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I'm gonna say something controversial. It shouldn't be controversial,

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but a bunch of you in the comments are probably gonna say it is, but if you're in the market for a MacBook,

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this is probably the one you should buy. This is the new MacBook Air with fancy top-of-the-line

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M3 processor, and realistically for most people,

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this is more than you need. As with most Apple packaging, simple and sweet.

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Oh, hey, it's not plastic anymore. We've got typical propaganda,

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also still with the spacer though. Like, what is this? Look at how much empty space there is in there.

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We've got, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, there we go, stickers.

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Thank you. I was worried for a second. The day that Apple stops including Apple stickers

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in their packaging is the day that we know we have failed as a society.

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We've got charger brick also in a glassine bag. What is this?

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This is a 30 watt USB-C power adapter, and then the cute little sleeved MagSafe cable.

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Type-C on one end, MagSafe on the other. I did get confirmation for 20 bucks US,

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you can upgrade to a 70 watt single port charger,

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or a dual port 35 watt charger. Depending on what you prefer,

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I would go with the 70 watt because faster charging.

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On this side, we've got the MagSafe charging port for the cable I showed you earlier,

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along with two USB-C ports. These run at Thunderbolt 3 or USB 4, so 40 gig on those.

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There is no additional USB-C ports on the other side,

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like some MacBook Pros, and it is going to be the same configuration

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if you have the 13 or 15 inch air. We've got a headphone jack here,

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which I like to see on the bottom. Feet for those that are interested, free of charge.

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Ooh, I forgot the M2 air was with the sexy colors.

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Look at that, same IO.

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Hey, look, same IO. Damn, this is the same laptop, but faster, I guess.

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Let me crack them open. Hey, look, same laptop.

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I can tell you already the moral of this story is gonna be to buy a used M2 MacBook,

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or a refurb maybe, or apparently Walmart has M1 MacBook Airs for like 700 bucks.

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As for on paper, they're not obviously the same laptop.

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The big thing you're getting here is the new M3 chip. Now we've gone into the details of far more extensively

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in the MacBook Pro M3 video, but the main differences are a little bit better efficiency,

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really good performance as before, but even a little bit more better.

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We've got AV1 decoding, but not encoding, and right, hardware ray tracing,

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if you game on your MacBook Air or maybe in Blender,

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I don't know if it supports it yet, but that could be a use case.

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And then other than that, specs-wise you're looking at pretty much the same laptop

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aside from the Wi-Fi 6E support that they added as well.

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So it'll be fast on Wi-Fi if you also happen to have a Wi-Fi 6E router

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and fast internet that can take advantage of it. Oh, I almost forgot.

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There is one more important hardware thing. On the M2 Air, you could have an external display,

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but only one. On the M3, you can now have two external displays,

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but there isn't really any hardware improvement. It's still a single display controller.

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So when you're using two external displays, you can't use the laptop display.

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That's because they're muxing the normal laptop display

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out through display output and not actually giving you an additional display controller.

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It is technically better than the M1 Air

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in terms of flexibility, but not better in terms of supporting more displays.

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It's the same amount. They're just giving you the ability to use the laptop display output on a separate monitor.

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So it sucks. It's still technically like better than they had before,

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but come on, on a Windows laptop, you can have like four display outputs if you want.

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What you can't get on a Windows laptop is this much horsepower without the noise, at least.

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In theory, the keyboard and trackpad should be the same, but let's try them out.

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Where does like a notepad happen here? Notes. My name is Jake,

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and I think this keyboard is pretty solid.

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It feels really similar, but almost like maybe it's just because this one is new.

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Like this feels clickier. This feels like a just slightest bit mushier.

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I don't know. Just because it's used and one is not.

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Hard to say. Trackpad feels the same. It's a nice big size for the class of laptop.

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Everything there looks the same and is still good.

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We've got the same display with the notch.

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Thought we were past this thing, Apple, but all right. Why not a dynamic island?

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It's the same 13.6 inch IPS display, 2560 by 1664,

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500 nits brightness, not high refresh rate, but a wide P3 color gamut.

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Let me do some speaker ring. They sound a little different.

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Am I crazy? Come here, Belle. It's okay. Like don't get me wrong.

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It is very similar, but like ever so slightly,

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just the tiny is a bit different. It almost just sounds more distorted on the left.

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Yeah, actually, I did notice on the spec stage on the M2,

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they listed wide stereo sound and they don't list it

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on this one. I don't know that it's better. It's like so close that you're not really gonna be able

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to tell the difference aside from if you were doing this. The one thing I will say you are losing out compared

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to a MacBook Pro is MacBook Pro speakers are obviously

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a little bit better. These are still solid for, I mean, where did the speakers come from?

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They fire the speaker out of like here. So it like bounces at you.

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It's a good design. It works. I mean, it sounds pretty solid. And it has sounded pretty solid on this one too.

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As usual, the display is pretty close to as they specify.

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It seems like it's a tiny bit brighter. Color tracking is very accurate.

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That being said, Apple's not really in the position

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they once were where they just led the class.

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Windows laptops are starting to catch up. And in some cases even surpass Apple,

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but you do at least know that you're gonna get a fairly color accurate display buying an Apple laptop.

