel model got with the 11th gen, which is actually quite good of a score for a laptop this size, but neither of those compared to the 7641 of our MacBook Air, which did it completely silently. So we only have a difference about 7.6 percent between the AMD and the m1, but the AMD is about 36 percent faster than the intel. Now that does not tell the whole story. First off, they are both plugged in the two surface, laptop fours, we're going to test that in a sec, unplugging them.

But if we look at the single core, the AMD gets absolutely smoked by the other two we have 172 compared to 1327 and then a massive 1743 for the m1. This is probably why web browsing is so much faster and snappier with the m1. It is 31 faster than the intel system as far as single core and 49 faster than the AMD, which is absolutely crazy, and now let's go ahead, and we are going to unplug the 65 watt power adapters, and I'm going to go run this one more time, all right. So we are running, and I want to show you guys that I do have the best performance selected on these machines and with that now that it's on battery power uh this AMD surface laptop 4, is staying completely silent, which might not be good news. Alright, we have our scores and yep.

I was right. That is not good news. We got a score of 5 700. Instead of 7096, almost 70 100, we definitely are getting a fairly decent drop in performance on the AMD system. Now, as far as the intel it did drop but less than 100 points, so not bad at all and then, as far as single core actually got a little higher here on battery power.

But once again, on the AMD system, we have 953- that is the slowest I've seen in years, and that is a drop of about 23 percent uh kind of on both right there, 23 25, that's pretty terrible and, of course the m1 was unplugged the whole time, and it just absolutely smokes these machines when it's unplugged, no issues whatsoever, and now I'm running the graphics test, because I want to see how good are these AMD, integrated, graphics and both of the surface laptop fours are plugged in, so we're not going to be trying to hamper their performance, we'll keep them plugged in for this all right, we have our results, and this is actually good news. The AMD got 15 07, which is perfect compared to 15 032, pretty much the same score, and this does have the best g7 graphics, intel Xe, which they actually just got this good of performance very recently before it was much worse, but of course the m1 MacBook Air got 19 065. It beat out these other two and keep in mind. This is the seven core model and of course it is also unplugged. If you spend about 50 bucks more, you can get the 8 core model which gets 21 up to 22 000.

You know what guys I wanted to test out unplugged performance. I said I wasn't going to do it. I want to see, as far as graphics can AMD, keep up this level of graphics performance. That was quite impressive. All right! Oh! No! Oh! No! No! No! What oh! No okay! Are you kidding um uh, it's on best performance, okay, no AMD! No, that's horrible! We well! You guys can see.

It got eight thousand four hundred forty-eight, it's not half the performance, but it's close dude. It's a joke and the surface just got done. Fourteen thousand seven hundred, so the intel system barely lost performance it lost about. I don't know what is that three hundred three to four hundred compared to this, it went from fifteen thousand to eight thousand four hundred wow. All right guys now we're to push the machines to their limits, we're going to test thermals.

So I want to get a baseline reading. I have my thermal camera here and, let's take a look at the AMD system. It's idling at 31 degrees Celsius, and I'm going to go to the intel, 30 degrees Celsius, so it actually is running slightly cooler and then our m1 mac. Look at that color difference so m on Mac is at 27 degrees at the hottest point, and that's, actually. What is that the display portion interesting yeah? It's actually the display portion right.

There definitely cooler, but we're going to take a look once we actually start running these and let's go ahead and get started with our 10 minute. Multi-Core stress test. It's going to push all these systems to their limits, and unfortunately I opened up my hardware monitor here, and it is not telling me the wattage or even the frequency of the CPU. Here we can see that it jumped up to 80 degrees Celsius, pretty quickly there and then on the intel system. It's running at 83, 84 degrees Celsius and all the way up to looks like 39, almost 40 watts.

That is actually really high wattage for a machine like this, which is maybe why it gets such good performance. All right so looks like we're actually getting 3.1 gigahertz across eight cores compared to about 3.3 3.4 for the intel's four cores. I don't know if you guys can hear that the AMD's fans kicked up. It's definitely loud, whereas the MacBook Air is completely solid, no fan in the intel system, even at now, 30 watts. It is very, very quiet all right.

The intel system is actually speeding up. Now I can hear the fan, and it's different. It's a lot higher pitch than the AMD version, even though it's the same laptop and our m1 MacBook Air is running at 83 degrees Celsius, so right around the same compared to the other two. So it's been eight minutes so far, and it's interesting that the intel laptop is actually louder now than the AMD. This got quieter.

That means it's cutting down the wattage to keep itself running cool, and I really wish I could see the wattage, but let's grab our thermal camera looks like the AMD is running at 42 Celsius and the intel is running at 44, even hotter wow, and then our m1 is at 39 to 40. They're right there at the edge. Of course, it's finless all right. We are done, and this is a nice reversal. We have 8 33 for the AMD system compared to 7687 compared to the m1 MacBook Pro.

