Is the 15 inch MacBook Air the PERFECT MACBOOK??

the Apple silicon MacBook lineup is really really good right now if you want small lightweight performance you can go for a 13-inch MacBook Air if you want to be a little bit more powerful but still compact you can get a 14 inch MacBook Pro and if you want bowls to the walls and the largest screen possible you've got yourself a 16 inch MacBook Pro but there has always been in my opinion something missing from this equation what if you really want the lightweight portability of a MacBook Air but you want some of these screen size of a 16 inch MacBook Pro what if you were to basically combine these devices into one beautiful hybrid that captures The Best of Both Worlds well as it turns out I was not the only one that had this idea and the new 15-inch MacBook Air is proof that you can have your cake and eat it too I think so even though the 15 inch MacBook Air doesn't have the same media cache as the Apple Vision Pro or the new Mac Pro or the M2 Ultra chip this is basically the boring announcement from WWDC but I still think that this could be one of Apple's best computers I know over the years a ton of people who have spent 2 000 plus dollars on a 15 or 16 inch MacBook Pro because they wanted that extra screen size when they really didn't need all that performance and this gives you the ability to get a hold of that screen real estate without having to spend a fortune and that I think is a really really interesting deal I'm kind of excited guys this is a product that I've been wanting for so long yes yes dude that looks so good what do we get in the Box usual accoutrement we've got a tiny tiny 35 watt USBC dual Port USBC power adapter and we've got a color matched Starlight braided power cable that is pretty nice are the Apple stickers color matched they should be yes oh yeah that's nice so the 15-inch MacBook Air itself this is really thin and really light oh I already like this a lot let's get that peel I'm not gonna waste time you guys have probably seen this a hundred times already by now I know I already have Starlight for the 13-inch MacBook Air but I couldn't resist because I really like this color it's silver but with a hint of gold and it's just the right amount of subtle but not being silver because I'm kind of done with silver and space gray let's open it up take a look around this is an incredible looking computer [Music] good look at that those smooth Palm rests we don't have speaker grilles we don't have the painted keyboard well it's clean and minimal and it's so thin 11.6 millimeters guys that means that this MacBook is as thin as the original iPhone that's pretty crazy oh yeah oh I like this this is the dream MacBook for me I've been asking for this for ages and they finally did it and I just have gone through the setup I haven't even done anything on it and I'm already excited I'll tell you why it's thin it's light it's fanless it's a MacBook Air but it's big and it has screen real estate oh this is I like this this is you're my favorite now but I gotta tell you there's been something on my mind lately and that is I want to know what it looks like on the inside do we have a bigger heatsink does that mean that this thing is going to perform better than the 13-inch MacBook Air we we have bigger battery but the battery life is rated the same so is there just like a bunch of empty space in here or are the speakers really big well we're gonna find out because I haven't even done anything on this Mac but it's time to open it up so for comparison's sake here's a 13-inch MacBook Air we've got speakers up at the top our antenna bands are up here too then we have a long logic board and some batteries surrounding the track pad so let's see if there's anything different about the 15 inch getting inside this MacBook Air is pretty simple we've got four P5 screws around each of the corners next we're going to grab a suction cup and just make a little bit of a gap in the bottom case here just enough to slide in our little pick we can go left pop that clip and then we'll go right pop that clip then we'll go down the side one two clips this time and now with the bottom case off this takes a little bit of maneuvering but we're just going to pull this way parallel to the MacBook there we go it's not the easiest thing to do but it's not too bad and realistically you probably never need to do this anyway wow that is really just a larger version of what we just saw there are slightly larger battery cells it seems and you can see the speaker drivers have been extended but they actually now go around the logic board holy cow that logic board looks nearly identical are they interchangeable could you switch the logic board between these things I can't imagine that you could because they're extending the USBC Port somehow this like Clips on directly but over here is a little bit different this side has different screw mountings so I don't think you could swap that over there's a screw under here that's in a different spot over here so I don't think they'd be swappable but they're very very similar and unfortunately I think that's going to mean that we're not going to get better cooling or performance out of this because the heatsink looks exactly the same but the key difference in here are the speakers and this is something that Apple talked about during the keynote so I think we got to put these things back together and I have a bunch of things I want to compare number one the speakers number two the performance and number three the battery life so let's get to it shall we [Music] let's start with a speaker test because Apple made a big deal during their keynote address about the speakers in this thing with spatial audio increased number of drivers but how does it actually compare to the 13 and 16 inch MacBooks [Music] compared to the 13-inch MacBook Air there's a definite Improvement in bass and frequency response you can sense a lot more depth to the sound but when you put the 16 inch next to it obviously it's not going to compete as well the machine just isn't thick enough to get the deep rich bass that the 16 inch provides take another listen oh [Music] now of course Apple loves to tout their speaker technology and there is nothing wrong with the 15-inch MacBook Air it's just that when they make these grandiose comparisons you kind of imagine that the sound is going to be groundbreaking