14" MacBook Pro vs 13" MacBook Pro vs MacBook Air! - Don't Be FOOLED!

hey what's going on everyone greg here and as i'm sure you know if you've been watching a lot of these recent m1 pro and m1 max macbook pro videos you probably know by now that these are really outstanding laptops they got a great display amazing performance pretty good battery life but you know they are expensive they start at 2 000 for the base model and if we're looking at the rest of apple's lineup there's actually two other laptops that they have that are a similar size to this new 14-inch m1 pro macbook pro that i kind of want to revisit and take a look at with the m1 macbook air and of course the m1 macbook pro and i kind of wanted to compare all three of these laptops and kind of find which one is right for you and which one i ultimately think that you should go with now uh to do this comparison we're not gonna include the 16-inch macbook pro i kind of feel like that's in another league it's in another size class really doesn't make sense and also i'm just taking a look at the base model two thousand dollar uh m1 pro macbook pro that's the one with the eight core bend processor i feel like that's so much closer uh to the m1 macbook pro and the m1 macbook air that if we really start to spec out the m1 pro or you know the m1 max macbook pro the 14 inch model uh it would just start to be a really unfair comparison you're probably not trying to decide between a maxed out spec 14-inch macbook pro uh and a base model macbook air like that's probably not happening if anything you might step up to the base model 14-inch macbook pro and i think that's the more realistic scenario but don't worry if you want to go ahead and check out some of the other videos i did on other versions of the macbook pro got a lot on the channel right now and i plan to do some more so if you're not subscribed already get subscribed if you're a returning viewer you like this video make sure you give it a like as well uh but let's go over all of these macbook pros um now one of the differences right off the bat as soon as i started opening up the lids of all these laptops uh the the first thing that really strikes you is the design the 14-inch macbook pro is such a fresh new take on the design language of the macbook pro that it really instantly starts to date the look of what we got on the existing designs of the m1 pro macbook pro which has been around since 2016 that design and then the m1 macbook air which is a very similar design to that so just looking at like the screen uh the bezels on the 14 inch macbook pro are much smaller it's one of the reasons why it can fit in that 14.2 inch display so both the pro and the air have the same size display too it's a 13.3 inch display and the new 14 inch is actually a 14.2 inch display now going from 13.3 to 14.2 might not sound like a huge jump up in display size it's not even a full inch but i gotta say when working on all of these laptops um the 13-inch versions of the macbook pro kind of just feel cramped to me now whereas the 14-inch i just feel like i just get that little extra bit of breathing room and screen real estate and to me it does make a pretty big difference so for productivity and other tasks like that i appreciate the bigger screen size on the 14-inch model i'm going to talk about display quality a little bit later in the video but another thing that really jumps out at you when you put all these laptops on a table is just the port selection so again both the pro and the air have the same two thunderbolt usb 4 ports and then the 14 inch macbook pro has three of those ports a magsafe port for charging a sd card slot for importing photos and videos and an hdmi port if you want to hook that up to an external monitor or a tv so there are a lot more ports on the 14-inch macbook pro i think it's definitely something that a lot of people are going to consider as one of the major differences between uh both of these laptops but it's not all good for the 14-inch macbook pro so um this is a heavier laptop now and it's actually a little bit bigger too uh with the form factor so apple said they put in a bigger 14-inch display into around the same form factor as the 13-inch and that's mostly true but if you notice if you put one on top of the other the 14 inch is a little bit bigger i don't think that would make a major difference fitting it in most bags it's just a little bit bigger um but one thing that you might notice actually is the weight difference so the 14 inch macbook pro weighs 3.5 pounds the m1 macbook pro weighs three pounds and then at the lightest end of the spectrum you have the m1 macbook air which weighs 2.8 pounds so you might notice a little bit of that weight difference and that actually might you know be a deciding factor whether or not you want to carry around that extra weight in the 14-inch model uh or if you want to go for something lighter like the macbook air and of course the 14-inch is just a hair bit thicker overall as well if you close the lids on all these laptops if you just take a look at that more squared off design um this macbook pro even though unlike the technical specs this is technically thinner it's not thinner at every single point of the laptop and it kind of has this uniform thickness where even the 13-inch macbook pro um the thickness is more towards that kind of like bottom end not necessarily on the sides and then on the 13-inch m1 macbook air of course you have that tapered design where it kind of starts off thick and then gets really