Macbook Air 15 Review: Far from Perfect

so by now there are tons of reviews out on the MacBook Air 15. if you've been watching my channel for a while I don't tend to rush out reviews I like to use the devices first before I tell you about them that way obviously I can experience things that you as a potential owner may experience in this case though since there are so many reviews out on the air 15 heck even I made an early stage prediction video on it which as you're about to see funnily enough ended up being pretty spot on I thought I'd do this review a little differently more focused on answering the question of whether the air 15 is now a viable or even better choice than the MacBook Pro 14 specifically for professional use cases that I know well content creation and software development and this question is very timely for me right now I'm massively growing this YouTube channel and hiring staff they need computers to use and we are a laptop only shop here my new staff needs laptops for video editing since we have limited space in the studio and people like to be mobile the MacBook Pro 16 isn't ideal I want to know should I buy them a MacBook Air 15 or should I buy them a pro14 so rather than make this decision off camera I thought I'd get in deep do some analysis and tell you what I found but first here is my super summarized view of the MacBook Air 15 which by the way I've been using solidly for the past two weeks overall it is a fantastic choice for anyone who is using their laptop for lightweight use consuming content working on office documents and that sort of thing in fact I believe it is the best laptop you can buy for that purpose the screen is very color accurate bright and crisp and I definitely appreciated the larger screen size plus Apple's Mac OS does an excellent job maximizing the information you can see on screen using the more space setting and slightly zooming in on Excel I was able to comfortably see 50 rows which is exceptional obviously substantially more than the smaller air 13 with M2 and a row more than on the MacBook Pro 14. the reason that there is only one row difference between the air 15's larger screen versus the pro 14s is likely due to pixel density the pro 14 has a slightly higher pixel density and therefore increase Clarity anyway the laptop is extremely lightweight for a 15 inch and its thin size add to just how portable it is the M2 processor is incredibly Snappy in everyday use it was just as fast as my MacBook Pro 14 with the M2 Pro chip things like opening applications were just as quick and it certainly was fast enough to do some programming and video editing on but more on that later the laptop is also dead silent as there is no fan noise because there is no fan one thing that is noticeably better on the air 15 than the Air 13 is that it doesn't feel warm to the touch while you use it this is because it's a larger laptop and the hot spots are further away from where your hands are in these fanless laptops normally the chassis itself acts as a heat spreader so for a smaller device like the Air 13 you feel more warmth as your hands are closer to the hot spots plus it still only draws 35 watts of power from the wall which really isn't that much and phenomenal when you consider the performance you get battery life is exceptionally long I lowered the screen's brightness to 200 nits and played a Netflix video over Wi-Fi for 4 hours at the end of the test the had a whopping 72 battery remaining which should get you around 14 hours for a similar use case this is almost identical to the MacBook Pro 14 with M2 the 12 core variant that is it had a little more remaining at 75 for the same test this is a fantastic result for the air 15 given it has a larger screen and a slightly smaller battery when compared to the pro 14. the speakers are also fantastic the webcam is good enough and the fingerprint reader works well there are three negatives all of which are minor though but I do want to mention them the notch is still too large especially as it does not support face ID in everyday use though you really don't even notice it's there the black colored midnight model it looks amazing but it shows smudges easily I'd recommend thinking twice before picking that color and then the keyboard definitely feels low travel it's not a bad keyboard as the keys feel Snappy and precise to type on but it's not as comfortable as the Glorious keyboards on my aero 14 or Dell XPS 13 plus the f-15s keyboard feels identical to the air 30 states which in my opinion is shallower and less comfortable than the MacBook Pro 14s I'm guessing that this is because the airs are thinner and apple had to go with a keyboard with less travel to accommodate this oh and one additional con is pricing although on the surface pricing does look good upgrades are very expensive especially the 16 gig of RAM upgrade which many people will want at a price of almost 1 700 US Dollars it's now very close to the price of a MacBook Pro 14 with M2 which is why I feel many people will be deciding between these two laptops so overall fantastic laptop for a user doing light tasks like contact consumption and office work but what about people trying to do professional tasks requiring a better performance like my own staff let's take a look at performance starting with geekbench 6 which tests a variety of common performance tasks you can see that the MacBook Air 15 with its 8 core processor performs very well in single core but unsurprisingly performs worse than the 12 core MacBook Pro 14 in multi-core it is almost exactly slower in the the same ratio as the number of cores it has less I.E it has two thirds of the cause so it performs two-thirds as fast but when we look at cinebench which tests the processor Under full load things get worse for the MacBook Air 15. in multi-core its performance is now worse than the lack of course it has and if I run cinebench on a loop for 10 minutes or even 30 minutes things continue to get worse this is because the air 15 doesn't have a fan to call the processor so the longer you run performance tasks the slower the laptop becomes you can see it already hits an insanely Hot 105 degree celsius average core temperature for this test the only way to keep the laptop's processor from getting even hotter is to feed it less power so it runs slower and I want to be clear with you guys a multi-core score of under 8 000 in cinebench in 2023 is really not that good that's a little worse than an Intel 13th Gen u-series processor which is their low