14" MacBook Pro vs M1 MacBook Air - Worth $1,000 MORE? 🤔

this video is brought to you by squarespace the best way to make an amazing website let's be honest is the new 14-inch macbook pro really worth a thousand dollars more than the m1 macbook air well today we will find out because we are going to compare a bunch of real world tasks such as regular everyday use ssd speeds some different benchmarks photo video editing battery life speakers webcams and general stuff that people do to see if it's worth actually spending the money both of these machines have a 100 battery so we are going to unplug them and we know the 14-inch even they're amazing machines they do suck more power so it's gonna be interesting to see as we go through what the battery life is like now i'm going to go ahead and start out by comparing the exterior differences because the m1 macbook air is this nice slim wedge shape i loved the comfort and the lightweightness of this machine only 2.8 pounds but the new 14 inch macbook pros they have that square design that feels a lot chunkier it's definitely heavier the footprint is larger in both dimensions and it is thicker as well especially on the wedge edge and i gotta say that i definitely prefer the design and the slimness of the macbook air if you care about portability it definitely is a lot lighter and more convenient to have with you now with that we also have some differences on the bottom the 14 inch macbook pro has these cutouts on the sides in the back because it does have two fans whereas the m1 macbook air is completely sealed because it's completely fanless but with that said we will actually test to see if we can even hear the fans on the 14 inch or if it's still silent a little bit later in the test now talking about ports on the left-hand side the macbook air only has two thunderbolt ports whereas with the 14-inch we have those same two but their thunderbolts four will have full display support meaning they can actually support two displays one through thunderbolt and one on the other side through hdmi whereas the macbook air can only support one external display with that you don't have to use one of those ports to charge because we have magsafe which is really nice and convenient and then we have the headphone jack on the left-hand side so it doesn't get in your way if you're using a mouse on the other side the macbook air just has a headphone jack compared to an hdmi port which is super convenient and an sd card slot which means you don't need any dongles along with that third thunderbolt now before we open these up i have to tell you guys about our giveaway we're giving away one 2500 14 inch macbook pro it's not this one it's a higher end one to one of you lucky people out there all you have to do is one be subscribed and two comment with these launch week videos we're making them up until tuesday one week from launch and then we're choosing a winner so make sure you guys come back every day we post at 7am pacific check out our videos and comment below and i don't care if you're anywhere out there in the world we will ship it to you we will pay import taxes whatever it is and get one of these in your hands and now let's take a look at the insides the 14 inch has full size function keys and then it has a larger trackpad but to me that really doesn't matter and the keyboard feels identical on both so even though we have this new look in either way it doesn't make a real world difference now what probably sticks out to you is the notch yes macbooks now have a notch we're gonna talk all about the displays where we have a ton of differences in just a sec but first i want to compare the speakers the 14-inch now has a crazy speaker system so let's see if we can tell a difference me [Music] all right guys wow what a difference the macbook air already had one of the best speakers in terms of ultrabooks but this new 14 inch it just kills it we have those dedicated woofers that move a ton more air this year compared to the 16 inch setup last year so if you care about movies or music with the built-in speakers this one is the way to go it is just incredible almost like adding a subwoofer to your car now as far as the webcams and microphones this is the macbook air's 720p webcam which has better processing due to m1 and it has really good microphones as well but the 14-inch macbook pro has a 1080p webcam with an f 2.0 aperture and it has upgraded studio microphone so you guys let me know which one looks better and which one sounds better and how much of a difference you see down in the comments section below and now let's get into the displays the new 14 inch has a higher resolution display we have 6 million pixels compared to 4 million but with that said i can't see a noticeable difference to my eyes now people have mentioned that you have two times scaling just like on the imac so it is easier on the eyes if you're reading a lot of text but to me i don't think that's a deal breaker both these are 16 by 10 but because of the notch apple actually added extra pixels where we have that menu bar so you're not really losing out on anything with the notch and of course we have these nice slim bezels all around now with that said if you ever maximize a window and application that notch gets hidden so it's not distracting if you're doing work or watching videos or anything like