and it's not I mean it's really really good but it's not groundbreaking it's nowhere near as good as the 16-inch MacBook Pro I mean just listen to the technical details at the beginning of this song on both devices foreign [Music] you can really hear the depth to the sound on the 16-inch Macbook Pro not to say that the 15-inch MacBook Air is bad but considering that both are claimed to have spatial audio support it is worth knowing that the 16 inch is going to blow it out of the water and that's also something that could be said of its display the 15-inch MacBook Air is fantastic because it gives you a chance to get that larger screen space but when you compare it to the xdr display on the 16-inch MacBook Pro with its mini LED technology and not to mention the pro motion support the differences in colors brightness and contrast and especially the black levels are extremely noticeable but keep in mind that the 15-inch MacBook Air is over a thousand dollars less expensive than the 16 inch MacBook Pro so you wouldn't exactly expect them to have complete parity in sound and display but should you expect a 15-inch MacBook Air to perform the same as the 13-inch MacBook Air well to find out I fired up good old cinebench and ran them back to back and the first thing that you'll notice here is that the 15 inch does pull ever so slightly ahead now I ran this test about a million times both for performance and Battery testing and I did notice that the 15 inch air has a very very slight performance gain over the 13. this is not something that you would ever notice in real world testing but it is there on its first run the 13-inch scored 7894 whereas the 15-inch scored 7912 that's only 0.2 percent faster but on the second run the 15 inch drop down to 74.21 whereas the 13 inch went down to 73.33 that widens the Gap to 1.2 percent so you could argue that the 15 inch does a slightly better job of retaining thermal performance next I went over to gfx bench to see how they would compare the graphics department and secretly have been running a battery test this whole time so the interesting thing to keep in mind for this comparison though is that I'm running base models on both so for 10.99 your 13-inch MacBook Air is going to come with the bend 8 core GPU whereas the 15 inch is going to get the full 10 core GPU so do keep that difference in mind when we look at these frame rates so weirdly in some cases the eight core outperforms the 10 and vice versa but overall the 10 core 15-inch MacBook Air is 7.3 percent faster in these tests so now let's get to battery life because as I mentioned I've been running a battery life test this entire time and this is an interesting test because Apple was claiming 18 hours of battery life exactly the same as the 14 inch MacBook Pro and the 13-inch MacBook Air but is that actually true well in my testing which included four back-to-back cinebench runs two gfx bench runs as well as 20 minutes of video playback the 15 inch got down to 63 battery remaining where the 13 inch got down to 59 so definitely an interesting comparison the way Apple made it seem in the keynote it's basically like choosing between an iPhone 14 and a 14 plus same thing bigger phone but I think there's a little bit more nuance and subtlety to this particular comparison especially when you consider the 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pros as well I think the 15-inch MacBook Air is a really good value at 12.99 because for an extra 200 over the base model M2 MacBook Air you're getting more performance from that 10 core GPU even if it's only a slight difference and of course you get that bigger screen you also get slightly better battery life and you're gonna get better speakers I think overall that's a lot of upgrades for the 200 difference between these machines but you're not gonna buy the 15-inch MacBook Air because you want seven percent more GPU performance with four percent better battery life no you're gonna buy this because of the form factor and the form factor is phenomenal it's basically a Reincarnation of the Intel 15-inch MacBook Pro except that it has all of the good and none of the bad 15-inch display check thin and light design check plenty of performance check outstanding build quality check all of the good but there's no butterfly keyboard or touch bar or scalding hot Intel processor or fans screaming in your ears constantly it's so good the form factor of the 15-inch MacBook Pro has always been really really good even since the Apple silicon transition I've gone back to this and gone dang you know what this is a really nice package but now you can get all of that with the 15 inch MacBook Air for a thousand dollars less than that old thing ever was when it was new and you're getting a fanless design with great speakers an apple silicon performance all oh it's so good the only thing you have to watch out for is your configuration I always review base models because base models always fit neatly into Apple's pricing structure but slap a couple upgrades on this guy and you're fast gonna be breaching two thousand dollars at which point you got to pump the brakes and go hey maybe I should be buying a 14 inch or a 16 inch MacBook Pro at this point because you're gonna get a lot more performance I'm also a little bummed that this has an M2 Chip I kind of would have rather Apple waited and just refreshed the 13 inch and the 15 inch with the M3 chip when that becomes available but obviously for the majority of people who are going to buy this what this represents is a fast thin light fanless computer with the screen real estate that you've always wanted but without that two thousand dollar price tag that you didn't and I think it rocks let me know if you'd like to see a broader comparison where I do kind of a buyer's guide comparing all the different MacBooks in the line up that are available right now I think that could be a pretty interesting video let me know your thoughts on this MacBook Air in the comments below and I'll see you all in the next one [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Luke Miani

Views: 183,175

Keywords: M2, Apple, Mac, MacBook Air, MacBook, WWDC, WWDC23, M2 MacBook Air, MacBook Air 15, MacBook Air 15”, macOS, college, college MacBook, Apple buying guide, m2 Macs, Apple guide

Id: PjQLkVAxPD0

Length: 14min 27sec (867 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 13 2023