powered processor let's talk about some professional use cases when editing a video on this laptop I found it work surprisingly well our videos are recently complex with lots of footage effects and color grading I noticed no major issues on the 16 gig of ram air 15 that I have it worked pretty well after I pushed the laptop a little though like switching between applications or ran an effect that's when I noticed a couple of times that there were some dropped frames that being said my MacBook Pro 14 with the M2 Pro chip and 32 gig of RAM also occasionally drop some frames not as many though the biggest issue in editing videos on the air though is when you go to export the video exporting is a very memory bandwidth dependent task the air has half the memory bandwidth of the M2 Pro chip 100 gigabytes per second versus 200 the M2 Max chip which is available as an upgrade for the MacBook Pro 14 has even more bandwidth at 400. this results in videos being twice as slow for me to render on the air versus my M2 Pro equipped MacBook Pro 14 and this is an issue in a professional setting click our videos are rendered multiple times as they go through various quality assurance checks that extra time that the air takes to render it really adds up you were talking around four times slower renders than on an M2 Max equipped MacBook Pro 14 or 16. then multiplied by how many times we render each video but it isn't only performance that is an issue for creators most digital cameras use SD cards to transfer data the MacBook Pro 14 has an SD card reader the F15 does not it's not efficient to constantly have to find a dongle to transfer files time is money in a professional setting oh and while we're talking about ports the air still only supports One external monitor whereas the pro support multiple alright let's talk about software development for a bit multi-core performance matters a lot as does the amount of memory you have developers run Ides integrated development environments which needs threads and memory to run then you'll need to run the application or in some cases applications that you are developing and test which also of course needs memory and threads to run then you'll likely have multiple developer tools running sometimes to execute the tests effectively you'll even need to run multiple virtual machines all these require threads and memory to run and often there is a lot of concurrency required this is different to opening lots of browser tabs where in modern browsers the tabs you aren't currently looking at are just moved out of an operational mode until you re-click on them so they free up threads in memory as you've seen the multi-core performance of the a15 is substantially less than the MacBook Pro 14 plus the F15 is limited to a Max of 24 gig of memory verse 96 for the pro 14. so if you are doing heavy software development on your laptop I.E you're developing and testing a large application with a large data set then I would not recommend you buy the air 15. however there are three types of software developers that I think the air 15 will be great for and perhaps even better than the MacBook Pro 14. one computer science students the air 15 has more than enough power for you two software developers who write code that predominantly execute on a remote server I.E those building mln AI models and three software developers who know the applications they are developing are very light in their performance needs I.E mostly front end if you fit one of those use cases as I said the air 15 may even be better than the pro14 as you'll enjoy a larger screen which I believe helps you be more effective as a developer just make sure you get a minimum of 16 gig of memory and 512 gig of storage on storage my MacBook Pro 14 has a two terabyte drive and the a15 that I have has a 512 gig Drive the air 15 has slightly slower read speeds but significantly slower write speeds as I understand this is an issue with a smaller 256 and 512 gig drives on Apple's newer Max Honestly though for most users the speeds of these smaller drives are fine by the way I haven't talked about the difference in the number of GPU cores on the air versus those available on the pro 14. look I just don't really do any heavy rendering tasks that use them but I did play a couple of rounds of my favorite casual game League of Legends and it played very smoothly on the air even though it uses Rosetta 2 emulation so in conclusion the MacBook Air 15 with M2 is a fantastic laptop definitely my pick as the best laptop that you can buy right now for light use consuming content using office and that sort of thing for professional level creative work like video editing I do not recommend buying this laptop over the MacBook Pro 14. there is two bigger performance drop particularly due to memory bandwidth plus it lacks an SD card reader for software developers like students or those doing less intensive development the air 15 is a good buy and I'd recommend it over the MacBook Pro 14. you get a larger screen a slightly lighter laptop for a lower price however for those doing intensive software development on a laptop I.E large applications large data sets you should absolutely buy the MacBook Pro 14 or even the 16 over the air 15. there there is a substantial lack of multi-goal performance on the air 15 and memory is limited plus even if you can develop on the F-15 today it won't give you the longevity of a more powerful MacBook Pro well that's all for today folks what did you think of the F-15 would you buy it over the MacBook Pro 14 let me know with a comment below for my stuff I think I'm going to go with the pro 14. if you like this video you know what to do smash that like button and get subscribed not only does it show your appreciation for the insane amount of work spent making these videos and it is insane but it also makes my mother very proud till next time go do something awesome with your day and I will catch you later

Channel: Just Josh

Views: 47,383

Keywords: Best Laptop, Laptop Review, Best Laptop 2023, Best Laptop for Work from Home 2023, Best Laptop for Students 2023, Best Student Laptop 2023, Best Student Laptop, Best Laptop for Software Developers, Macbook Pro, best laptop 2023, best laptops for students, best laptop for students, macbook air 15 inch 2023, Best Creator Laptop, Best Laptop for Video Editing, Macbook Air 15, Macbook Air Review, Macbook Pro 14 vs Air 15, Macbook Pro vs Air

Id: agLx1-X2Kro

Length: 11min 51sec (711 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 05 2023