that and as far as color accuracy the latest m1 macbook airs also support dc ip3 so if you're doing photo editing video editing there's no difference in terms of color grading and things like that now yes the 14 inch does support hdr content we're going to cover that in just a sec but in terms of brightness for regular use it is still limited to 500 nits instead of crazy a thousand or 1600 whereas the macbook air is limited to 400 nits so you do have the brightness difference that you guys can see with our top camera but looking from the side camera you guys can see that the viewing angles are also a lot better with the new 14-inch now when it comes to playing back hdr photos or video you guys can see the difference you don't see the full thing because this is not a hdr video for maximum compatibility but look how much brighter the hdr mini led screen that goes up to 1600 nits on the 14 14-inch looks the highlights pop like crazy not only that the contrast is also better at the same time so if you're watching hdr videos or movies the experience is much better and if you want to edit hdr video or even hdr photos you need to have the 14 inch now the new display can have some blooming if you're watching in the dark with the brightness maxed out with high contrast text and things like that but the macbook air has blooming across the whole screen because it has a single backlight and because of that and the hdr screen it looks amazing for watching movies in the dark the contrast levels are pure black or as close as you can get without oled but the brightness is way better than oled and it makes for an amazing movie watching experience especially with those crazy speakers now those aren't the only differences we also have pro motion on the 14-inch which means it can go up to 120 hertz which makes everything super smooth in the menus when you're scrolling and it's great for gaming if you want to do some of that but also it can go down to 24 to save your battery life if you're watching videos so let's be honest and talk about does that screen matter that much well right now i gotta say if you're buying a 999 dollar macbook air or actually for like 929 or maybe even less on amazon we'll leave a link down below that's a thousand dollar jump and that makes it hard to justify but if you're buying a macbook air with 16 gigs of ram and a 512 gig ssd just like this 14 inch comes with for that 2 000 price that is a six hundred dollar jump and then at that point that might be enough to justify having this super nice display along with the better speakers and the other upgrades and that display alone is just so amazing so it's really up to you how much you care and how much you watch videos if you can make use of that now that we mentioned ssds let's check out the speed difference the m1 air was a big improvement over the previous years we have 2 100 right and 2 800 read but these new ones are insane we have 4 600 rights and 4 800 almost read so the ssds are basically twice as fast compared to the air now does that matter in the real world and i have to say no i don't think so it could matter if you're buying the highest end new macbooks and pushing them to the limits but for regular use you don't really notice the difference now before we get into the performance test let me give a shout out to the sponsor of this video squarespace if you've been thinking about making your own website squarespace is seriously the best way to go you can build a great looking website like we did with literally no web making experience it doesn't matter if you want a portfolio a blog ecommerce or anything else you just choose from one of their great templates and easily customize it it's incredibly simple it's affordable and our sites have been running flawlessly for years now bringing in tons of traffic thanks to its built-in seo tools start your free two-week trial with no credit card required by going to squarespace.com maxtec or by using the custom link down below and when you're ready to launch you will save 10 off your first purchase of a website or a domain and now let's get into performance i'm going to start out with geekbench 5 and the new 14 inch comes with the m1 pro chip but for 2 000 you actually get a binned version that comes with an a core cpu only six of those are high performance cores and a 14 core gpu instead of a 16 core now our one thousand dollar macbook air is also binned but it's only missing one out of eight graphics cores the cpu still has four high performance cores so it's gonna be interesting to see how these compare now with that we're also gonna do a video comparing the 14-inch bin version compared to the unbind which costs 300 more so make sure you guys have those notifications enabled if you guys want to see that along with other videos like comparing 16 gigs of ram compared to 32 and comparing 14 inch to 6 inch as far as thermal throttling all of those videos are coming up all right guys we have the scores and look at this the single core is less than a one percent difference almost identical and that's what you're going to use day-to-day simple tasks opening up folders stuff like that you won't notice a difference now as far as the multi-core score we do have a difference of 27 percent and that's what those two extra performance scores get you with the 14 inch and in just a bit we'll see how