Surface Laptop 4s vs M1 MacBook Air: You'll Be Shocked!

oh no oh no no no what hey guys it's max we just got in the brand new surface laptop 4 and we not only are going to compare it against apple's m1 macbook air but also against the surface laptop 4 with the amd processor so i am super excited to see how apple's m1 compares to intel and amd and we're not only going to compare things like the keyboards trackpads speakers webcams we're also going to look at that cpu performance in real world tasks and how the thermals compare between intel and amd as always we have links down in the video description and i have a link to this m1 macbook air that you can buy for 900 on sale right now which is crazy and i also want to mention that you guys can click that subscribe button down below that would help us out because we're trying to reach 1 million subscribers before the end of the year and about 77 of you guys are not actually yet subscribed so that would mean the world to us let's go and jump in and these both weigh 2.8 pounds so as far as weight it's identical but you can see that the surface laptop 4 is physically larger than the macbook air and the biggest reason why is the display and along with that we have some major display differences that are quite shocking which we'll talk about in just a bit and surprisingly the surface's body is actually thinner than the macbook airs but once you add in the lid it is just slightly thicker overall now as far as ports our macbook air has two thunderbolt 4 ports so they're super quick whereas the surface laptop 4 has one usb type-c port and a usb type a port plus a headphone jack on the left hand side and then if we flip over to the other side the macbook has its headphone jack and the surface has the microsoft surface connector which you can use to charge and connect docs now i have to say we are transferring files to the surface and unfortunately this usbc port on here it's not thunderbolt 4 it is not thunderbolt 3 it's not even 10 gigabit per second usb type c so our transfer was going at a super slow 350 megabyte per second compared to my other amd laptop which actually transferred at about 730 so double the speed and then of course with thunderbolt 4 on the mac it goes at over 2000 with that same exact drive so that definitely is a disappointment now the only reason why i think they could be doing this is to sell their very expensive surface connector docks because you need to use their own without thunderbolt on this machine in order to get good speeds so that is a major disappointment now with their charger it actually comes with a faster 65 watt charger and they do give you one more usb port both these have nice one-handed hinges and i love that we have windows hello on this laptop it logs you in automatically whereas the macbook you do have to use touch id to log in or of course if you have an apple watch you can do that as well now our intel surface does have this alcantara material that's soft touch it is not cold to the hand so it does feel nice feels more cozy if you want to say that but it can capture grease but if you want to spend a little bit more get a higher end version of the surface you actually do end up getting full aluminum which does feel more premium as far as keyboards the surface laptops does feel really nice it's clicky it's responsive but it is not as good as the magic keyboard on the macbook air just feels a little bit more tactile i would say and as far as track pads the macbook air definitely has the better trackpad you can't really compete with these force touch or 3d touch track pads with that said even though the surface does have a diving board design trackpad it feels surprisingly even all around and it is also very responsive with microsoft's trackpad drivers and now it's time to compare the speakers our macbook air has these speaker grilles so the speakers are up firing whereas the surface you don't see speaker grilles anywhere so i'm sure they're probably flying from maybe behind the keyboard or somewhere over there so i'm curious to see if microsoft has made an improvement with this new laptop so let's go ahead and compare these and i will say this is going to be the last time that we are using this song i know a lot of you guys are tired of it so go ahead and enjoy hearing this song for the very last time put on a pair of headphones and let's go ahead and take a listen bring me back all right guys let me know your thoughts down in the comment section below which one sounded better and in what way i'll give you guys my opinion i don't think the surface laptop 4 had a speaker upgrade from the laptop 3. with that said it still sounds good it is really loud for a windows laptop it has good bass good mids the highs could be a little bit sharper but overall i think anybody's going to complain with that said the macbook air sounds better in every way the vocal clarity is definitely better it is definitely louder the bass is also a little bit more rich so the macbook air is definitely the winner and now it's compared the webcam and microphone quality this is the quality you can expect from the macbook air's 720p webcam and the built-in microphones and this is the quality of microsoft's 720p webcam looking