- If you're a typical user and you want an M3
MacBook with a big screen, the choice comes down to
the 15-inch MacBook Air and the 16-inch MacBook Pro. But how do you know which
one to actually choose? I know there's some confusion about external display support, and I found something strange
about file transfer speeds, so let's talk about it. Now, I don't wanna spoil the ending here, but if you're a super demanding user and you're always pushing
your laptop to the max, save yourself some time
and get the MacBook Pro. But for the rest of us,
there's a lot to consider. Now, one of the major differences
we see is form factor. And I'm not talking about aesthetics. This can actually become a
very meaningful difference. Both laptops have the
updated, more boxy design, but the MacBook Pro has a
slightly larger footprint. It's about 50% thicker. And it weighs either
1.4 or 1.5 pounds more depending on which chip
configuration you get. If you're using your
MacBook from your desk, this isn't really gonna make a difference. But if you travel with it a lot or if you take it with
you to and from school, keep in mind the additional
weight of the MacBook Pro and the larger footprint
when you're on a plane, in a coffee shop, or anywhere else where you might be tight on space. Now I've had every 16-inch
MacBook Pro since the M1, and it's pretty much the MacBook that I take with me anywhere, and I still use it on a plane
even though it's oversized. And since they both fit in my backpack, the larger footprint isn't
super meaningful to me, but I do notice the additional weight. Now, both models have the
same type of keyboard, which might be the best keyboard
on any laptop that I own. And really, the only
difference is the black well on the MacBook Pro,
which looks kind of cool. Now, we're getting a really
big palm rest assembly with both models, so the typing experience is really comfortable even for long typing or coding sessions. In both cases, we have a full
height row of function keys and a Touch ID button for
biometric authentication. Now, both MacBooks also
have giant track pads. They're responsive, they're accurate. You can click anywhere. They have pressure-sensing capabilities. And Apple might make my favorite
touch pad on any laptop. Now, the one on the MacBook
Pro is a little bit bigger than the one on the MacBook Air but not in a way that's been meaningful for anything that I do. Now, as far as colors, the
MacBook Pro comes in Silver and a new Space Gray, which
is the one that I got, and I absolutely love it. The MacBook Air comes
in Silver, Space Gray, Starlight, and Midnight, which Apple says that now features a
breakthrough anodization seal to reduce fingerprints. Now I have the new one and the
previous model in midnight, and I'm not really sure that I've noticed a major difference. It still shows fingerprints. But like I've said before,
I don't really care if my gear looks like I'm using it. And if that ever becomes an issue for me, I just give it a quick wipe. Having said that, if fingerprints is something that's gonna bother you, just do yourself a favor and
pick one of the other colors. The Silver or Space Gray are timeless and the Starlight is super clean. But what about the built-in displays? Now here we see some super
important differences. We're getting a 15.3-inch
display on the MacBook Air versus 16.2 on the MacBook Pro. So of course the MacBook Pro is larger, but somehow it still has thinner bezels. In terms of the actual display itself, it's a clear win for the
Liquid Retina XDR Display on the MacBook Pro. Now, don't take this the wrong way. The 15-inch display on the
MacBook Air is very nice, but the MacBook Pro
display is just next level. It's super sharp. The colors look amazingly crisp. And because it's a mini-LED display versus LCD on the MacBook Air, we're getting a lot more dimming zones with darker blacks. Now, the MacBook Pro also
has a higher resolution. It's brighter for SDR content. And it's much brighter for HDR content. Now, if all you watch is SDR content, then it's not a major difference. But more and more content
is being created in HDR, and then the difference is noticeable. Now, both displays are
P3 true tone displays with support for 1 billion
colors, which is great. But the MacBook Air has a 60 hertz display and the MacBook Pro has ProMotion. Now, this is Apple's adaptive refresh rate of up to 120 hertz. So essentially, depending
on what you're doing, the display can go from 24 hertz all the way up to 120 hertz in order to optimize the user experience and maximize battery life. Now, looking at the ports, we start seeing more
significant differences. So the MacBook Air has two
Thunderbolt 3/USB 4 ports, and a MagSafe port on the left side, and then a 3.5 millimeter
headphone jack on the right. The MacBook Pro has two Thunderbolt
4 ports, a MagSafe port, and a 3.5 millimeter
headphone jack on the left, and then another Thunderbolt