thin as you get towards the front of the laptop and the trackpad the keyboard also looks a little bit different too so now the 14-inch has kind of like this blacked-out keyboard where everything's black and then of course the m1 pro and air don't have that and the function key row on the 14-inch is a little bit bigger so it has a bigger escape key than the macbook air and also the touch id button is kind of like its own physical dedicated button which i actually quite like i find that it's actually a little bit easier to kind of reach and feel for that touch id button and on the macbook air in comparison now that i go and use it just kind of feels like a little it feels small for some reason like oh wow that's that's the size of the touch id sensor so i feel like it's easier to just go ahead and click that button uh on the 14 inch macbook pro and then of course the 13-inch macbook pro is completely throwing everything out of the window here because it still has the touch bar and uh apple decided to get rid of that with their recent m1 pro macbook pros but the m1 macbook pro is an older model so it still has the touch bar and listen the touch bar is pretty you know hit or miss for most people sometimes i miss it honestly on the 14 inch model i really liked resizing brushes in affinity photo with it um but for most other tasks like changing brightness or volume i kind of prefer a physical dedicated button for that uh but hey if you're a big touch bar fan maybe that's one of the reasons why you'll go for the m1 macbook pro or any of these other laptops because this is probably the last laptop that the touch bar is ever going to be on there's also the price difference there is a major price difference between all of these laptops uh so the m1 macbook air is the cheapest in this lineup it starts at 1 000 for 8 gigabytes of memory and 256 gigabytes of storage that's with an m1 chip uh with a seven core gpu then you have the 13-inch m1 macbook pro that's gonna start off at thirteen hundred dollars uh same eight gigabytes of memory same 256 gigabytes of storage uh but the m1 processor this time is the fully binned m1 processor so uh eight cpu cores and then of course eight gpu cores the 14 inch macbook pro it's really the most expensive out of this lineup but there are benefits for paying this higher price and we're going to kind of break this down so the 14 inch macbook pro starts at 2 000 however it does start with double the storage so that's gigabytes of storage and it also starts with double the memory so it comes with 16 gigabytes of memory as standard now this macbook pro also says it comes with an 8 core cpu but it's not the same cpu that's found on the m1 macbook pro this is an m1 pro cpu and the difference here is that there's actually six high performance cores in the 14 inch model whereas with the m1 macbook pro and the m1 macbook air those only have four of those high performance cores and then four energy efficient cores so the 14-inch macbook pro is more performant right it gets six of those high performance cores and then two of those energy-efficient cores uh and then the m1 macbook pro and m1 macbook air is losing out on those two extra performance cores so you know spoiler alert there's probably going to be a difference in multi-core performance between the 14-inch and the 13-inch models now listen if you want to save money and get like a base model and you're like a really light user you only need eight gigabytes of memory you're only going to use 256 gigabytes of storage that 1 000 m1 macbook air it's just a good value right but let's be a little bit more fair to the 14 inch macbook pro here because again like i mentioned it has higher uh storage tiers and memory tiers to start with so if you were to fairly spec out the m1 macbook pro and the m1 macbook air let's say you need it more storage let's say you want it more memory well you'd be getting a lot closer to that 14-inch price point so if you wanted to get a macbook air with the same exact specifications you would actually be spending 1400 for that machine and if you wanted to get the m1 macbook pro with the same 16 gigabytes of memory and 512 gigabyte ssd you would be paying 1 699 which is a 300 difference to that 14 inch model it gets us a lot closer in price uh to that model but you know again being fair to these other models you can make the decision for yourself you don't have to get 16 gigabytes of memory if you don't need it and you don't have to get a bigger uh solid-state drive if you don't need it as well or you could choose to spend that extra money on other things there's also a difference in webcam so both the m1 macbook pro and the macbook air are going to come with the same 720p webcam but the 14-inch actually gets an upgrade here to a 1080p webcam here is a webcam test on all them i'll let you be the judge of which one has the better quality or if this increase in quality is worth it to you okay this is a test recording on the m1 macbook pro webcam okay this is a test recording on the 14-inch macbook pros 1080p webcam okay and finally this is a test recording on the macbook airs webcam okay we scratched the surface on what's probably the most obvious and most outwardly facing differences between all these laptops but let's dig a little bit deeper and talk about performance and then some of the more major differences between these laptops so first of all let's do our standard geekbench benchmark that's everyone's favorite benchmark to do a quick little comparison to and you can really see here