at it right now it actually looks a lot better to me but you guys let me know which one looks better side by side down in the comment section below along with which one sounded better as far as the microphones and now let's compare the displays where we have a lot of differences the first one you'll notice is that the surface laptop 4 uses a more square display it's a 3x2 aspect ratio which i really like on a small 13 inch laptop gives you a lot more usable space 16 by 10 is also not bad now as far as detail or sharpness the macbook air has about a 4.1 million pixel display nice and sharp and then here we actually have 3.3 sounds worse but in reality this display is much better than a lot of 1080p displays it's nice and sharp so as far as detail there are no issues now this display is also a touch screen which of course apple does not put touch screens on their macs now as far as brightness the surface is actually brighter than the macbook air it is now 500 nits so it's brighter than before which is great and the macbook air is running at about 400 nits of brightness but unfortunately microsoft did not improve the reflectivity so it's almost like a mirror if you're in a dark room and you're watching dark content or if you're in a bright room with stuff in the background or even outside and along with that we also have a really big difference in contrast whereas the macbook air's display is a lot more contrasty with more accurate colors and finally let's get into performance i have all three laptops here we have the amd surface laptop four of course we have the m1 macbook air and then the intel surface laptop four this one right here is the mid spec i5 model um 11 gen but it is actually very close to performance to the i7 we checked online uh and then this is actually the best amd version of the surface laptop for you can get i purchased it on the business website because they don't let you get the best cpu on the mainstream one for some reason so let's go ahead and get started i'm starting off with the speedometer 2.0 test to see how quick and responsive the web browsing is and both surface laptops are actually plugged in we will be doing one test unplugged to see if they maintain their performance all right guys we are done and this is interesting i honestly wasn't expecting this the amd actually got worst they got last place 139 compared to 158 and 225 so of course the macbook air smoked the others it is super quick and responsive it was actually 42 faster than the intel laptop and then 62 faster than the amd and then the intel was actually about a 14 or so faster or 16 than the amd and that's because it does have a faster single core performance compared to having eight actual cores in this amd laptop and now let's see how these cpus perform in a variety of different tests so we're using geekbench five here and once again the two surface laptops are plugged in it's interesting the amd is actually loud you guys can probably hear that where these were silent and they actually got done first which is really weird all right we have our scores and now i know why the fans were spinning up we have a score of 7096 multi-core that is by far the fastest i've ever seen in a windows ultrabook that is incredible and it smokes the 5018 that our intel model got with the 11th gen which is actually quite good of a score for a laptop this size but neither of those compared to the 7641 of our macbook air which did it completely silently so we only have a difference about 7.6 percent between the amd and the m1 but the amd is about 36 percent faster than the intel now that does not tell the whole story first off they are both plugged in the two surface laptop fours we're going to test that in a sec unplugging them but if we look at the single core the amd gets absolutely smoked by the other two we have 172 compared to 1327 and then a massive 1743 for the m1 this is probably why web browsing is so much faster and snappier with the m1 it is 31 faster than the intel system as far as single core and 49 faster than the amd which is absolutely crazy and now let's go ahead and we are going to unplug the 65 watt power adapters and i'm gonna go run this one more time all right so we are running and i want to show you guys that i do have the best performance selected on these machines and with that now that it's on battery power uh this amd surface laptop 4 is staying completely silent which might not be good news alright we have our scores and yep i was right that is not good news we got a score of 5 700 instead of 7096 almost 70 100 we definitely are getting a fairly decent drop in performance on the amd system now as far as the intel it did drop but less than 100 points so not bad at all and then as far as single core actually got a little bit higher here on battery power but once again on the amd system we have 953 that is the slowest i've seen in years and that is a drop of about 23 percent uh kind of on both right there 23 25 that's pretty terrible and of course the m1 was unplugged the whole time and it just absolutely smokes these machines when it's unplugged no issues whatsoever and now i'm running the graphics test because i want to see how good are these amd integrated graphics and both of the