13” vs 15” MacBook Air M3 - Which Should You Buy?

what's up guys my name is Brandon and this is the new 13-in M3 MacBook Air and this is the new 15-in M3 MacBook Air so in this video we're going to unbox both of them and actually a third over here as well in a different color we're going to compare the 13 and 15in sizes compare the M3 performance and just give my overall First Impressions on whether or not I think these are worth buying so let's start with the new midnight 13-in MacBook Air as you can see on the box we do have the midnight color which does show its shade of blue on the box which is very realistic now this is the base model which is an 8 gigs of RAM 256 GB of storage and it's the 13in so this is the cheapest M3 MacBook Air you can get and this will run $10.99 and then the 15in which also comes with 8 gigs of RAM and 256 GB of storage is going to run you $12.99 however as you can see I did get the upgraded version with 512 GB of storage and 6 16 GB of RAM and this one cost $16.99 so you're getting in MacBook Pro territory at that price range but I do want to compare it and see if 16 gigs is really better than 8 GB and I got this one in the silver color and then we also got Starlight as well which again we'll unbox here in a moment all right so let's start with the 13-in base model in the midnight color so we do have the typical green arrows the pull tabs right here on the box as usual one on each side on the top and the bottom so there we go let's flip it over and let's see that midnight color for the very first time so we do have the paper covering it up let's take a look at the accessories before diving in so we do have the color matching cable here so this is going to be similar to what we saw with the space black MacBook Pro and it's going to be the same uh cord here that you saw with the M2 15-in MacBook Air that came in this midnight color and then we also have our paperwork here which does come with some some color matching midnight stickers which I love to see the color coordination there and then also in the Box we do have the 30 wat USBC power adapter now the 15-in you'll see comes with the 35 wat dual USBC block but this one only has the one port tier however when you are specking out the 13-in MacBook Air you can pay an extra $20 to get the 35 wat dual USBC block or if you upgrade to 512 GB of storage it comes with that by default and also when you spec up the 13in to 512 GB of storage or 16 gigs of RAM for the extra $200 you do also get the additional two GPU cores that comes standard on the 15in model so you're going to have an 8 core CPU and 10 core GPU versus 8 core GPU on the base model and you can also choose the 70 W USBC power adapter for free on the 15in or if you've speced up the 13in at all all right so let's set all this off to the side and let's take a look at the midnight M3 MacBook Air 13in so here is our look at that love the packaging as always and here is what it looks like you can see I do already have some minor smudging on here so this is actually going to be less of a fingerprint magnet compared to the 15-in M2 MacBook Air which also came in the midnight color and that's because of a new anodization seal that aims to reduce fingerprints similar to what we saw with the space black M3 MacBook Pro from last year however this is going to show more fingerprints than the M3 MacBook Pro which was in space black because again this does have more of a blue tint to it instead of being just straight black and let's go ahead and open it up and see what we have here so you can see the matching keyboard layout looks awesome let's go and take off the screen and yeah I I just love the midnight color it actually goes really well on this compact 13in model as well this is will definitely be my preferred color and you can see we have our hello screen right there always satisfying all right so we're going to set the 13in off to the side and go ahead and unbox the 15-in model which again I did get in silver and this is the upgraded version so let's go ahead and unbox this very similar of course a much bigger box though than the 13in because we do have a much bigger unit and I did get this in silver which I feel like is just a classic color you can really never go wrong with a silver MacBook in my opinion so here we go we do have the paper over top as well we have our color coordinated cable right here inside of the pamphlet here we will also have our color matching stickers so here we go here are the silver Apple stickers that come with the silver color and then once again we do have a different block with the 15-in model this is going to be the 35 wat dual USBC block which I love these These are great to travel with because you can charge two devices at the same time and again this comes standard with an upgraded 13-in or the base model 15 in and man just picking up the 15in you're going to feel a big difference in weight I mean after going from the 13in to the 15 in it's a pretty big difference I mean it's only 2.7 lb versus 3.3 lb but it feels heavier like it feels at least 2 lbs heavier to me after just holding the 13inch but let's go ahe and unbox this and take a look at that classic silver color here we go with the classic Apple logo on top man these things are so thin I'm used to a MacBook Pro which has more you know thickness the these