that when we're talking about single core performance the m1 and the m1 pro chip are pretty much identical in all of these computers at least for a geekbench benchmark so we got a 1746 on the m1 macbook pro a 1749 on the macbook air and a 1769 on the 14-inch macbook pro all these scores are pretty much exactly the same they're all within the margin of error uh but the multi-core performance is where you notice the difference now on the m1 macbook air and the m1 macbook pro there really isn't a difference right so the m1 macbook pro gets 7 738 and the m1 macbook air gets 7706 but on the 14-inch macbook pro here's where you start to notice the difference with those two extra performance cores because that gets a 10 thousand and eight score this is actually the third time i've ran this benchmark on the 14 inch macbook pro and that is the highest score i've seen so far in multi-core performance so it's actually breaking that uh 10 000 barrier in geekbench so you're actually still getting very good cpu performance even on this eight core bin chip uh so cpu wise that's pretty good for geekbench but let's do a more intensive benchmark uh with cinebench so we loaded up cinebench on all of these uh macbooks and we'll start with the lowest because the macbook air got a 6573 and the m1 macbook pro got a 7797 now if you're wondering why there's such a huge score discrepancy between the m1 macbook pro and the m1 macbook air if they have the same chip you have to remember and i failed to mention this before is that the m1 macbook air does not have a fan in it so even though they have the same cpu technology um the m1 macbook pro is actually able to cool that chip off and stop it from thermally throttling whereas the m1 air it just has to throttle down to properly cool off that laptop that can be kind of a pro and a con right uh for a pro it means you'll never hear fan noise on the air because there's literally no fan inside of it but if you want to eek out all the performance that the m1 chip has to offer having the active cooling system of a fan if you are doing again more intensive cpu workloads we didn't see really a difference in geekbench but on cinebench which is more intensive you can see the difference here that the m1 macbook pro is going to be faster now obviously the 14 inch with those extra two performance scores takes the cake again here in cinebench and it maxes out at a 9560 score now another major difference between all these laptops is gpu performance uh the 14 inch macbook pro again it's the bin model does have a 14 core gpu which is a step up from the m1 pro's 8 core gpu and then again the base model macbook air is outfitted here with the seven core m1 gpu so it should be the weakest so i loaded up gfx bench and i ran to tess here for the benchmarks one is going to be the aztec ruins normal tier and then one is going to be the aztec ruins high tier off-screen and as we finish out this benchmark you can obviously see that the 14-inch macbook pro handily beat both the m1 macbook pro and the m1 macbook air obviously the m1 macbook pro was then the second strongest in gpu performance and then at the last part of it was the m1 air all right so we can clearly see the power differences here the 14 inch macbook pro is stronger uh uh now i'm going to do a video export test to kind of test this out as well to see if that impacts what i do in final cut pro that's kind of what i can speak to as a video editor doing export speed tests is something that i can relate to but before we do that kind of want to talk about display differences which i didn't talk about before because i wanted to include this in the battery section for testing so i loaded up a 4k hdr video uh just about a minute long video so i could show you the differences in the display quality here and this is where the 14 inch macbook pro just really pulls ahead between both of these laptops so 13 inch m1 pro has a 500 display the m1 air has 400 nits for max brightness now the 14 inch m1 pro is a little different it's a mini led display so for normal use you're still getting around the same 500 nits of max brightness however the display can actually get much brighter than that when viewing hdr content either in full screen or in certain sections so in full screen with hdr it can get up to 1 000 nits of max screen brightness but then it can also peak at certain points in certain areas where maybe you have like a really bright highlight like the sun or just a bright light in your face in the video that can get up to 1600 nits of max brightness and this is really apparent when watching hdr video you can clearly see that the highlights and everything in the 14 inch macbook pro obviously just are brighter and have a lot more detail to the point of where you're watching like a youtube video uh in hdr and the video player itself will actually be brighter than the rest of the screen it's actually really interesting to look at uh but besides the brightness differences in hdr video there's also just a general display quality upgrade on the 14 inch because the mini led can actually turn off zones of its backlighting where on the m1 macbook pro and the m1 macbook air it kind of has to run the backlight at all times so what that basically means is you get more of a contrast ratio on the 14-inch mini led display uh apple says it's a million to one contrast ratio and basically what that means is you get really deep inky black levels that are really close to an oled display the display on the 14 inches bigger it also looks a lot nicer and