15" MacBook Air | developer's dream

last year I was so impressed by the M2 MacBook Air that I nicknamed it the MacBook Pro Mini it totally aced my software developer tests but even so I've still found myself grabbing my trusty MacBook Pro for work mainly because of its larger screen size but guess what the new 15-inch MacBook Air just might change that you've seen the specs already I'm sure and many videos are out about this along with a bigger screen you've got a beefier battery more speakers for a larger Bolder sound all without packing on too much weight I wish I could stay the same for myself though this is the screen size and how much code you can fit on the screen and I've hidden the dock so that it doesn't get in the way here's my package.json file default font default everything we have 28 28.5 lies 20 in the quarter lines that fit on the 13 inch model and we have 34 full lines that fit on the 15-inch model for six extra lines you gotta pay what a hundred bucks not bad I'll do it I'll do it you can also see how many more folders I can see at the same time and on the left nav you can see how many extensions are showing at the same time going across is also important because now I can have more tabs showing without having to go through some kind of context menu you can also shrink Visual Studio code interface by command minus so you can fit a lot more things in there it's just that you're gonna have to squint a little bit more in theory a larger size might even ramp up its performance that's what I'm really curious about today and you can bet I'll be putting that to the test I'm mostly work in my home office which is this right here and then I have my portable office also known as Starbucks I took the new 15-inch base model there to work on a client project as a replacement for my MacBook Pro we're developing a mobile app that involves typescript to JavaScript transpilation and a native xcode compilation with quite a few cocoapod dependencies since I use native script this also has an Android version but I would kind of have a hard time running that on an eight gigabyte machine I wanted to get a sense of how different this feels than the MacBook Pro and a MacBook Air 13-inch for iOS development specifically with the only things running on the machine being Visual Studio code iOS simulator and an xcode build I did not find any significant difference between any of these machines from a perceived Performance Point of View things took a slightly different turn once I ran a few more tests later on I'll show you that in a bit and with a fanless machine on a hot summer day that ought to do it even with the base model MacBook Air that only has 8 gigs of RAM xcode and iOS project build and run just fine you really have to push the machine quite a bit or I could say Force that'll be a better word if you want to see any kind of slowdown I did have to try and answer the performance difference question which actually has been on my mind ever since the 15-inch machines were announced is the larger machine going to be more performant because of better heat dissipation due to the larger size so I had to see what it would take to get the 13 inch and the 15 inch MacBook airs to throttle and which one of them would do it first I've kicked off The xcode Benchmark build I'll link to it down below this is less for getting comparative performance metrics of the M2 but it's more for having an intense code compilation on the machine that would hopefully eventually start slowing down due to Thermal throttling this happens when the operating system starts to detect that the CPU is dangerously hot and slows it down to prevent a meltdown and I've discovered that the 15 inch machine actually started throttling sooner than the 13-inch machine which I found surprising but after some reflection not that kind of reflection even though there was plenty of that kind too I've concluded that this must be because of the larger surface area of the 15-inch machine so much for that experiment crazy amounts of glare aside I would not take the fanless machine to work outside on a hot day on the other hand I have shown that a MacBook Pro will handle this just fine and I've made a video about that although I would not even do that even with a MacBook Pro let's get back inside let's run this build one more time neither one of these is throttling yet but what I did notice was something odd the temperature on the 13 inch is hitting 108. we've kind of seen this before and it was expected but what wasn't expected is that the 15 inch temperature is at 69.77 80 but never quite reaching past 100 degrees it just never heats up that high could the case have something to do with that we're done over here folks on the smaller machine we have 112 seconds so in a cooler atmosphere we have the fastest time so far and we have the fastest time so far on this machine and actually it's the fastest time out of these two at 110 seconds no throttling on either one of these finally on the third run I was able to get the smaller MacBook Air to throttle there it is yes it's throttling this one is not throttling yet furthermore the temperature on this one jumped to 108 and this one stayed around 60 to 80 degrees I've also measured each one of these bodies here and they're both registering 41 degrees Celsius and I'm guessing What's Happening Here is there's more temperature being drawn out of the CPU into the body which is much better for the longevity of the machine I'm gonna make this a little bit more of a real world scenario here where I have 15 tabs open in Chrome on each machine I've got Docker running no containers but Dockers running and Docker takes up quite a bit of resources by itself just running I've got a project in vs code open and I've got a project in xcode open with a simulator so we've got a bunch of stuff running I'm gonna do the same kind of build to see if we can get this 15 inch to throttle in the office scenario just towards the end of the test the 15 inch started throttling however it lasted a lot longer than the 13 inch without throttling so there is actually actually a performance benefit here to the 15-inch model I'm going to do something totally unforgivable these machines are gonna hate me right now because I'm gonna do some machine learning training on it a machine like this is not meant to do machine learning training I'm trying to see if there's a difference between 8 core GPU which comes on a 13-inch model and the 10 core GPU which comes standard on the 50-inch Model A Link to this repo down below we're going to be training resnet 