I do not like macOS or at least I think
I don't but the last time I made a genuine attempt to switch was 10 years
ago so even if Microsoft hadn't spent the last decades speedrunning the
destruction of Windows I would be way overdue for a bite out of Tim's Apple so
I'm doing it after switching to the iPhone and honestly not really liking it
I'm doubling down I am embracing Apple's philosophy which is that if I'm not
enjoying their product it's probably because I haven't bought enough of their
other products yet so I need a Macbook for my computer backpack and a Mac for
my desk and I will either discover why the heck people love these things so
much or I'll discover why they still only have 15% market share but before I
can do either of those things which ones do I choose that is where I come in I
have assembled a trough I mean a trove of apples behind us and I've recruited a
couple of Mac advisers to help him make the right decision
and there's Stakes Stakes what Stakes oh yes the stakes at the end of this video
you don't get to just take something off of the table you have to pull out your
credit card and buy the exact spec of what we decide is going to be best for
you then you get to exclusively use your max for a month and see how it goes oh
so no pressure then well fine but if I have to waste money on a Mac then they
have to waste time hearing this message from our sponsor hetner they're
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today let's start things off with the Darkhorse option the iPad Pro In
fairness to him the performance really is very close to a Macbook it even uses
the same 10 core M4 processor which is
kind of incredible when you look at this thing but the processing isn't even the
real reason you'd want one the real reason is the display this is a 13-in
tandem OLED panel that goes up to 1,600 knits and it's one of the best
displays we have ever seen just period
the brightness combined with those perfect blacks of the OLED makes visuals
pop in a way that pretty much nothing else can except for one small problem
I'd be stuck with I P OS not to mention the stupid ergonomics so tell you what
you can take one of these but I'm more interested in a real laptop you know the
kind that fits on a lap yeah so wait am
I switching to I don't see why you should make me switch and you shouldn't
have to cuz originally like I was okay with that but now we're in February and
the cool laptops are coming out should have thought of that before you push
this video looking at Apple's air and pro
MacBooks then there are a few key things to consider with one being performance
Apple's lineup is a cluster right now so depending on which shell you prefer your
processor choices might be limited not to the latest CPUs but rather to a
generation or even two generations ago for my use case though which is mostly
word processing in Google Docs performance is not a major consideration
and there weren't any major efficiency gains in terms of battery life going
from the M3 to the M4 not to mention
that the weight and thinness of a MacBook Air is also very appealing but
there are some areas where the pro clearly pulls ahead for me the Pro
Models could make more sense even configured with the same CPU they have
better cooling enabling them to Turbo for much longer for all the solid works
you'll be doing apparently it works great now what really yeah in parallels
you just have to spend 100 bucks on getting that that's the Mac way you can
do anything you want just got to spend regardless of what kind of work we're
doing we'll be doing it on a liquid Retina Display but it's worth noting
that that marketing term doesn't actually tell us that much about the performance on the air it only goes to
500 nits Peak brightness 60 HZ while on
the pro it'll do up to 120 HZ and up to
1,600 nits for incredible visuals that
is everywhere other than the camera Notch another problem for the air are
the ports you get two Thunderbolt four ports mag safe and a headphone jack that
is it on the pro there isn't a whole lot more but the additional Thunderbolt Port
SD card reader and in particular the HDMI 2.1 Port are very very welcome on
the topic of HDMI output I rarely plug more than one external display into my
laptop but if you need more your mileage may vary depending on the CPU you use
you realize you're going to have to put this down at some point and pick one right I know but it's just like surface
laptop bad Edition here I don't think there's any option
other than the air for me I kind of want the air I'm just really concerned about
the cooling cuz I'm guessing solid works probably runs inefficiently yeah and I
think after like 5 to 10 minutes this thing will just be hitting thermal
limits and not able to do it well not only that but the skin temperature is
probably not going to be dangerous because Apple makes sure that it isn't
but what it won't be is great yeah I
don't even know if I want some bigger one I don't know the 15's pretty nice oh
no how much more is it though I don't want to spend any more on this than I
have to Alex fair enough yeah this seems
fine 16 gigs unified memory 256 gigs SSD
sure yeah how much faster is an M3 cuz everything I've heard people are just
pretty happy with their M series Silicon regardless of what generation it is
these days yeah not not much I'm just going to get the M2 ,000 us is enough to
spend on a machine that I don't even want how about you are you going to
consider pricing it all or because we're not buying you one are you just going to
grab whatever you want off the table yeah I think it's just going to be this
one is this an M2 or an M3 I think it's an M2 oh okay so conveniently this is
basically what I'm getting yeah of
course we're not done I'm also going to need a desktop or two so let's kick
things off with a classic the iMac which
man Alex I know you wrote up a whole bit about this thing but let's be realistic
these small screen limited IO non- upgradable waste machines are aimed at
the kinds of folks who desire Beauty over functionality which let's face it I
am not so why don't we move on to something a little more practical the
new Mac Mini I am a huge fan of this
little beast and it was actually the inspiration for us bringing back this
series our unit here has an M4 chip with
a 10 core CPU a 10 core GPU and 16 gigs
of unified memory and I don't know what impresses me more about it the