surface laptop fours are plugged in so we're not going to be trying to hamper their performance we'll keep them plugged in for this all right we have our results and this is actually good news the amd got 15 07 which is really good compared to 15 032 pretty much the same score and this does have the best g7 graphics intel xe which they actually just got this good of performance very recently before it was much worse but of course the m1 macbook air got 19 065 it beat out these other two and keep in mind this is the seven core model and of course it is also unplugged if you spend about 50 bucks more you can get the 8 core model which gets 21 up to 22 000 you know what guys i wanted to test out unplugged performance i said i wasn't going to do it i want to see as far as graphics can amd keep up this level of graphics performance that was quite impressive all right oh no oh no no no what oh no okay are you kidding um uh it's on best performance okay no amd no that's horrible we well you guys can see it got eight thousand four hundred forty eight it's not half the performance but it's close dude it's a joke and the surface just got done fourteen thousand seven hundred so the intel system barely lost performance it lost about i don't know what is that three hundred three to four hundred compared to this it went from fifteen thousand to eight thousand four hundred wow all right guys now we're to push the machines to their limits we're going to test thermals so i want to get a baseline reading i have my thermal camera here and let's take a look at the amd system it's idling at 31 degrees celsius and i'm gonna go to the intel 30 degrees celsius so it actually is running slightly cooler and then our m1 mac look at that color difference so m on mac is at 27 degrees at the hottest point and that's actually what is that the display portion interesting yeah it's actually the display portion right there definitely cooler but we're going to take a look once we actually start running these and let's go ahead and get started with our 10 minute multi-core stress test it's going to push all these systems to their limits and unfortunately i opened up my hardware monitor here and it is not telling me the wattage or even the frequency of the cpu here we can see that it jumped up to 80 degrees celsius pretty quickly there and then on the intel system it's running at 83 84 degrees celsius and all the way up to looks like 39 almost 40 watts that is actually really high wattage for a machine like this which is maybe why it gets such good performance all right so looks like we're actually getting 3.1 gigahertz across eight cores compared to about 3.3 3.4 for the intel's four cores i don't know if you guys can hear that the amd's fans kicked up it's definitely loud whereas the macbook air is completely solid no fan in the intel system even at now 30 watts it is very very quiet all right the intel system is actually speeding up now i can hear the fan and it's different it's a lot higher pitch than the amd version even though it's the same laptop and our m1 macbook air is running at 83 degrees celsius so right around the same compared to the other two so it's been eight minutes so far and it's interesting that the intel laptop is actually louder now than the amd this got quieter that means it's cutting down the wattage to keep itself running cool and i really wish i could see the wattage but let's grab our thermal camera looks like the amd is running at 42 celsius and the intel is running at 44 even hotter wow and then our m1 is at 39 to 40. they're right there at the edge of course it's fanless all right we are done and this is a nice reversal we have 8 33 for the amd system compared to 7687 compared to the m1 macbook pro that means that if you're pushing cpu all the way it actually gets seven to eight percent higher performance than the m1 mac which is exactly the same but opposite compared to geekbench five where the mac was seven eight percent faster and that is with amd definitely slowing down somewhere in the middle of that test to keep itself from running too hot so that's excellent performance when it's plugged in and of course the intel is in last place 5038 points meaning the amd version of the surface laptop 4 with this best cpu is 65 faster than the intel as long as you can keep it plugged in and now let's see how those performance numbers actually act out in real world programs i have adobe lightroom classic opened here with some 42 megapixel raw images with a bunch of effects and we know from the past that even though this program is not written for apple silicon it's running under rosetta the performance is actually the same the smoothness when we're switching photos brushes all that stuff so now i'm wondering how does this amd cpu hold up so first i'm going to do is just switch through about the same so sometimes m1 slightly faster like that there you go so either about the same or maybe the m1 being slightly faster but it's pretty close and now i'm going to go ahead and select all of these images here all 50 of them and we are going to do an export test now as we wait i do want to mention that both these systems the intel surface laptop 4 and the macbook air have 8 gigabytes of ram compared to 16 