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Not to mention that macOS does a really good job of color management.

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It doesn't have HDR like the MacBook Pros because there's no local dimming and it's only 60 Hertz,

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which probably doesn't matter to you realistically.

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It does look nice on the eyes though. Well, let's talk performance then.

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What do we got here? In games, it is a bit faster.

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You can and will get slightly more frames than your friend with a MacBook Air M2.

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You won't get more frames than your friend with the MacBook Pro M3, that's for sure.

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But it also has two extra GPU cores on that M3 chip. And a cooling fan, which is gonna make a big difference

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if you plan on gaming for more than 45 seconds.

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You are gonna run into a situation where you will thermal throttle, similar to all the previous M based MacBook Airs.

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If you think about it in your day to day, your web browsing, you're never gonna notice that.

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However, gaming, extended workloads, it does make a difference.

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There are ways to get around it. You could get a laptop cooling pad

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or when you're editing and premiering, close the lid and have your two monitors now.

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Haha, screw you MacBook Air M2 dude. But it is still worth mentioning.

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That being said, it does also mean that this machine is silent.

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Now, don't get me wrong. I would probably use a Windows laptop if the battery life didn't suck

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and you know, a couple other things. But God damn, Apple really has the leg up

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when it comes to that. Here, let's look at the battery life.

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The efficiency is better. So you are getting even better battery life in a stress test.

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Interestingly, the MacBook Air M3

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actually scored better in the stress test. And that's probably because it's thermal throttling.

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So it's drawing less power. It's not a huge difference,

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but I guess if you consider the larger battery, it's pretty noticeable.

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When you're in 12 hours, 12 and a half hours in an endurance test,

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you're already into a situation where you can't even really complain about it.

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Like, let's be real here. That's more than a one and a half work days

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of consistently watching YouTube videos. Now let's talk productivity.

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In Blender, we actually couldn't run our typical Blender Barbershop test

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because it runs out of memory. On these eight gig models,

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you actually just can't render that complex of a scene anymore.

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So if you're planning on doing anything a little more serious like video editing regularly,

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let's say, or Blender rendering or whatever,

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you might want to look at getting more RAM. Although the M3 chip does have

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a substantial leg up in Blender. They implemented that months ago already.

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And it's widely supported and we can see it in the numbers.

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The M3 laptops absolutely stomp the M2 Air

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and presumably the Pro, although we didn't test that here.

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In Cinebench, little bit of a performance improvement, kind of expected to see that.

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In Nukex, which is a nearly hour-long test, depending on what laptop you have.

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Again, the fan makes a huge difference. Not thermal throttling makes a huge difference.

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In Pugetbench, which is a lot shorter of a test,

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sort of, in Photoshop, you can see, you're getting pretty much the same performance

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and that's because any sort of high load is typically gonna be for short bursts,

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which the kind of thermal mass of the chassis of this laptop can absorb.

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When you go into Premiere, which is video editing, where you're gonna have a sustained load,

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well, now there's a big difference, especially if you go to render like a 30-minute-long video.

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It'll go pretty fast and then it will slow down. And it's also somewhere where having extra RAM

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will definitely help you. It is still faster than the Air M2.

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Sure, don't get me wrong, but an M3 Pro is a lot faster.

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But overall, I mean, it's a fast laptop.

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Let me do a Wi-Fi speed test. Hey, look at this, all right, open speed test.

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All right, 500, 500, that's not bad. Let me try speed test, speed test,

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and see if it's any different. Oh, look at that, upload speed, let's go.

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Why is it faster than open speed test? That's weird. All right, seems like we're getting around 500 down,

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500 to 700 up, depending on which service I use

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for whatever reason. And then let's try Wi-Fi 6E.

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500, 600, it's not really looking that much better.

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I'm gonna be honest with you. I mean, 600, 600 is faster than the 5G Wi-Fi.

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Try the local open speed test, see how that goes.

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Still about the same, 600 down, a little bit faster.

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Look, the Wi-Fi on the laptop, it's pretty fast.

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It's not the fastest I've ever seen, but also I tried it on my phone and it wasn't faster.

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So maybe the AP is just, I don't know, having a day.

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Let's be honest. This is a pretty iterative update.

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Do I like it? Yes, it's still faster. If you do Blender, yeah, probably upgrade,

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but if you do Blender, you should probably buy a Pro as well.

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It is 100 bucks cheaper than the M2 was at launch.

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Mind you, when the M2 Air launched, we ran a little bit of a different

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global supply chain situation and that could maybe be a justification for it.

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But as of right now, it's $100 more than the M2.

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If all you do is web browsing and watching memes

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and YouTube videos and basic photo editing,

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like buy an M2, you'd be kind of silly to buy this.

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It's pretty much the same other than in the situations I laid out.

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Honestly, buy an M1, you don't get the cool colors

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on the M2 and the M3 with the M1, but you can buy it at Walmart for 700 bucks,

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which is 300 bucks cheaper than the M2 to buy new

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and 400 bucks cheaper than this one. So yeah, if you liked this video, hit the like button.

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It's a nice laptop. I don't have anything bad to say about it.

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It's still realistically expensive in the grand scheme of things,

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but not that expensive for what you're getting.