I'm really excited. I finally get to take a look at the MacBook Neo, which I
have heard is not this time. What? Why? Oh, Riley already look I
guess I get to take a look at the MacBook Air instead, which is still pretty exciting because it is also
featuring Apple's new M5 silicon. And we're going to open it up and see if
it's worth the price increase over the Neo. It's going to be tough to beat, but
I'm still excited to take a look at this. Right off the bat, classic Apple,
you get the device right away wrapped in some nice paper here. Let's take it out.
Woo! These look slick. Look at how thin
that bad boy is. This is the starlight color, my favorite character on The
Boys, but maybe not my favorite color on the MacBook Air. That's fine. As for the
rest of the box, we've got our USB-C to
the MagSafe charger. Oh, it's like what?
20 ft probably? It's huge. Oh, 2 m. Okay. I was I was hoping to
convince everyone out there I'm 20 ft tall. As for the rest, oh, there you go.
At least we're still getting a power plug here. This is one of their new like
dynamic chargers that goes between 60 W and 40 W, so it'll go up to the 60 W to
charge your device, but if it ever detects it's kind of overheating, it'll
drop down a little bit to 40. That way, ideally, it'll protect the charger
long-term by not overheating a bunch. And other than that, that is all you get
in the box. Well, except for us cuz we got a special message from dbrand
apparently. They're going to make me put a sticker
on this damn thing. Oh, that's fun. They actually sent over
their brand new 1984 MacBook skins. This
one is the classic colorway, which kind of has that old beige plasticky vibe and
is also a good match for the starlight MacBook.
I think it'll match on all sides. Yeah, it'll look pretty good. They apparently have over eight different colorways, one
for pretty much every type of modern MacBook color except sky blue. If you
own sky blue MacBook, dbrand hates you and you personally.
This is going to be easy. First step, wipe down your device. Look at that
baby. These 1984 skins are kind of the answer
to the question, what if Apple of 1984 made a MacBook of 2026? They're
available for 27 different MacBook models, new and old, so odds are dbrand
has one for your MacBook. We're going to go for [music] it.
dbrand We're We're We're trying here, buddy.
Perfection. This actually looks kind of sick. I actually kind of like the look
of it. I mean, I have to. [music] They sponsored the video. >> [laughter]
>> So, if you want your MacBook to remind you of the good old days, you can head
on over to shortlinus.com. Might as well go around the exterior of
the device. On our right side, boom, headphone jack. That's all you get on
this side here. On the front, nothing cuz it's a laptop.
>> [laughter] >> And on this side, you get two Thunderbolt 4 ports and of course your
MagSafe charging clip there. And on the back, there's no rear IO or anything,
but that's it. Two Thunderbolt 4 ports, baby. Like I mentioned at the very
beginning, this has Apple's M5 chip in it. Now, it's a slightly cut down
version from the MacBook Pros that you would see, which makes sense. In this
case, it's a 10-core CPU with four of them being their new super cores and six
being efficiency. It has eight cores on the GPU and 16 cores for the NPU. Then
that's where you're going to see like the biggest difference between the base model Pro MacBook. The GPU has more
cores on the Pro. And as for the RAM on this device, you can get it in a couple
of different configurations, but a big one is the memory bandwidth has been
increased from 120 GB a second to 153.
What else has been increased is the base storage. There's no 256 GB base storage
for this anymore. You have to go to 512.
Which does make the device a little bit more expensive than last year's as the
starting model, but it is the same price as what the 512 was last time. So, is it
a price increase? Uh it's kind of hard to say if it is or isn't. Other than
that, the rest of the exterior stuff is basically the same. It weighs almost the
exact same. It's basically the same size. We just need to open it up and
take a look at guess what? The exact same screen.
It feels so light. >> [laughter]
>> Like I said, exact same screen. It's the same size, 2560 by 1664, at least on the
13-in. On the 15-in, it's a little bit
bigger. Still a 60 Hz screen, you have to go to the Pro line if you want 120
Hz. And still 500 nits brightness across the board. And still that big freaking
notch right at the top center there. >> [laughter] >> But that houses the 1080p webcam in
there, which we'll take a look at in a second here. One of the other internal specs that is different is they upgraded
from Wi-Fi 6E to Wi-Fi 7 in this device.
So, if your house has Wi-Fi 7, that's great. You're going to be making the
most of it. On the spec sheet, there's a lot of things that are just very minorly
different, but other than that, it's a MacBook Air. I do want to watch some content. I want to listen to the
speakers. And we are actually going to game on this device, too. What should
You know what? I pointed out the camera. Let's start with the camera on this. We'll take a photo first. What does it
count? Oh, it's counting down. ALL RIGHT. >> [laughter] >> I THOUGHT IT TOOK THE PHOTO. I DIDN'T
REALIZE IT WAS counting down right away. Oh god, that
>> [laughter] >> Yeah, you can tell I was not ready for that photo, but for a 1080p webcam
though on a laptop, it is a lot better than a lot of other 1080p webcams I've
looked at. I mean, even that like Lenovo laptop that I unboxed recently that was
like What was it? $3,000 or something? I
would say that that webcam was worse than this. But I also took a video with
that one. So, let's take a video here. Let's see if it's worse. Hello. This is
what the the webcam looks like. And this is also what the audio sounds like from
this webcam. How do How do I sound? Do I sound great?
