I'm gonna say something controversial. It shouldn't be controversial,
but a bunch of you in the comments are probably gonna say it is, but if you're in the market for a MacBook,
this is probably the one you should buy. This is the new MacBook Air with fancy top-of-the-line
M3 processor, and realistically for most people,
this is more than you need. As with most Apple packaging, simple and sweet.
Oh, hey, it's not plastic anymore. We've got typical propaganda,
also still with the spacer though. Like, what is this? Look at how much empty space there is in there.
We've got, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, there we go, stickers.
Thank you. I was worried for a second. The day that Apple stops including Apple stickers
in their packaging is the day that we know we have failed as a society.
We've got charger brick also in a glassine bag. What is this?
This is a 30 watt USB-C power adapter, and then the cute little sleeved MagSafe cable.
Type-C on one end, MagSafe on the other. I did get confirmation for 20 bucks US,
you can upgrade to a 70 watt single port charger,
or a dual port 35 watt charger. Depending on what you prefer,
I would go with the 70 watt because faster charging.
On this side, we've got the MagSafe charging port for the cable I showed you earlier,
along with two USB-C ports. These run at Thunderbolt 3 or USB 4, so 40 gig on those.
There is no additional USB-C ports on the other side,
like some MacBook Pros, and it is going to be the same configuration
if you have the 13 or 15 inch air. We've got a headphone jack here,
which I like to see on the bottom. Feet for those that are interested, free of charge.
Ooh, I forgot the M2 air was with the sexy colors.
Look at that, same IO.
Hey, look, same IO. Damn, this is the same laptop, but faster, I guess.
Let me crack them open. Hey, look, same laptop.
I can tell you already the moral of this story is gonna be to buy a used M2 MacBook,
or a refurb maybe, or apparently Walmart has M1 MacBook Airs for like 700 bucks.
As for on paper, they're not obviously the same laptop.
The big thing you're getting here is the new M3 chip. Now we've gone into the details of far more extensively
in the MacBook Pro M3 video, but the main differences are a little bit better efficiency,
really good performance as before, but even a little bit more better.
We've got AV1 decoding, but not encoding, and right, hardware ray tracing,
if you game on your MacBook Air or maybe in Blender,
I don't know if it supports it yet, but that could be a use case.
And then other than that, specs-wise you're looking at pretty much the same laptop
aside from the Wi-Fi 6E support that they added as well.
So it'll be fast on Wi-Fi if you also happen to have a Wi-Fi 6E router
and fast internet that can take advantage of it. Oh, I almost forgot.
There is one more important hardware thing. On the M2 Air, you could have an external display,
but only one. On the M3, you can now have two external displays,
but there isn't really any hardware improvement. It's still a single display controller.
So when you're using two external displays, you can't use the laptop display.
That's because they're muxing the normal laptop display
out through display output and not actually giving you an additional display controller.
It is technically better than the M1 Air
in terms of flexibility, but not better in terms of supporting more displays.
It's the same amount. They're just giving you the ability to use the laptop display output on a separate monitor.
So it sucks. It's still technically like better than they had before,
but come on, on a Windows laptop, you can have like four display outputs if you want.
What you can't get on a Windows laptop is this much horsepower without the noise, at least.
In theory, the keyboard and trackpad should be the same, but let's try them out.
Where does like a notepad happen here? Notes. My name is Jake,
and I think this keyboard is pretty solid.
It feels really similar, but almost like maybe it's just because this one is new.
Like this feels clickier. This feels like a just slightest bit mushier.
I don't know. Just because it's used and one is not.
Hard to say. Trackpad feels the same. It's a nice big size for the class of laptop.
Everything there looks the same and is still good.
We've got the same display with the notch.
Thought we were past this thing, Apple, but all right. Why not a dynamic island?
It's the same 13.6 inch IPS display, 2560 by 1664,
500 nits brightness, not high refresh rate, but a wide P3 color gamut.
Let me do some speaker ring. They sound a little different.
Am I crazy? Come here, Belle. It's okay. Like don't get me wrong.
It is very similar, but like ever so slightly,
just the tiny is a bit different. It almost just sounds more distorted on the left.
Yeah, actually, I did notice on the spec stage on the M2,
they listed wide stereo sound and they don't list it
on this one. I don't know that it's better. It's like so close that you're not really gonna be able
to tell the difference aside from if you were doing this. The one thing I will say you are losing out compared
to a MacBook Pro is MacBook Pro speakers are obviously
a little bit better. These are still solid for, I mean, where did the speakers come from?
They fire the speaker out of like here. So it like bounces at you.
It's a good design. It works. I mean, it sounds pretty solid. And it has sounded pretty solid on this one too.
As usual, the display is pretty close to as they specify.
It seems like it's a tiny bit brighter. Color tracking is very accurate.
That being said, Apple's not really in the position
they once were where they just led the class.
Windows laptops are starting to catch up. And in some cases even surpass Apple,
but you do at least know that you're gonna get a fairly color accurate display buying an Apple laptop.