MacBook airs always impress me with how thin they are so here we go here is our silver and you can see a comparison of the keyboard right here between the midnight and the silver midnight is just my favorite color I think for the MacBook Air but again you cannot go wrong with silver and now we're going to set the silver off to the side as well because I did also get the Starlight 13-in MacBook Air so I've personally never had a Starlite Macbook so I was curious and I figured some of you guys might be curious as well as to how the Starlight looked compared to Silver so we're going to go ahead and unbox this this is the base model 13in as well and here we go you can see looks very similar to the silver at first glance and then in here we do have the color matching braided cable which does have a slight difference it is more of like a tan tone to it and let's take a look at those stickers as well because I'm sure yeah these definitely have more of a kind of goldish tan tone to them as well and we do have that same 30 W adapter in there and here is the staright so man even in this lighting it looks silver to me I guess when I turn it over it's going to look a little bit different yeah you can see it but you really have to be in the right lighting I mean this thing looks very similar to Silver so let's pull these up side by side here so I guess you could tell a difference when you put it next to Silver but if you were to see it without the silver comparison right here you would think it's silver but just with more of like a gold Hue to it like a gold tone which I guess is why it's called Starlight makes sense but when you open it up that's when you can really see the difference here so it's hard to tell the difference from the shell but when you take a look at the keyboard that's where you can really at least in person tell a difference between these two even if I didn't have the silver here you can tell this is not a silver color and you can see the three colors side by side by side here midnight silver and starlight now before we get into the setup process and running the benchmarks and all that fun stuff I do want to take a quick look at the design on both models more specifically the midnight color here on this 13-in model because as somebody who has a 15-in M2 MacBook Air I can tell you right now that this is not smudging near as much as that machine did I mean that you know the new anodization process that is on this M3 midnight color it is it definitely shows I mean I can tell you right now it does smudge up a little bit you're always going to see slight smudging especially if you put it in direct light but I could tell you right now it is much less of a fingerprint magnet than the M2 MacBook Air in the same color and compared to the space black MacBook Pro I would say it's about the same I mean you can see a little bit more of the smudging on the midnight like I mentioned earlier because it is more of a blue tone versus a straight black tone that you have with the space black but as far as the port selection goes on the leftand side we do have our dual Thunderbolt 3 ports so these are going to be USB 4 ports right here and then we do have our magsafe charger right there which is nice to have and then on the right hand side we have our 3.5 mm headphone jack if you still use wired headphones and then also both of these machines have Bluetooth 5.3 and Wi-Fi 6E support so if you do have a Wi-Fi 6E router or even if you just have a Wi-Fi 6 router in general you will see better performance because of the upgraded Wi-Fi internally to support Wi-Fi 6E and then we also have the same magic keyboard that we've had for a while now so there's no touch bar and there's no wedge design anymore so we don't have the kind of slanted you know wedge design that we had on the MacBook Air previously which personally I liked that I liked having you know kind of a you know place to rest your hands and you kind of had that angle but we do not have that anymore on the MacBook Air now you can see the difference between the 13inch and the 15inch in terms of the overall keyboard size so you're only getting a 2-in bigger display but you can see you buy yourself a lot more space on the keyboard as well so the trackpad itself is going to be much bigger than the 13 in you can see it's you know maybe not double the size but it's like 1.5x the size and I'm going to put my fingers here just for reference and then just looking around the keyboard you can see up top here there's a lot more space right here over on the sides both sides you have a lot more space and then down here next to the trackpad as well you have a lot more space which is nice when you're kind of resting your palm right there which I do a lot you're not going to be you know off the edge of the machine like you will on the 13 in so that's an advantage for the 15 in but again it is going to be much heavier 3.3 lb versus 2.7 lb and if you're looking for comparisons CU I know it's hard to translate weight on video the 13in is going to be the same weight as the previous generation MacBook Air and it's also slightly lighter than the M1 MacBook Air from 2020 now for the 15-in model here this is also going to be the same weight as the previous generation the M2 but it is going to be slightly lighter than the M3 MacBook Pro from last year and then