on top of that it's a pro motion display so it does have 120 hertz it's not working in all applications right now specifically in safari like it's not enabled i'm sure apple will fix that in an update but uh so you have to go into that knowing that it's not perfect right now but moving around the user interface everywhere where 120 hertz is active like editing in final cut pro the smoothness of this display matched with that display quality upgrade it might be one of the reasons why you pick this macbook pro besides performance like the display is that good it's actually worth kind of that two thousand dollar asking price just to kind of jump up to that alone i know that might sound crazy but it's true also the speaker differences so the 14 inch macbook pro has way better speakers than both the macbook air and the m1 macbook pro um just a lot richer sounding and way more bass so if you're going for the display and speaker upgrade the 14 inch model easily wins out in both categories also before we get into the final benchmark the final cut export and then the final battery life tally i also want to just do a quick disk speed test real quick just to let you know the differences here and you can see that the 14 inch macbook pro really does have faster ssds here we're getting about 5 500 on the read speed around 4 200 on the right speed if we take a look at our m1 macbook pro you can see we're getting around 3086 on the right speed and around 3000 as well on the read speed and then the m1 macbook air seems to have the slowest drive here um getting around 2500 on the right speed and again just below 3 000 kind of like 2 700 2 800 on the read speed all right there's two more tests to round out this video in terms of performance and battery life so again i mentioned that i was gonna do a final cut export test and i want to do it with two different settings one exporting uh one of my projects that was a little bit more complex i've been doing a lot of easy exports in my test i wanted to go with something more complex i exported my pixel 6 pro video and that video was around 24 minutes in length so this is a 24 minute 4k clip more titles a little bit more color grading and stuff like that in that video and i wanted to do it with two export settings first with h.264 which is primarily how i export to youtube honestly because youtube's going to compress it anyway but i also want to do a prores export where we might see even more of a difference here uh so i did the first export with h.264 uh all the same settings here obviously and honestly i was surprised by this result because i thought the 14-inch macbook pro would perform much better here and it did perform better but not by much so it took a total of 11 minutes and 46 seconds to export that 24 minute 4k clip and the other macbook pros also to my surprise finished around the same time right so the m1 macbook air and the m1 macbook pro both finish at 12 minutes and 32 seconds now obviously a lot of the encoding for h.264 is being done you know on a dedicated part of the m1 chip it's not even having to offload to like the cpu and kind of like the gpu parts uh so you can really see that the difference is even between the 13 inch m1 pro and the air are nothing and then with the 14 inch it's just a slight improvement uh but then i want to do prores i thought i'd see more dramatic improvements there thanks to the 14 inches dedicated pro res encoder which i believe the 13-inch models don't have i also had to adjust this clip actually because i didn't have enough storage on my m1 macbook air so this was just a 15 second uh 4k video clip and the export time for the 15 minute 4k video clip uh with pro res on the 14 inch was 2 minutes and 55 seconds that's really fast uh on the m1 macbook pro it was 5 minutes and 41 seconds so you can see there's quite a bit of improvement there and then this is where you really start to notice the thermal throttling on the m1 macbook air even though it technically has the same cpu power as the m1 macbook pro because that took 10 minutes and 21 seconds to finish that export so here you're starting to see more benefits to the 14-inch if you're dealing with prores if you export in that format again it's kind of hard to tell what different workflows will be but 14-inch obviously has a power increase and then the more intensive those workloads are you kind of have to account for the cooling system in the 14 inch versus the 13 inch and then of course the lowest end being the macbook air so 14 inch best improvement no shock there i also kind of ran an unscientific battery test through all of this because the m1 macbook pro is supposed to have the best battery life and actually the 14 inch macbook pro is supposed to have the worst battery life out of all these laptops and we've basically been running benchmarks and watching videos on these laptops for about an hour and a half and yes the m1 macbook pro actually has the best battery life out of all these laptops it finished uh with 83 battery life um now what i was finding during some of these tests was that the macbook air was actually having better battery life than the 14-inch macbook pro however when we started to get to some of those final cut export tests and the macbook air was starting to take a longer time the macbook airs battery actually suffered more uh so it got 77 remaining battery life by the time we finished these tests and the 14-inch macbook pro had 79 remaining battery life and it really started to catch up to the m1 macbook pro because it really did