Not to mention that macOS does a really good job of color management.
It doesn't have HDR like the MacBook Pros because there's no local dimming and it's only 60 Hertz,
which probably doesn't matter to you realistically.
It does look nice on the eyes though. Well, let's talk performance then.
What do we got here? In games, it is a bit faster.
You can and will get slightly more frames than your friend with a MacBook Air M2.
You won't get more frames than your friend with the MacBook Pro M3, that's for sure.
But it also has two extra GPU cores on that M3 chip. And a cooling fan, which is gonna make a big difference
if you plan on gaming for more than 45 seconds.
You are gonna run into a situation where you will thermal throttle, similar to all the previous M based MacBook Airs.
If you think about it in your day to day, your web browsing, you're never gonna notice that.
However, gaming, extended workloads, it does make a difference.
There are ways to get around it. You could get a laptop cooling pad
or when you're editing and premiering, close the lid and have your two monitors now.
Haha, screw you MacBook Air M2 dude. But it is still worth mentioning.
That being said, it does also mean that this machine is silent.
Now, don't get me wrong. I would probably use a Windows laptop if the battery life didn't suck
and you know, a couple other things. But God damn, Apple really has the leg up
when it comes to that. Here, let's look at the battery life.
The efficiency is better. So you are getting even better battery life in a stress test.
Interestingly, the MacBook Air M3
actually scored better in the stress test. And that's probably because it's thermal throttling.
So it's drawing less power. It's not a huge difference,
but I guess if you consider the larger battery, it's pretty noticeable.
When you're in 12 hours, 12 and a half hours in an endurance test,
you're already into a situation where you can't even really complain about it.
Like, let's be real here. That's more than a one and a half work days
of consistently watching YouTube videos. Now let's talk productivity.
In Blender, we actually couldn't run our typical Blender Barbershop test
because it runs out of memory. On these eight gig models,
you actually just can't render that complex of a scene anymore.
So if you're planning on doing anything a little more serious like video editing regularly,
let's say, or Blender rendering or whatever,
you might want to look at getting more RAM. Although the M3 chip does have
a substantial leg up in Blender. They implemented that months ago already.
And it's widely supported and we can see it in the numbers.
The M3 laptops absolutely stomp the M2 Air
and presumably the Pro, although we didn't test that here.
In Cinebench, little bit of a performance improvement, kind of expected to see that.
In Nukex, which is a nearly hour-long test, depending on what laptop you have.
Again, the fan makes a huge difference. Not thermal throttling makes a huge difference.
In Pugetbench, which is a lot shorter of a test,
sort of, in Photoshop, you can see, you're getting pretty much the same performance
and that's because any sort of high load is typically gonna be for short bursts,
which the kind of thermal mass of the chassis of this laptop can absorb.
When you go into Premiere, which is video editing, where you're gonna have a sustained load,
well, now there's a big difference, especially if you go to render like a 30-minute-long video.
It'll go pretty fast and then it will slow down. And it's also somewhere where having extra RAM
will definitely help you. It is still faster than the Air M2.
Sure, don't get me wrong, but an M3 Pro is a lot faster.
But overall, I mean, it's a fast laptop.
Let me do a Wi-Fi speed test. Hey, look at this, all right, open speed test.
All right, 500, 500, that's not bad. Let me try speed test, speed test,
and see if it's any different. Oh, look at that, upload speed, let's go.
Why is it faster than open speed test? That's weird. All right, seems like we're getting around 500 down,
500 to 700 up, depending on which service I use
for whatever reason. And then let's try Wi-Fi 6E.
500, 600, it's not really looking that much better.
I'm gonna be honest with you. I mean, 600, 600 is faster than the 5G Wi-Fi.
Try the local open speed test, see how that goes.
Still about the same, 600 down, a little bit faster.
Look, the Wi-Fi on the laptop, it's pretty fast.
It's not the fastest I've ever seen, but also I tried it on my phone and it wasn't faster.
So maybe the AP is just, I don't know, having a day.
Let's be honest. This is a pretty iterative update.
Do I like it? Yes, it's still faster. If you do Blender, yeah, probably upgrade,
but if you do Blender, you should probably buy a Pro as well.
It is 100 bucks cheaper than the M2 was at launch.
Mind you, when the M2 Air launched, we ran a little bit of a different
global supply chain situation and that could maybe be a justification for it.
But as of right now, it's $100 more than the M2.
If all you do is web browsing and watching memes
and YouTube videos and basic photo editing,
like buy an M2, you'd be kind of silly to buy this.
It's pretty much the same other than in the situations I laid out.
Honestly, buy an M1, you don't get the cool colors
on the M2 and the M3 with the M1, but you can buy it at Walmart for 700 bucks,
which is 300 bucks cheaper than the M2 to buy new
and 400 bucks cheaper than this one. So yeah, if you liked this video, hit the like button.
It's a nice laptop. I don't have anything bad to say about it.
It's still realistically expensive in the grand scheme of things,
but not that expensive for what you're getting.