How much do you think this laptop costs?
This MacBook. Which one is this? The M1?
It's an M1. That's like $800. Seven fifty USD.
Four thousand dollars. Really?
Twenty seven hundred. I told you I don't say numbers. I was gonna say fifteen hundred.
Fifteen hundred dollars US. Eight ninety nine or something. How much do you think this HP?
Horizon five. Five hundred. Eight hundred nine hundred.
Five ninety nine. Eight fifty. Nine hundred and fifty.
Twelve hundred. Twelve?
The MacBook is six hundred and fifty dollars. Six hundred what?
Six fifty. What? What?
And this PC is six hundred and sixty.
They're brand new. They're brand new.
I don't even, you don't even use Macs. My eight gig is a little rough.
We'll find out. When Apple released the M3 MacBook Air earlier this year,
they discontinued the venerable M1 MacBook Air from 2020.
Except they didn't. Because Walmart stepped in and started selling the M1 brand new for seven hundred dollars
before further discounting it this summer to six fifty.
It's actually mind-boggling because Apple never sells a laptop for this price.
It's cheaper than what they charge in the refurbished store.
And it kind of shakes up an assumption many of us have when buying a laptop,
which is that one can get a faster, more featured Windows laptop for cheaper than any Mac.
When I was in college I did confront this when buying my first laptop
and because the equivalent Macs were around three to four hundred dollars more than the HP I was looking at,
I bought the HP. It had a fingerprint reader that they supported for one year.
But how does that change with a MacBook that's only six hundred and fifty dollars?
To find out, I went hunting for a PC best suited to fight against this MacBook
and came up with this.
It's the HP Pavilion Aero 13.
At the time of writing, it was on sale for only six hundred dollars.
The one I have, however, has the sixty dollar high resolution display upgrade.
So it's a bit more. This is not a bad looking laptop,
really channeling the classic lines and proportion of the MacBook Air.
It's like two weighing in at a spelt one kilogram.
Power wise, it's no slouch. It has a Ryzen 5, 8640U, 16 gigabytes of RAM, and 512 gigabytes of storage.
Both of those are double that found in the MacBook.
And the M1 is getting to be an old chip hitting its fourth birthday come November.
In my tests, the M1 did the same thing.
In my tests, the M1 did start to show that age compared to the x86 Windows chip.
The Mac still has impressive single core performance in Cinebench and Geekbench,
but the Ryzen's extra two cores and multi-threading push it slightly ahead when all the cores are lit up, though not by much.
However, Blender's benchmark exposes the MacBook's greatest weakness, memory, or lack thereof.
The Monster and Classroom benchmarks show the two chips performing quite close to each other,
but Junk Shop outputted a conspicuously low number.
And when running Blender's GPU benchmark, the Junk Shop stage filled the memory and did not finish.
I got no results. If you are interested, I did run these tests on a 16 Gigabyte M1 MacBook Air with the extra GPU core they offered back in the day.
And having both of these upgrades does push the GPU performance results far ahead of the HP, but neither are available anymore.
So yes, 8GB is quite stingy, especially considering that we get on an iPhone these days.
In an $1100 M3-powered MacBook Air, it's unacceptable, but because the M1 is an older, slower, and less expensive chip, it's less of a bottleneck.
And to be fair to Apple, I saw lots of 8GB Windows laptops in this price range too.
In the real world, when browsing on the HP in edge with a bunch of tabs open, it gave me a couple of memory full warnings.
Of course, this is thanks to me clicking between tabs and surfing sites full of advertising cookies.
And so I opened up the same tabs and apps on the MacBook to see how it fared.
Yes, the memory filled up. Yes, memory pressure pressed into the yellow.
Yes, SWAT memory was utilized. But it didn't feel slow.
The caveat here is that macOS is using SWAT memory, which is using the storage SSD.
And if you fill that up too much, which you will because there's less space, your computer will slow down.
And perhaps even more surprising, the Sims runs slightly better on the MacBook.
In War Thunder's benchmark, it appears that the Ryzen performs much better.
But more so, macOS has a microscopic list of supported games.
So if you want to go beyond these two, you'll want to get the HP.
Though I should note that with its integrated graphics, this is categorically not a gaming laptop.
I'm actually quite impressed with how cool the Ryzen runs.
Yes, it has a fan and can get a bit audible, but it gets nowhere near as hot as Intel chips I've used in older MacBooks.
And I should note that playing the Sims, the MacBook gets as hot as I've ever felt it.
Oh, and look at the ports. This is a selection I could only dream about.
HDMI 2.1, USB-A, and the Ryzen chip can output up to three external monitors alongside the built-in display.
A major improvement over the M1's single external display limitation.
You can also upgrade the storage if you think the generous half a terabyte isn't enough,
as the HP is easily serviceable and the storage isn't soldered on.
You can't upgrade the MacBook Air even at checkout.
The basic skew it is. Oh, and despite being modular, the HP's SSD is notably faster too.
So, for out-now performance, the HP is the way to go.
It is simply faster and more capable.
But as a package, the MacBook is still better.
For one, it has doubled the battery life.
Even this two-plus-year-old unit will last me an entire day with about eight hours of screen-on usage.
I'm lucky to get half that with the HP.
Then there's the trackpad. Apple's glass-clad Force Touch trackpad is perfect.
While the HP's surface feels good and is responsive enough,
the physical click requires a lot more force.
And so it feels more exhausting to click my way around Windows.
It's not so bad if you just tap through, but I can't get used to that.
It's the same story with the keyboard. It's solid, if a bit slappy sounding, but the key actuation requires more force.
That said, the HP has longer key travel, and others who try to here have an easy time typing accurately and quickly with it.
Too bad there's so much flex under the board, though.
If you're used to Apple keyboards like I am, you really have to calibrate for that.
On the other hand, I think the M1 MacBook Air has the best keyboard they fitted to any laptop,
even compared to the newer models.
These inputs really do reflect the differences in build quality.
The HP is lighter in your bag, but the recycled metals and ocean-bound plastics do feel cheaper than the solid chunk of aluminium the MacBook is hewn from.
I mean, look, you can't open it with one finger.
Back in 2020, Apple upgraded the display on the Air to produce nearly every colour in the DCI-P3 gamut.
HP's upgraded panel, while matching in pixel count, can't show as many colours,
only offering full coverage of sRGB, though it is a bit brighter.
Oh, and the speakers. The MacBook Airs are the weakest Apple make,
but as long as you don't run them at full blast, they are still better than the HPs,
which sound exactly like laptop speakers.
I'm relieved to see that software bloat on Windows laptops has gone down since the days when I bought mine.
Meanwhile, Apple keeps turning on iCloud photos with every update when I don't want it.
And while that brings them closer together, Windows is still very busy.
If I was looking for a laptop for school right now, I'd pick the MacBook.
Yes, the HP is more capacious and powerful, but only slightly.
The MacBook, however, is a much better package.
We've never really been in a place like this where a MacBook is so inexpensive it touches on value PC territory.
It's a great place to be. Thanks for discounting this Mac Address.
I'm curious in the comments below who among you would be able to live with this M1 MacBook Air
because you'd get a great deal if you can.
And if you want to watch another video, you can check out the one where I bought the worst Mac that Apple was selling at the time.
That was not a good deal. Not even close.