gig on this high-end amd version which they make you get 16 gigabytes um now the previous tests we did didn't really really matter that much as far as the amount of ram because uh as long as you don't have stuff open in the background it's enough for it but lightroom is heavily dependent on ram performance so we're going to see how this unified ram can compete with 16 gig wow this is interesting the intel is actually going faster than the amd even though has weaker performance less ram and it's actually louder as well but it looks like the m1 is still sped up there and it's gonna finish first and bam the intel actually beat out the amd and yes the amd is still plugged in this is insane and there is the last one so looks like our macbook took two minutes and 33 seconds the intel took two minutes and 55 seconds and the amd took three minutes and 16 seconds which is crazy because as you guys saw it has the best cpu performance but in this real world photo editing test it is actually the slowest that is insane but now let's see what we get with video editing i have the latest version of davinci resolve studio opened up right here with some 4k footage with some luts and effects let's test out our playback performance i'm going to hit the spacebar on all of these and let's mute this guy right here and it looks like on the m1 it's playing back perfectly look how choppy that was on the amd and also on the intel both look like they are having a good amount of stuttering even though we have good graphics performance good cpu performance interesting okay i'm gonna do one more test here before we export i'm gonna go to my color tab here it's going to give us some more info and now we could see that it's playing back at about 20 21 frames per second 19 there right around there instead of 24 and with the intel 1817 so yes the intel is actually a little bit slower but neither one of these can play this back perfectly which is really surprising whereas our m1 no issues not even a single stutter and keep in mind these two windows laptops are plugged in so you know there's no performance issues the amd would slow down quite a bit if it was unplugged and now let's export this five minute 4k project we're comparing intel's quick sync compared to the m1 chips hardware encoders and amd's dedicated encoders over here so it's really cool that it is using that special encoder let's go and we'll see what we get and the macbook air is speeding through this we have just a few seconds remaining here all right it looks like it took two minutes and 58 seconds to get done we still have four minutes and five seconds remaining here and four minutes and 30 seconds remaining with the intel it took seven minutes and 27 seconds compared to seven minutes and 12 seconds and the m1 macbook air took two minutes and 58 seconds more than twice as fast it could have lapped these two all while being completely silent i'm sure you guys can hear these fans here they're both coming along and it is just silent no issues and it just is insanely fast that is absolutely incredible and the other thing that is incredible is that even though this amd system is so much faster with the multi-core performance and it is plugged in it would be much slower if we unplugged it the intel is just barely behind and it's also quite a bit cheaper as well which is just kind of crazy and mind-blowing so with all of that said what did we learn well first off even though we have eight cores here with the amd system and the fans kick up sooner and it runs louder and hotter real world performance isn't that much better in fact in lightroom it was actually slower and for video editing it was just slightly faster and then if you unplug it it is just much slower especially with the graphics so the intel system being cheaper i would actually suggest in this case going with the intel system and along with that the m1 macbook air is an absolute boss it is by far cheaper than the other two even if you're matching up the same amount of ram and ssd and you can actually pick one up right now for 900 899 bucks i'll have a link and down in the video description and it is silent and it just smokes these other two especially in the real world performance it is absolutely incredible so there you guys go let me know your thoughts down in the comment section below go ahead and click that subscribe button above to help us reach our goal of 1 million subscribers before the end of the year we would greatly greatly appreciate it and check out one of those other videos right over there that's been max and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Max Tech

Views: 2,384,310

Keywords: AMD vs Intel surface laptop 4, Surface laptop 4 intel vs and, Surface laptop 4 vs m1 MacBook Air, AMD surface laptop 4 vs M1 MacBook Pro, MacBook Pro vs surface laptop 4, Gaming, Video editing, Premiere Pro, Davinci Resolve 17, Final Cut Pro, FCX, Photoshop, Lighroom classic, Geekbench 5, compute, Metal, Open Cl, Cinebench R23, Fan noise, Overheating, Battery life, thermal throttling, SSD replacement, SSD Test, speakers, webcam test, keyboard, M1 vs AMD vs Intel, M1 vs Intel vs AMD

Id: 7yTWGjYFiC0

Length: 22min 35sec (1355 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 27 2021