port, an SDXC card reader, and an HDMI port on the right. Now, with the MacBook Air, all three ports are on the left side, so you can only charge the MacBook or connect accessories from one side. The MacBook Pro has ports on both sides. So when you're traveling,
when you're at a coffee shop, or even around the house, you
have more convenient access. I also love having the SDXC card reader on the MacBook Pro. This way, I don't need to bring a hub or a dedicated card reader
with me every time I travel. But I know that that's not
meaningful for every user. Now, when it comes to
external display support, there has been some confusion. So the MacBook Air supports a single external 6K 60 hertz display if you still wanna use the
display on the laptop itself. If you close the MacBook Air
and use it in clamshell mode, then it will support
another 5K 60 Hertz display. So the maximum that you're getting is two. With the MacBook Pro, if
you get the M3 Pro chip, you can connect up to
two 6K 60 hertz display over Thunderbolt, or one 6K 60 hertz
display over Thunderbolt, and then one 4K 144 hertz over HDMI. The other option with the MacBook Pro is to upgrade to the M3 Max chip, and then you can connect
three 6K 60 hertz display and a fourth 4K 144 hertz display. But if you've seen my
MacBook accessories video, I showed you how to connect
three external 4K displays to any Mac or MacBook that
has at least an M1 chip in it. And that's in addition to
the built in MacBook display. Now, in that video, I
was using the PD2725U, but BenQ actually makes
three different models specifically designed for MacBook users. These monitors don't just look great, but they're shipped with
default color settings that perfectly match MacBook colors. They also have something
called M-book mode, which provides active color syncing so that the colors on the MacBook display and the colors on the BenQ
display look the same. And this way, if I'm
editing video or photos, I know that I can trust
the colors that I see. They have plenty of ports and the stand is super versatile, so you can tilt your
display lower or raise it. You can easily switch between
landscape and portrait mode. They have a built-in KVM switch, so you can use the same
display keyboard and mouse with two different devices. And I love the Hotkey Puck G2 because it gives me easy access to all of the monitor's features without having to mess
around with tiny buttons on the back of the monitor. So click the link in the description to learn more about BenQ's three displays designed specifically for Macs. And thank you to BenQ for sponsoring this portion of the video. Now, as far as the camera, both MacBooks have a 1080p camera, which works really well for video calls. In both cases, we have a notch, and I feel like I always
have to add this disclaimer. Yes, I wish it wasn't there if it means that I wouldn't have to
give up on the thin vessels, which can't be done with
the current camera module. No, it doesn't bother me. And no, it doesn't interfere
with how I actually use any of the MacBooks that have a notch. And the one feature that I
still wish we got with it is Face ID. Now, when we look at the sound system, both MacBooks technically have
a six-speaker sound system with force-canceling woofers. With the MacBook Air, the
speakers are hidden in the hinge. And with the MacBook Pro, we have the more typical speaker grills on each side of the keyboard. Now, Apple calls the sound system on the MacBook Pro high-fidelity. And there's no way to confuse
the two in terms of sound. The speakers on the MacBook Air are actually surprisingly good, especially considering the fact that you have to look really
hard to find them in the hinge. But the speakers on
the 16-inch MacBook Pro could be the best speakers on
any laptop that I've tested. So if you like to use the
speakers on your laptop, the MacBook Pro is
definitely the way to go. Now, let's talk a little
about processing power. And remember what I said in the beginning. If you're looking for the
more powerful machine, that's definitely gonna
be the MacBook Pro, whether you go with the
M3 Pro or the M3 Max chip. Now, this is because of the additional CPU and GPU cores in those chips. But the MacBook Air has plenty of power for the vast majority of users. Now, since the foundation of
all three chips is the same, single core performance
is virtually identical. When we look at multi-core
performance, as you'd expect, the MacBook Pro comes out ahead, and by how much really depends on which configuration of
the MacBook Pro you go with. But keep in mind that the price starts
going up fairly quickly. For GPU performance, again,
you'd expect the MacBook Pro to come out ahead with additional
GPU cores, and it does. Another advantage we
see with the MacBook Pro has to do with sustained performance. And because it has an active
cooling system, or fans, when you push the system
and it starts to heat up, the MacBook Pro can just turn on the fans, cool the system down, and then maintain the