that makes a difference in the real world and now let's go ahead and test out the graphics and compare the 14 core bend compared to the 7 core and bam we have our results and it looks like we're from 18 800 to 35 400 so no going from 7 cores to 14 does not exactly double the performance but it is 88 better performance now the other thing we have to keep in mind is that the macbook air is fanless so during an extended load we could have a bigger difference and we'll check that out in just a sec and now let's get into gaming i have 3d marks new wildlife extreme which is the latest to test gaming performance with metal acceleration and i'm going to use the extreme unlimited mode let's go ahead and get this started that is because we're going to run this off screen to make sure the resolution doesn't impact the scores and promotion doesn't impact anything and one thing that i want to test is limitations for throttling because we do have a fanless macbook air here all right we have our scores and the macbook air got 27.1 frames per second compared to 55.5 so in this test if you're gaming we literally get double the scaling just slightly more than double the performance while having double the cores now when the test was running i did not see any throttling for the graphics the temperatures were fairly low and of course the 14 inch will not throttle but if you're doing very heavy extended task with cpu and gpu use the macbook air will throttle but realistically it's not enough to make a huge difference based on our test compared to the other m1 max now speaking of throttling i'm gonna test out cinebench's throttle test it's gonna run for 10 minutes and this is actually a benchmark that is for 3d rendering if you guys are interested in that it's going to push the cpus to their limits and of course the macbook air is fanless now with the 14 inch it's been already a minute of the test the fans are still off so for most tasks that means that even if it's short bursts of a hundred percent the fans are gonna stay off now i'm gonna let this run for another eight or nine minutes until to the end and we are gonna use my thermal camera to see how hot does the macbook air get does the bottom get super hot and how much does it thermal throttle oh man it literally just started spinning up the fans and it's already been over two minutes two minutes and 15 seconds before the span fan spin up at all and right now we don't have the exact cp temperature but the hottest temperature inside is showing 50 degrees celsius on the macbook air we are looking like the cpu performance cores are at 95 degrees and they have been for what is it a couple minutes now or about a minute so it looks like yes right away on the macbook air it does get hot and we'll see the frequency at the end we are almost done with the test and the macbook air has been pinned at 95 degrees celsius the whole time and the 14 inch even though the fans are up probably about a third of the way it is still silent it cannot hear it over our hvac system which is crazy and we don't have the exact temps but the hottest temp is at 56 degrees celsius now let's go ahead and bust out my thermal camera here we have a big hotspot where the heatsink is at 44 degrees celsius the macbook air is actually cooler at 40 degrees celsius for the hottest spot now i also want to go ahead and pick this up and take a look at the bottom of it right there we have that big heat spot at 40 degrees celsius of course our 14 inch has vents at the top so exhaust here but the bottom is also at 40 degrees celsius at the hottest spot meaning that if you care about the heat on your lap we're not really seeing a difference all right guys we are done and i am shocked for one specific reason first off let's talk about the scores we have 6748 compared to 9506 so even though we saw a difference of 27 in geekbench when we're pushing these to the limit we have a difference of 40 percent and that is because of the thermal throttling um so with the macbook air after about halfway through it's throttled all the way down to 2.35 gigahertz instead of 3.2 whereas the macbook pro sticks at 3.2 gigahertz the whole time now the reason why i'm shocked is the fact that we literally after 10 minutes of 100 cpu usage we could not hear the fans this thing was still silent so if you care about silence there's no reason to go for the macbook air if you can afford the 14 inch now what i want to do next is push this machine to its limits because i want to see if the fans can ever get loud on it so i'm going to max out the cpu right now i'm going to go back into 3dmark wildlife and i'm going to go ahead and run that extreme test as well so we're maxing out both the cpu and we're maxing out the graphics at the same time let's see what happens with those fans all right guys it's been two minutes of looping both the cpu test and gpu being maxed out now we can finally start to hear the fans they're about 75 or so so that took longer than expected to have those ramp up and after two and a half minutes they are completely maxed out and really by the sound of it actually actually go manually and enable those and what's really surprising is that even with the fans maxed out they are not that loud what do you think vadim was it 13 inch actually louder than this maybe so on all these days of testing we have never had the fans