performance the size or the cost for
just $600 this petite pal offers a
shocking value proposition it takes up virtually no space and it is darn near
silent doing it however that value proposition drops off sharply as soon as
you need more storage or memory here we are I don't think I need the M4 Pro so
these are my base options but I also don't want to pay extra for storage I'm
going to be using 10 gig networking for all of my storage because this is going
to be a work machine so what I actually want is oh my God you don't even get
double the RAM for $200 you get 8 gigs of RAM for
$200 it's like apple took that observation that we made that their
memory and storage upgrades cost more per weight than literal gold and they
were like we can do
better 100 bucks for 10 gig I don't even mind but I don't want to be $200 for 8
gigs of RAM 16 enough I was using 15 gigs in
Chrome tabs yesterday I'm going to get 24
gigs
$900 no I'm not doing it I'm over it
$700 there is good news though you don't actually have to pay the exorbitant
Apple tax for storage and memory if you know the right people so get subscribed
because we plan on exploring upgrade abilities that some might consider to be
unnatural which could be particularly valuable for purebred tab hounds or more
realistically AI developers who could easily blast through the Mac Mini's
maximum 64 gigs of RAM which brings us
to the big boy the Mac Pro with 64 gigs
of RAM as the starting configuration and a $7,000 starting price the Mac Pro
strikes fear into any workload and into
the wallet of any YouTuber cring enough to buy one as a flex this particular
specimen contains a comical 192 GB of
unified memory a 24 core CPU 76 GPU
cores and a 32 core neural engine
bringing the price to an eyw watering $9,600 I do have a question though given
that this monster is still limited to M2
series chips and our little tiny Mech
mini over here has an M4
how close are these in performance should we drag race them yeah I'm team
Mac Mini let's go 3 2
1 there's no way realistically I know the answer but whatever performance per
volume very high and um yeah okay 24
cores still beats 10 cores regardless of how much better those cores are absolute
shocker do you know what else is shocking it is Alex next week we have
three exclusives on Floatplane centered around me to well celebrate myself so
check it out at lg. g/ alex2 now there
is one notable Mac missing from our lineup here the Mac Studio splitting the
difference between the mini and the uh not so mini you can option the studio
with the wild core counts and RAM capacities of the pro but just without
the PCIe expansion slots we do have a
Mac Studio in the house but we weren't able to steal it because Labs is using
it for AI stuff which makes sense that is the powerful Mac desktop that makes
any sense oh now I pick one this one
easy I didn't even need to look at that one oh but because we didn't choose the
iMac I'm going to need a display as well wait what I have to choose an Apple
display this one this is as low as the height adjust goes and this one doesn't
have any at all okay well you have to look at them at least a all all right
well first up is the non-display display the Apple Vision Pro which I could
connect to my laptop or my desktop and then project a screen or screens now
that it's been updated anywhere around my office which sounds pretty great
except that I typically need to work longer than 1 hour at a time and if I
spend longer than that in the Vision Pro it gives me a splitting headache I also
can't be arriving on set with goggle marks all over my face so I think we'll
have to move on to the studio dis display at 27 in with 5K resolution and
600 nit Peak brightness this is a pretty darn nice monitor or at least it was in
2025 though it's pretty difficult to stomach the $1,600 asking price for
specs like that especially when a height adjustable stand brings the price up to
$2,000 but hey why try to stomach $2,000
for this when you can projectile vomit $5,000 at Apple for the pro display
xdr okay maybe I'm getting a bit hung up on the price here but come on I'm still
not over the fact that the stand for this monitor alone costs
$1,000 with that said there is a lot to
like here it's $1,600 nits Peak brightness is enough for not just an
impactful HDR experience but conceivably enough to master HDR content on it and
its 6K resolution allows you to have a full resolution 4K video with plenty of
pixels left over for your timeline and your media bin of course I'm not a
professional video editor just a professional video reviewer so what
about oh goodness a third option the
display that I already use on my desk at work the Asus PG 42u although the
resolution is just 4K and the peak brightness tops out at just 1,000 nits
not to mention that it has its own issues with respect to height adjust and
stand maneuverability in every other conceivable way it wins over Apple's
offerings it's OLED for perfect blacks it has 138 HZ refresh rate for snappy
navigation is way bigger to help with multitasking oh and it costs barely more
than the fing stand for the pro display xdr like I know this isn't an Apple
product but I'm guessing that the vast majority of Mac Mini buyers are not
going to be eviscerating their wallets for a display it's just so hilarious if
you want excellent display from Apple at a fair fair price they're very happy to
sell it to you you just have to be okay with having a laptop attached to it on
that note I guess it's time to head to apple.com and order the laptop I'll be
loading into my commuter backpack LT store.com all right let's get on with
this $2500 do you know how much of a single
GPU that could buy for me most of it actually makes it sound
like a deal I'm getting two whole computers for less than a
5090 place your order do a lot less gaming though actually realistically
I'll just be playing batro so like whatever there it is great hey look my
Apple watch says they're processing my order it's going to be interesting to
see his perspective since he doesn't have an iPhone and doesn't have a watch
he's not ecosystem at all
no not stoked charge while iPhones are
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sorry if you guys enjoyed this video maybe check out the one where Alex and I
switched two Snapdragon laptops for a month or in my case much longer than a
month yeah neither of us switched back we'll see what happens with these apples