taking a closer look at the displays we do have liquid retina displays on both so it's a 13.6 in on the 13in and a 15.3 in on the 15in both are going to have the same 500 nits of peak brightness they're both going to have the same P3 wide color damn it true tone and of course neither one of them are going to have the promotion display like you get on the MacBook Pro and then we have a lot more to talk about but I want to go ahead and set these up so we're going to set up the 13-in because it is in my favorite midnight color here so let's go ahead and get through the setup process so we're going to start from the very beginning so here is the hello screen that you will see right when you boot up your M3 MacBook Air and you do have to select your language at first we're going to select English and then from here we need to select our region so I am in the US we're going to select that we have all of our accessibility features here so Vision motor hearing and cognitive I do not use accessibility so we're going to do not now now we need to connect to our Wi-Fi network you get some information about the data and privacy that's going to show up in the status bar and now if you want to transfer anything over from a previous Mac or a Windows computer you can now do that at this step but I'm going to pass on this we're going to select not now and now you need to sign in with your Apple ID and now we're going to set up our computer account so you're going to put in your full name and your account name I like having just my first name name as the account name and then you can set up your password right here which I'll just set as password for now and then you can also choose to allow to have your Apple ID reset the password which I would recommend doing just in case and let's go ahead and continue and set up our account and now it's going to transfer over all of our iCloud data so our notes our Calendars our messages photos all that is being transferred over right now after you sign in and now you can choose to customize your settings if you would like to I usually like to stick to the default that it has set up here so I'm just going to click on continue but you can customize that if you would like to and then if you want to turn off the disc encryption this is where you can do it it is on by default but you can go ahead and deselect that if you do not want to encrypt you know your data for whatever reason you can do that there going to continue and now we need to set up Touch ID so we do have the touch ID button up in the top right hand corner we're just going to scan our index finger you can also scan whatever finger you feel comfortable with whatever finger you're going to use the most to unlock your device you can always set up more fingers and settings later so we're going to continue There we go our Touch ID set up and now you can add your cards if you want to I'm going to skip this for now and there we go we are now on our M3 MacBook Air so let's take a look at the version that we're running so we are on Soma 14.3 so we should have a day one update here so if you go into your system settings and go to General software updates you should have a new update on day one I'm not seeing it right now but it should probably populate in the meantime because somoma 14.4 is the latest release okay there it is so there you go it just popped up right there so if you do get an M3 MacBook Air just be prepared to update to the latest software on day one now let's pull over the 15-in model again because there are a couple of differences here that I want to talk about so first off you know we do have more space here on the trackpad of the 15-in and that's not just for space you also can fit two additional speakers inside as well so the 13-in is going to have a four speaker sound system whereas the 15in has a six speaker sound system with Force cancelling woer so you're going to get a lot more base out of the 15-in model when it comes to the speakers compared to the 13-in model and both are going to have the same spatial audio support which the M1 MacBook Air did not have so the sound is going to be terrific on these it was terrific on the M2 model as well now the mics are the same on both models so the 13-in and the 15-in are going to have the same microphones which is going to be a three mic array with directional beam forming however something new on the M3 model is going to be voice isolation and wide spectrum mode mod so if we go into here so we're going to go into Quick Time real quick on this model and if we go to record audio with quick time and we drop down on our microphone here up in the menu bar you can see that we now have voice isolation so that was not there on previous MacBook airs even the 15-in M2 MacBook Air did not have the voice isolation feature for the mic mode which is great if you want to record something on the go and if you're in you know like an airport or something where it's very loud this is going to come in handy now when it comes to the webcam you can see we do have a FaceTime HD camera which is now 1080p so I say now but the M1 MacBook Air still had a 720p camera so Apple did switch that with the M2 and now on the M3 we also have a 1080p camera and you can see what the quality looks like here I am going to record myself I'll back up a little bit so you can see this