50. we're not going to be doing the full thing this requires 21 gigabytes of memory but what's interesting about Apple silicon is it's still going to run it it's just going to write all that to swap we're gonna see that it's not gonna be happy I'm gonna start as soon as I started that uh if I lost usability of my machine even haptic feedback on a touchpad doesn't work because the machine is just freaking out now you can see what's going on in the CPU history the GPU history this is part of activity monitor you can see that that GPU is really getting hit hard the haptic feedback just came on by itself and it remembered my stroke that's interesting okay I knew this thing wasn't going to be happy look at the memory pressure that's going on right here on this 13-inch model we already have eight gigabytes of swap being used we're in the red for memory pressure there not so much yet over here on the 15 inch but it's gonna happen there it is yeah the machines are completely unusable right now all right I got the result and I did this twice and the weird thing is the 13-inch model with less GPU cores one both times the samples per second is two and a half and the total completion time for that was 1 minute 37 seconds for this one 2 minutes 17 seconds and the samples per second was 1.9 and it was 1.6 last time I ran it I was expecting the 15 inch to do a little bit better because it has more GPU cores realistically you're not going to be doing any kind of machine learning on the base models here I did actually do the test on a few machines including an RTX 3070 I'll link to that video down below this particular test that I'm about to do actually shows the Apple neural engine at work and the GPU and the CPU so it Compares all three of them I'll link to this repository down below Peter Lynn created it he was on the channel before in that previous video I mentioned so let's run this I'm going to start rock paper scissors and let's go what this test does is it renders some frames and using the Apple neural engine it's insanely fast we got 636 on each one of these machines while 636 and 637 very close negligible difference but that's a lot of frames per second you can also see in the GPU history what's going on right now because that GPU is being pegged okay here's a difference you can see the number of frames per second on the GPU is different so we've got 83 on the 13 inch model with 8 GPU cores and 80 9 almost 90 on the 15 inch model with 10 GPU cores and that kind of uh aligns the numbers do actually matter here and the next test is CPU I don't expect there to be any difference because well these have the same number of CPU cores and they're the same exact CPU cores we also see the 13-inch model hitting up to 99 degrees Celsius whereas this one staying about 75 and we have a result yeah as far as CPU goes we got almost identical numbers 46.8 on the 13 inch model and 46.9 on the 15 inch model so the only difference there was in the GPU results not a huge difference but still a difference nonetheless I did run this on the M1 Ultra Max studio in that other video the one I linked down below you can check those results out and that's taking it to the extreme so you can see the difference there now these are both base models which means they have eight gigs of RAM and 256 gigabyte ssds and as we know the 256 gigabyte model only has one nand chip instead of two therefore the bandwidth is going to be smaller for your speed and disk speed does reflect that there is no improvement going to the new 15-inch unless you get a larger SSD speaking of upgrades I did get the 16 gigabyte model because the base model is probably not going to be enough for a lot of people right after reboot I ran Docker and just running Docker by itself which is one of the most popular things that developers use these days according to the recent stack Overflow survey just running Docker is taking up over five gigabytes of RAM already without any containers running so if you're doing virtualization if you're doing containerization you're going to need a lot more RAM than just the base model offers 16 at the minimum I would even say 24 if you're going for the air the 16 gigabyte 15 inch air that I got is actually space gray so I can finally tell them apart this will have a little bit better time running containers and virtual machines let me know Down Below in the comments if you want to see any of those videos so should you buy the new 15-inch model I would say for people like me people that enjoy a larger screen yes absolutely I think the 15 inch is going to replace the 13 inch at least for me but is it going to replace my MacBook Pro my 16 inch MacBook Pro well the feel of the machine is almost exactly the same as a 16 inch MacBook Pro I can somewhat tell the difference between the screens now at this point because I've gotten spoiled by my 16-inch Mac Pro it's got promotion whereas this one doesn't have that so sometimes when I drag the window I can see that it's a little bit choppy but it's not a huge deal the keyboard and the trackpad are both amazing it's a much bigger trackpad on the 15 inch over the 13 inch that is very noticeable especially if you're used to a 16 inch model MacBook Pro my 16-inch MacBook Pro does have 64 gigabytes of RAM you cannot get past 24 gigabytes of RAM in a MacBook Air right now but I've noticed that most of the workflows that I do that even require that much RAM are video editing photo editing things like that not programming well sometimes I run multiple windows machines inside a virtual machine inside parallels and in that case it does matter how much RAM you have and the more the better stay tuned for more videos about the MacBook Air and let me know in the comments down below what you want to see if you like this video if you found it entertaining or informative or both go ahead and give it Thumbs Up And subscribe to the channel for more videos like this thanks a lot folks I'll be back foreign

Channel: Alex Ziskind

Views: 211,013

Keywords: apple, apple macbook, macbook, macbook air, macbook air 15, air 15, apple silicon, 13 vs 15, 15 vs 13, m2 macbook, m2 air, m2 macbook air, programming, programmers, software development, software developers, macbook 2022, 2022 macbook, new macbook air, macbook air 2022, 2022 macbook air, m2 macbook air review, 2022 m2 macbook air, m2 macbook air 2022, new m2 macbook air, macbook air m2, macbook air m2 review, m2 macbook air 256gb, m2 macbook air 256 gb, m2 macbook air ram

Id: A1IOZUCTOkM

Length: 12min 35sec (755 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 16 2023