get even like halfway but when we force 100 for both cp and gpu give it a few minutes it maxes out and they're still pretty dang quiet that is surprising now for those of you that want to work with logic both of these machines are excellent the m1 macbook air can do about 88 tracks in the new logic benchmark test you guys can find all the details of the benchmark online whereas the 14 inch base model it can handle about 115 tracks with the same test so that's about 30 percent more performance and that kind of lines up with the cpu differences now what i will say is for logic if you're going to use a lot of plug-ins you will want to upgrade the macbook air to at least 16 gigs which is actually the most you could do here and if you're going to do a lot you have the opportunity to go higher with the 14 inch and for those of you guys that want to do some programming we are going to test out xcode and thank you to max airmenko for creating this benchmark for us and this terminal command that launches it bam and our results are in and look at that we took 146 seconds for the m1 air and 110 seconds for the 14 inch bend model that's a performance improvement of about 32 percent now if that difference is worth the money is going to be up to you depending how often you compile code but with that said even the m1 macbook air is so much faster than past intel models it is an insane difference so the performance here is still excellent you can actually download this online and test out your system and what about if you want to do a bit of 3d design is the macbook air enough well i have the latest version of blender that is optimized for apple silicon and we are going to go ahead and render this sample project called party tug that you can actually download on their website this one actually uses metal so it's using the graphics we'll see what difference we get here all right that was really fast our macbook air took 18.93 seconds almost 19 seconds compared to 9.73 so the 14 inch with the 14 core graphics is almost twice as fast which you would expect and both of these are actually extremely fast for a tough scene like this because of their unified memory compared to older intel processors so once again you can download this make sure it's completely pre-loaded before you render and compare these systems to yours and now for the photo editors i have adobe lightroom over here and i have to say that real world performance is slightly quicker on the 14-inch not a huge difference but you might have a little bit smoother brushes now the other thing we have here is eight gigs ram versus 16 and ram does help for photo editing especially when you're doing batch processing so i would say if you do a lot of that you do want 16 gigs of ram and now let's go ahead and run an export test i have 50 42 megapixel raw images here all graded ready to go out to jpeg so let's see how long it's gonna take now check this out guys while this is running look how much ram is being used on the eight gig macbook we have six and a half gigs of ram out of eight used but another 6 gigs of swap meaning it's writing files to the ssd and of course the ssd even though it's super fast it's not as fast as the 14 inch now on this one we have 16 gigs and 14 gigs out of those 16 are being used and we're still using swap memory to the crazy fast ssd so both of these would like to have more ram if we had it available and it would speed stuff up a little bit now as i may have mentioned we are going to be doing a 16 gig versus 2 32 gig video soon so make sure you guys check out that video bam we are finished and our macbook air took two minutes and 46 seconds and then the 14 inch macbook pro took a minute and 42 seconds that is 63 faster and that's interesting because the cpu difference is what 30 or so now that is because one we have the extra ram but even more important than that this is using 16 channel memory uh so has twice the bandwidth and that also helps meaning if you get 16 gigs on this one it might be about 20 30 seconds faster but it will not be as quick as a new macbook pros now of course in the real world unless you're somebody that's editing 50 100 photos a day or a thousand like a wedding photographer you can wait a little bit longer and you know have the export take longer it's not that big of a deal but it could add up enough to wanting to spend the extra and now for the video editors we are going to test out final cut pro for the footage that most people work with which is h.264 both these machines do incredibly well in final cut and also in davinci resolve and i've been using the m1 macbook air for almost a year now editing a ton of my videos because most of it it can handle right now i have two lots of plied and film grain and it's running just fine now the issue comes in if you end up doing tougher footage or stacking even more effects which we'll show you but the first thing that i want to do is an export test with this new m1 pro chip let's start the export and hit our timer as you might be able to see with the m1 air our graphics are at 98 they are maxed out compared to only 64 on the 14 inch that is because with this machine the encoders are limiting the export not the cpu or the gpu whereas with the macbook air we don't have enough graphics performance to go any faster but as you guys can see the export times are very very