same level of performance. And we can see that pushing the system to a hundred percent for 10 minutes, we're getting the same performance we did as the much shorter baseline test. With the MacBook Air, which has no fan, the system has to
throttle back performance in order to cool down. And we're seeing about a
7.5% drop in performance. It also means that the MacBook Pro doesn't physically feel as warm. So here's how I would look at it. The typical user isn't pushing
their MacBook to the limit for that long on a regular basis. And even if they do every once in a while, assuming that the baseline performance of the MacBook Air is enough for them, it's only a slight drop in
performance on rare occasions. Now, if all you do is
batch process hundreds of high res photos in Lightroom, if you're working with
super demanding video files and you're constantly
rendering large video projects, or if you're using 3D applications, then you'll notice upwards of two to five times improved performance on the MacBook Pro. But that type of user is
already likely to know that they're better off
with the MacBook Pro. Now, in addition to this
improved performance, the MacBook Pro also has
50% higher memory bandwidth. And there's an important difference when it comes to unified memory. The base MacBook Air
comes with eight gigs, which can be upgraded to 16 or 24. The MacBook Pro starts
out with twice that. It starts out with 16,
and it can be upgraded to 32, 64, or 96 gigabytes. And we'll come back to
that in just a minute, but let's talk about the
SSD and battery life. So as far as SSD speeds,
if you're familiar with the M1 or M2
MacBooks, you already know that the 256 gigabyte
version of the MacBook Air comes with slightly slower SSD
speeds than the larger sizes. And in either case, the MacBook Pro comes with an even faster SSD. But when we tested data transfer, we found something super unexpected. We started out by copying
a 20 gigabyte file from a super fast external SSD, and we found that the
256 gigabyte MacBook Air finished in 12.75 seconds, the
512 gigabyte in 8.33 seconds, and the MacBook Pro in 8.21 seconds. So the 256 gigabyte model
took about 50% longer, but four seconds might not be a huge deal. Now, when we copied a
107 gigabyte file over, the 256 gigabyte MacBook Air finished in four minutes and 42 seconds while the 512 gigabyte MacBook
Air finished in 42.5 seconds, and the MacBook Pro in
a similar 41.66 seconds. That means that the 256
gigabyte MacBook Air took approximately four minutes
longer to copy this file, which is like 671% longer. And when we took a closer look, all three laptops initially said that this process would
take about a minute. But the transfer speed on
the 512 gigabyte MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro remained constant. When the 256 gigabyte MacBook Air reached a little over 60 gigabytes, it drastically slowed down
for the rest of the process. So it actually got to 60
gigabytes copied in 30 seconds, and then the other 46 gigabytes took four minutes and 12 seconds. Now, is this gonna matter
to the overwhelming majority of MacBook Air users? No. But if you are constantly copying large files back and forth, make sure that you get
at least 512 gigabytes on the MacBook Air. Now, moving on to battery, the MacBook Air has a 66.5 watt hour battery, which is rated for 18
hours of video playback. The 16-inch MacBook Pro comes
with a 100 watt hour battery rated for 22 hours. And then both laptops are rated for 16 hours of wireless web. Now, I have to say that these
are two of the best laptops that I've ever tested for battery life, but if you want the absolute best, go ahead and get the MacBook Pro. Alright, so which model is the
right choice for your needs? And remember that I have
links in the description which typically have lower
prices than the Apple Store. When comparing the base models, the 15-inch MacBook Air is $1,200 less, which is almost half the price. And if you try to match up
the RAM and the storage, you'll be adding an additional 400 bucks, so now it's $800 less. And technically, the MacBook
Pro still comes out ahead with two additional
gigabytes of unified memory and more CPU and GPU cores. Now, the base 16-inch M3 Pro model with a 12-core CPU and an 18-core GPU will be more powerful
than the MacBook Air. You're getting a larger display, additional external display support, more ports, and better battery life. The 15-inch MacBook Air still
has more than enough power for the overwhelming majority of users. You're still getting a large display, and fantastic battery life, and a super portable
ultralight 15-inch MacBook. I would strongly consider
upgrading the internal storage and the unified memory to 512 and 16 because this MacBook could
easily last five to seven years or even more for some users. And this way, you won't need
to prematurely replace it. Now you should check out this comparison. Click on my face to subscribe. You know what I always say,
buy it nice or buy it twice. Good luck and see you soon.