is what the quality and the audio sounds like and I'm a good bit back so I'm going to move closer here to the microphone so you can hear what it sounds like when recording from the front-facing camera camera here the only camera on the M3 MacBook Air and this is on the 13-in model so it's going to sit a little bit lower than what you would have on the 15in model so if you're taller and you want to always stay in frame you know you may want to get the 15inch for that reason now even though the 15in is going to be larger and it has you know the extra speakers we do not have any extra battery life so both are going to be rated for up to 15 hours of web browsing and 18 hours of Apple TV movie Playback which is still the same as the M1 MacBook Air so you're not going to get any gains in battery life whatsoever now one of the big selling points of the M3 MacBook Air is something that really should have been here all along but that is dual display support when in clamshell mode so if you have your MacBook Air closed if it's in clamshell mode you can now connect up to two external monitor so you can have a dual display setup with the MacBook Air that is something that even the MacBook Pro at the moment does not have but it will be getting in a future software updates however none of the MacBook airs are going to get that in a software update so if you do have a dual monitor setup you might want to consider the M3 over something like the M1 or M2 now when it comes to the performance which we are going to run some benchmarks here in a moment Apple claims that the M3 MacBook Air is up to 60% faster than the M1 MacBook Air from a few years ago and if you still have an intel-based MacBook Air Apple claims that the M3 is going to be up to 13 times faster so a major Improvement in performance if you're coming from a Intel MacBook Air so that alone is pretty compelling you know as a proposition to upgrade or not so I would strongly consider it just based off of performance and battery life alone but we'll talk about you know whether or not you should buy this after we run some of the benchmarks so let's get downloading all right so I just downloaded all of the benchmarking tools and I went ahead and ran a few tests and here are the results now keep in mind this is the base 13in and the upgraded 15in so this is going to be double the RAM and double the storage so I want to see how those two compare so you can see on the Center bench test we did score an 8415 on the multicore for CPU on the 13in and an 8989 on the upgraded 15-in model so a decent size difference but nothing honestly too crazy now I did also run a geekbench test here and you can see the geek bench scores so we scored a 3026 on the single core on the 13inch over here and an 11414 on the multicore now if we compare the 15in it actually scored lower on the single core so 2954 and an 1143 so lower on both ends now of course that could be an anomaly these benchmarks aren't everything but I found that pretty interesting now we do also have the dis speed test here now I've not run this yet so I am going to run this at the same time for both we have the same 5 GB of the stress level here and let's see how these two compare on the read and right speed so you can see the right speeds are significantly higher so 1,900 on the first pass versus 3100 and you can see how these are going about there now the read speeds are pretty similar I mean look at that that's 2800 versus 2600 megabytes a second so really not a big difference at all in read speeds you're going to notice the big changes in the right speeds it looks like if you are going to upgrade to the 16 gigs of RAM now that could be the storage it could be the ram it's hard to say at this point but you are going to get minor boosts it looks like when you upgrade the storage and the ram now is that worth the extra cost I don't know it depends on what you're actually going to be doing with the device which we'll talk about here in a moment now after running those Benchmark tests and the disc speed test here I've not really noticed any heat coming from either machine now these are fanless devices so you're not going to have a fan inside of either one of these I am feeling more heat from the 13-in model especially up here closer to the display I'm not really feeling it as much on the 15in at least not as warm but I'm actually kind of surprised at how well this is kind of dis ipating the heat without having a fan to do so all right so after playing around with these machines for a little bit and after running The Benchmark tests I think I can give my first impressions now so you know if you have an M1 series MacBook specifically a MacBook Air I would strongly consider upgrading to the M3 if you have a dual display setup if you need faster Wi-Fi speeds because again we do have Wi-Fi 6E here or if you just need a slight speed boost like you are going to get better performance on the M3 compared to the M1 now if you have an M2 machine specifically a MacBook Air I would say probably don't upgrade I mean I you probably know that by now but do not upgrade to the M3 if you have an M2 MacBook Air unless you need dual display setup if you have a dual display setup that would be the only reason I would say you should upgrade it to the M3 because you're not really going to see hardly any performance