close and that is because projects like these even with a couple luts and a film grain applied they're not that difficult so don't think if you spend the extra money you automatically will have faster speeds if you do want the fastest export speeds you have to buy the m1 max chip which has double the encoders meaning it could go up to twice as fast for something like this but then you got to ask yourself if it's worth paying at least 2 900 for that and the times are 255 and 308 so it's only a 13 second difference now you could export this project to h.265 and then both would be a lot faster about half the time for this test but once again this one the 14 inch will still be a little bit quicker now the real difference comes in if we are working with tougher projects i'm gonna export this red raw project and the macbook air took two minutes and 32 seconds for only a one minute project compared to one minute and 28 seconds so that's a difference of about 73 faster even though we're still exporting h.264 so we have those encoders there because of the much higher graphics load we see that 73 difference instead of just a seven percent difference so if you really start pushing the macbook air that's when it's really going to start slowing down and the last thing i have to mention is prores or pro vs raw footage even though they are smooth for both once you start adding effects the m1 air will start getting limited and then if we go and export a project the 14 inch macbook pro absolutely flies through it it's already at what 40 right here compared to just 10 and that is because it has dedicated decoders and encoders for prores and prores raw so if you're somebody that works with these codecs i would definitely think about investing the extra money for a 14 inch wow right there the 14 inch just got done took a minute and seven seconds where this one was only at 25 in that time meaning it takes about four and a half minutes to export a five-minute project still fast but nothing like the 14-inch and now let's talk about battery life we've been testing for multiple hours now how long maybe three hours or so three four hours let's take a look at the battery life on the m1 macbook air we are at 44 battery and on the 14 inch we're at 46 now how does that make sense when the 14 inch takes so much more power for its display and more powerful cpu and graphics well first off its battery is 40 larger compared to that macbook air and second along with that even though it uses more power it did a lot of those benchmarking tasks much quicker while we had to sit and wait for the macbook air and before we got into benchmarks the macbook air was actually leading in battery life so what this means is for a really easy simple task even though the battery is smaller than the macbook air it still will give you maybe one to two hours battery battery life for web browsing email maybe watching some videos but if you start doing tougher tasks like gaming photo editing video editing coding that kind of the stuff you will still get better battery life with the 14 inch macbook pro so if you were worried about battery life do not worry with this new macbook now before we give our final verdict i want to give a shout out to our merch this is the m1x hoodie now we did do the sharpie edition for the shirt and i think we have one for the hoodie as well right vadim sharpie edition we do have one we just don't have a silver sharpie but if you've made it this far if you guys enjoy our videos go and check out our merch we have a lot of great designs and you can use the promo code m1 pro for 20 off for a limited time we would greatly appreciate it and of course if you haven't yet subscribed go ahead and subscribe comment below so you guys can win a 2500 14 inch macbook pro and if you don't care about winning do it to help us reach our goal of 1 million subscribers before the end of the year we would greatly appreciate it and with that said what is the final verdict let's answer the original question is the m1 macbook air good enough or is it worth spending a thousand dollars more for the 14 inch well as we guys showed you all the differences you get a lot more for the money you get extra ports extra displays a much nicer screen much nicer speakers you're getting a lot for the money but if you don't push him hard to use simple tasks the m1 macbook air is much lighter you'll get better battery life and you're saving so much cash you can literally buy one as a gift for a friend or family member and even if you start doing photo and video editing and you're not doing extreme stuff in coding and logic it still does such an amazing job so for most people unless you're going to the extremes with productivity the m1 macbook air is enough it's just mainly do you want the extra updated features new design new display that kind of stuff so if you want to save some money get yourself the m1 macbook air we actually have links below to amazon they have great sales on there right now i think it was 929 to pick one up i don't think you will be disappointed so don't feel like you are missing out so there you guys go there is our full comparison thank you guys for watching click that circle above to subscribe once again we have a couple great videos right over there that's been max and i will see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Max Tech