export that prores video clip that much faster which just made it not work as hard while it was waiting for the other macbooks to finish that test so let's draw a final conclusion here because i think i walked away here with a different result than i kind of thought going into this video i kind of thought i was going to tell you to definitely steer clear away from the m1 macbook pro because if you spend three hundred dollars more you would get a lot of upgrades in things like the webcam the performance the speakers the mini led display and and all that stuff and you know finishing this video i still think that like if you asked me like greg what would you choose uh you know with a 300 price difference between the 512 gigabyte macbook pro model and the 14-inch macbook pro i would say yeah just spend the 300 extra get the mini led display it's so gorgeous to look at i love it you get the new design you get the better speakers you get the more ports right you get so many improvements on the 14 inch model that if you are getting a similarly spec m1 macbook pro i would say just spend the 300 extra dollars and get that machine however however if you are getting that base model and you don't even care about those things and all you care about is maximum battery life because that is such a important thing for consumers you know i gotta say the m1 macbook pro even though again i personally wouldn't pick it i would want all the extra things you get with the 14 inch even if it means a sacrifice in battery life there are certain people who are gonna look at that m1 macbook pro look at the performance gains you get over it from the m1 macbook air and go that's good enough for me and also hey look i get better battery life out of it too and it's it's thinner and lighter than the 14 inch model uh so i'm gonna go for that one and you know what i was gonna tell you hey don't do that but you know after these tests i gotta say that's that's honestly a solid choice if you wanna do that and save some money and then again get the best battery life out of all these uh smaller laptops we're testing um with the macbook air i think that's obviously the easiest recommendation to make between all these laptops it's the cheapest at a thousand dollars you can start speccing up the macbook air to different configurations of how you want it so if you just want a one terabyte macbook air with eight gigabytes of memory just because you need a ton of storage uh you can still get that cheaper for the starting price of the 14 inch macbook pro so the macbook air is still a strong recommendation still has great battery life and all those things and then of course going back to the 14-inch model um there's a lot of things to attract you to this model like we just said comparing it to the m1 macbook pro the display is amazing speakers are amazing you get some really good port selection here finally with the macbook pros uh the webcam is an improvement and again that mini led display i feel like is worth the entry price alone but you are getting better performance out of this machine uh and a better starting configuration don't forget this doesn't come with a 256 gigabyte drive and eight gigabytes of memory as standard it comes with 512 and 16 gigabytes of memory so overall going to be a smoother machine to run if you are using it for more performative tasks it probably just pays to step up to that 14 inch macbook pro to start with and hey you know i i didn't want to compare other mac specs of the 14-inch model if you got to the end of this video and you're like i want even more power well the 14-inch model obviously you can max it out to even more power you get the full m1 max chip in there and everything so yeah this video doesn't have a clear winner right like you can make a different choice depending on all the information i give you and i think it's all valid sometimes in videos there is a winner in this video there isn't and i really wasn't expecting that i really was going into this video thinking i wouldn't recommend the 13-inch m1 macbook pro but it surprised me here but they're all great laptop choices depending on your needs and what features are important to you so you gotta help me out here now you have to help me out here if you actually made it to the end of this video because this is long uh let me know in the comments below what macbook you think is the best out of all these smaller options and which one you would choose and also let me know what specs you would go with as always if you like this video if you found it helpful i really do hope you found all this information helpful please give me a like if you want to see more from the channel obviously make sure you're subscribed to the channel and this was a long video but you know what i'm gonna start making another one right after this so i will see you all in the next video take care everyone

Channel: GregsGadgets

Views: 125,077

Keywords: MacBook Pro, MacBook buyers guide 2021, MacBook buyers guide, MacBook Pro 14 vs 13, MacBook Pro 14, MacBook Pro 14 vs 13 m1, MacBook Pro 14 vs MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 2021 vs MacBook Pro 2020, MacBook Pro 14 vs MacBook Air m1, MacBook Pro 13 vs MacBook Air m1, MacBook Pro 14 base model, MacBook Pro 14 battery, MacBook Pro 14 display, MacBook Pro 14 webcam, MacBook Pro M1 pro vs air, MacBook Pro M1 pro vs m1, all MacBooks compared, all MacBooks battery life test, m1 pro vs m1

Id: lp1_4GNPzE4

Length: 27min 31sec (1651 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 10 2021