That means that if you're pushing CPU all the way, it actually gets seven to eight percent higher performance than the m1 mac, which is exactly the same, but opposite compared to geek bench five, where the mac was seven, eight percent faster, and that is with AMD, definitely slowing down somewhere in the middle of that test to keep itself from running too hot. So that's excellent performance when it's plugged in and of course, the intel is in last place, 5038 points, meaning the AMD version of the surface laptop 4 with this best CPU is 65 faster than the intel. As long as you can keep it plugged in and now, let's see how those performance numbers actually act out in real world programs, I have Adobe Lightroom classic opened here with some 42 megapixel raw images with a bunch of effects, and we know from the past that, even though this program is not written for Apple Silicon, it's running under Rosetta, the performance is actually the same. The smoothness when we're switching photos brushes all that stuff. So now I'm wondering how does this AMD CPU hold up? So first, I'm going to do is just switch through about the same so sometimes m1, slightly faster, like that.

There you go so either about the same or maybe the m1 being slightly faster, but it's pretty close, and now I'm going to go ahead and select all of these images here, all 50 of them, and we are going to do an export test. Now, as we wait, I do want to mention that both these systems, the intel surface, laptop 4 and the MacBook Air- have 8 gigabytes of ram compared to 16 gigs on this high-end AMD version, which they make you get 16 gigabytes. Um now the previous tests, we did didn't really matter that much as far as the amount of ram because uh as long as you don't have stuff open in the background, it's enough for it, but Lightroom is heavily dependent on ram performance. So we're going to see how this unified ram can compete with 16 gig wow. This is interesting.

The intel is actually going faster than the AMD. Even though has weaker performance less ram, and it's actually louder as well, but it looks like the m1 is still sped up there, and it's gonna finish first and bam the intel actually beat out the AMD and, yes, the AMD is still plugged in this is insane, and there is the last one so looks like our MacBook took two minutes and 33 seconds. The intel took two minutes and 55 seconds, and the AMD took three minutes and 16 seconds, which is crazy because, as you guys saw, it has the best CPU performance, but in this real world photo editing test, it is actually the slowest that is insane, but now, let's see what we get with video editing, I have the latest version of da Vinci resolve studio, opened up right here with some 4k footage with some cuts and effects. Let's test out our playback performance, I'm going to hit the space bar on all of these, and let's mute this guy right here, and it looks like on the m1. It's playing back perfectly, look how choppy that was on the AMD and also on the intel.

Both look like they are having a good amount of stuttering, even though we have good graphics, performance, good, CPU, performance, interesting, okay, I'm going to do one more test here before we export. I'm going to go to my color tab. Here it's going to give us some more info, and now we could see that it's playing back at about 20 21 frames per second 19 there right around there, instead of 24 and with the intel 1817. So yes, the intel is actually a little slower, but neither one of these can play this back perfectly, which is astounding, whereas our m1 no issues not even a single stutter and keep in mind these two windows laptops are plugged in, so you know, there's no performance issues. The AMD would slow down quite a bit if it was unplugged and now, let's export this five minute, 4k project we're comparing intel's quick sync compared to the m1 chips: hardware, encoders and AMD's dedicated encoders over here.

So it's really cool that it is using that special encoder, let's go, and we'll see what we get and the MacBook Air is speeding. Through this we have just a few seconds remaining here. All right. It looks like it took two minutes and 58 seconds to get done. We still have four minutes and five seconds remaining here and four minutes and 30 seconds remaining with the intel.

It took seven minutes and 27 seconds compared to seven minutes and 12 seconds, and the m1 MacBook Air took two minutes and 58 seconds more than twice as fast. It could have lapped these two, all while being completely silent. I'm sure you guys can hear these fans here they're both coming along, and it is just silent, no issues, and it just is insanely fast. That is absolutely incredible, and the other thing that is incredible is that, even though this AMD system is so much faster with the multi-core performance, and it is plugged in, it would be much slower if we unplugged it. The intel is just barely behind, and it's also quite a bit cheaper as well, which is just kind of crazy and mind-blowing.

So, with all of that said, what did we learn? Well first off, even though we have eight cores here with the AMD system and the fans kick up sooner, and it runs louder and hotter real world performance isn't that much better. In fact, in Lightroom it was actually slower and for video editing it was just slightly faster and then, if you unplug it, it is just much slower, especially with the graphics, so the intel system being cheaper. I would actually suggest in this case, going with the intel system and, along with that, the m1 MacBook Air is an absolute boss. It is by far cheaper than the other two, even if you're matching up the same amount of ram and SSD, and you can actually pick one up right now for 900 899 bucks I'll have a link and down in the video description, and it is silent, and it just smokes these other two, especially in the real world performance. It is absolutely incredible, so there you guys go.

Let me know your thoughts down in the comment section below go ahead and click that subscribe button above to help us reach our goal of 1 million subscribers before the end of the year. We would greatly appreciate it and check out one of those other videos over there. That's been max, and I'll see you in the next video.

Source : Max Tech