Views: 638,509

Keywords: apple, apple macbook, apple macbook pro, macbook pro, 2021 macbook pro, macbook pro 2021, macbook pro vs, macbook air vs macbook pro, m1 macbook air, m1 macbook air vs, m1 pro, m1 pro chip, m1 pro macbook pro, m1 pro macbook pro vs m1 macbook air, 14 macbook pro, 14 macbook pro m1 pro, 14 macbook pro vs, 14 macbook pro vs macbook air, 14 macbook pro vs m1 macbook air, m1 max, m1 pro macbook pro 14 vs m1 macbook air, m1 chip, apple m1, apple m1 pro, apple m1 pro review

Id: zePD4Sdf6yA

Length: 28min 10sec (1690 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/tperelli]

Man I’ve owned a Pro for going on 10 years and it’s served me well but I have less of a need for so much power at this point in my life. Work provides me with a laptop so that does all the heavy lifting.

Been debating an iPad for sooo long and thinking it’s probably the right move.

[u/tekreviews]

TLDR:

• Geekbench CPU: 9818 vs 7732 (same single core)
• Geekbench GPU: 35428 vs 18864
• 3D Mark: 55.5 FPS vs 27.1 FPS
• Cinebench R23: 9506 vs 6784
• Logic Pro: 115 tracks vs 88
• Xcode: 110 sec vs 146 sec
• Blender Render: 9.7 sec vs 18.9 sec
• Lightroom Export: 1:42 min vs 2:46 min
• 5 min 4K H.264 Export: 2:55 min vs 3:08 min
• 1 min 4.5K Red Raw Export: 1:28 min vs 2:32 min
• 5 min 4k Prores to Prores 42: 1:07 min vs 4:30 min
• 2x the SSD speed
• Similar battery life: 46% (MBP) vs 44% (MBA) after the test
• MBP 14 is 500 nits brighter and 1000 nits brighter at peak
• 120 Hertz Pro-motion with higher contrast and better colours
• MBP 14 better speakers and more bass
• MBP 14 better mic and webcam
• MBA is thinner and lighter

[u/alizayshah]

Coding is primarily CPU intensive right? As someone who wants an Apple Silicon chip purely for Xcode/coding would the Air be the best bet then?

110 vs 146 seconds doesn’t seem like much of a difference to me (could be totally offbase here).

[u/716green]

I currently own a 16 inch 2021 MacBook pro (Intel) (from employer), and a 13 inch MacBook Air M1 (personal).

I can't even articulate how much I love my m1 and how much I can't stand the MacBook pro. The m1 air doesn't have a fancy it's lightning fast, it's beautiful, the screen is perfect (brightness and size imo) and it just feels good to use. The trackpad and keyboard ate amazing. All day battery life too.

The MacBook pro sounds like a jet engine constantly, it's big and bulky, the screen doesn't look as good, it doesn't have a nice feel to the keyboard, and the battery is useless without an outlet near by.

If I'm going to code, I'm going to want to reach for my m1 air every time but my employer requires that I use their MacBook pro when I'm coding for them.

Tldr; M1 MacBook pro may be excellent but the 13 inch air M1 is already perfect and cheap.

[u/LurkerNinetyFive]

Without giving Apple any ideas, I’d pay £500 extra for the display alone.

[u/KafkaDatura]

The problem with this comparison is that you also have to consider the chassis. Bigger, smoother, better lit screen, spatial sound, more convenient ports... You're not ONLY paying for more cores.

[u/DilbertLookingGuy]

The pro got better battery life than the air? I thought it would be the other way around.

[u/winsome_losesome]

As usual, their best videos are these comparison videos. They’re detailed and covers a lot.

But it’s getting confusing with how many videos they’re releasing. I think they’re milking it too much. Just make a comparison first of the base 14”, M1 Pro 16”, and the M1 Max.

[u/firelitother]

If M2 Air supports 32GB, I would buy that instead.