gain like in day-to-day usage you're not going to really see any type of performance gains with the M3 over the M2 maybe unless you're G gaming because you do now have Hardware accelerated rate tracing on the M3 compared to the M2 but overall you're not going to see much difference in day-to-day performance now if you have an Intel MacBook Air any type of Intel MacBook Air I think it is absolutely a great time to upgrade I mean you have up to 13 times faster performance you have better battery life you have you know better everything pretty much across the board so if you have an Intel machine I think it is definitely worth looking at the M3 MacBook Air even the base model I think is going to be just fine fine and even if you have an Intel MacBook Pro you're going to see nice gains from the MacBook Air and you're going to have that dual display capability you know without needing to go to the MacBook Pro so that is also worth considering if you maybe don't do super intensive you know video editing and gaming on a daily basis a MacBook Air might suffice in terms of what you actually need a lot of people buy more than what they actually need which I think you know is a reason that the MacBook Air sells so well because you get great performance for a great great price and if you're trying to decide between the 13-in and the 15-in MacBook Air M3 I would say it really just comes down to preference and what you're actually going to be using the machine for like if you're using graphic design software like Photoshop illustrator things like that you're going to probably want the 15in because you want that extra real estate but you are going to have the added weight so if you're somebody who travels a lot and you don't do any type of graphic design work the 13in is probably going to be perfect for you because it's going to be lighter in the hands lighter in your backpack and you may not benefit As Much from the bigger display I know for me personally I am going to stick with the 15in only because I use Final Cut Pro Photoshop things like that I need all that real estate but if I didn't use those I would absolutely go with the 13in just because it's so much more Compact and light and for the other small things like the speakers like the 15in is going to have better speakers just because it is a bigger body and it's also going to dissipate more of that heat it's not going to be as hot although neither one of them really get too hot in my experience but you know small things like that I don't really think they're going to be worth the extra money to go with the 15in just for better speakers but if that is something you're into that may be worth considering as well but these two share a lot of similarities like both can do the dual display setup both have the same battery life pretty much everything is the same except for once again the screen size and the weight are going to be the two big things that you need to decide between and I think it really just comes down to what you're actually going to be using the machine for now as far as the difference between 8 GB and 16 GB goes I am going to make a dedicated video talking about 8 gigs ver 16 gigs but honestly in my testing here and after having you know an 8 GB machine for a while my M2 MacBook Air is an 8 GB of RAM machine honestly I don't think it's worth it for most people to upgrade to 16 gigs of RAM I really don't see many use cases where you actually need and will use 16 gigs of RAM on a MacBook Air because the people I think about when I think about a MacBook Air the typical person I see buying this is somebody who does light creative work and just does a lot of web browsing and a lot of traveling for those type of people you don't need the power of you know 16 gigs of RAM you don't need the power of a MacBook Pro so 8 gigs is going to be enough I think for most people even considering a MacBook Air now on the other end of the spectrum 256 GB of storage in my opinion that might be more worthy of an upgrade to go up to 512 than upgrading the ram if you had to choose one because it is $200 you know each for to upgrade the RAM and also for the storage if you're going to spend an extra $200 I would probably recommend doing the storage now I know you can connect an external drive and you can get a lot of storage but still 256 is such a small amount that you're going to run out of space very quickly on your machine so in my opinion you know after using the M2 MacBook Air you know with the same 8 gigs of RAM 256 I would say that the upgraded Ram upgraded storage makes more sense than the upgraded RAM for the majority of people but again I will have a video coming talking more about the RAM and overall my experience after maybe a week of using these machines but anyways there you have it that is the M3 MacBook Air and both the 13-in and the 15-in variants I hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did I would appreciate if you give it a thumbs up also make sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on future MacBook Air videos but anyways guys thanks again for watching and I'll see you soon

Channel: Brandon Butch

Views: 167,672

Keywords: Brandon butch, iphone, ios, apple, iOS 17, iPhone 15, iPhone 16, iOS 18

Id: IgFV4QrgTiE

Length: 24min 18sec (1458 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 08 2024