I hope so. I don't know yet. That sounds really good.
Yeah, the microphone on that sounds awesome, actually. It's one of those
things that sometimes when I go to review the short circuits of like the other laptops, I'm like, "Oh, I wonder
how this mic sounds." And then I hit play and I'm like, "Ooh, that sounds like garbage." This I feel like you
could comfortably take a call on. You know, you had a business meeting with this, you're fine. But I do also want to
test the speakers properly. And by properly, I mean our
standard test of Crab Rave. So, let's boot up Crab Rave here. Oh man, I Sorry.
I hate MacBook keyboards. Maybe it Maybe it's just again the fact that I'm not
used to typing on this, but I am the best person in the world to be typing on
a MacBook Air. I know a lot of people
who will scream from the mountaintops that they're the best laptop keyboards ever. I don't prefer these types of
scissor-style keyboards, but that's always a personal choice.
What isn't a personal choice is audio. Now, we're going to actually listen to
audio.
>> [music] >> Ever since they bought Beats, I swear to
god every single MacBook device has so much bass in it. Their AirPods, like
their phones, it's They stole the Beats sound profile.
There's so much bass in it. It's To be very clear, I am impressed at how good
the speakers sound in a device this
thin. It truly is amazing. It's just the sound profile isn't to my liking. And
maybe you could go in and spend some time configuring it and getting it exactly how you'd want. That's fine. But
out of the box, it's not my type. But we'll also do a 50% volume comparison. I
think that's always a fair choice as well. So, we'll go 50% and we'll listen
to the drop one more time.
Oh, that's a pleasant 50%.
I like that.
Oh, but it's so much The bass is so much more noticeable at 50%.
It's still very good speakers though. They're very They're They're very good speakers. But as you guys know, audio is
half of the experience of video. The other half is
the the video. So, >> [laughter] >> let's look at our RE test footage here.
It doesn't feel as bright as some other devices I've looked at. I mean, 500 nits
isn't the brightest thing that we've looked at that they've claimed any devices, whether it's been Lenovo or any
other company, whatever. But it doesn't I'm not getting that brightness when I'm
watching this YouTube video right now. I will say the color
range looks pretty good on this though. That's what I think this device is
targeting, right? It's going to be targeting people who are going to do like Photoshop and some Premiere
editing. Oh man, I just had I almost reached up and went to tap the X. Apple,
please, for the love of god, put a touchscreen on your MacBooks. Maybe I'm
in the minority here. Make it an option to buy a touchscreen MacBook. I love
touchscreen laptops. And so, immediately
for me, I look at these and I'm like, that's almost a deal breaker for me. But
I know that's a very personal choice as well. Before I fire up a game here and
do some gaming like I mentioned I was going to do, I'm going to go over some of our other Labs' results when it came
down to benchmarking the M5 that's in here. We compared it to the last year's
M4, and we compared it to the also MacBook Pro M5. That way, we kind of had
a good idea of where this lines up. And when you compare it to the Pro in
single-threaded or single-core performance, it's almost identical,
which is what you would expect from basically the same chip. It's the
multi-threaded experience is where the Pro really outshines. Another thing that
might be contributing to the performance delta between the MacBook Pro M5 versus
this M5 is the MacBook Pro M5 has a
dedicated fan to it, whereas this does not. So, I'm in Cyberpunk right now.
There's actually a dedicated setting in Cyberpunk for MacBooks that is just called for this Mac. So, we're going to
do that cuz I think that'll probably give it the best chance at looking good.
But obviously, you could play around with it as you want. So, let's continue
our game here. Ho ho baby.
I don't have my FPS counter on, and I can tell that there's a lot of motion blur on. And I can tell we're not quite
hitting 60 FPS. We're probably dropping just a little bit below that. And our 1%
lows are probably even lower. But saying that, it's going to be a hot take. I
think if you were a console gamer, this is like perfectly acceptable. I
think if you're expecting like PC level performance out of this, I think you
could probably be a little bit upset at it. But console gamers are used to
motion blur. Console gamers are kind of used to the 60 FPS target limit. And I
think if that's what you had to settle for, this feels like a pretty decent
gaming experience. Even just walking around really quick, I'm I know I'm obviously not doing anything like crazy.
Man, this trackpad as is a lot better than the other haptic trackpad I tried.
What was it? I think it was the Lenovo Robo. This trackpad is
garbage. This is a much better feeling trackpad. Actually,
since it has that for this max setting, I'm going to quickly run a benchmark
really quick and we'll see what we get. And I think one thing that's important
to point out is this is probably going to be like the hardest you would push this type of device when gaming, right?
I think a more realistic gaming approach is going to be Balatro, idle games, you
know, maybe some other light titles. I
don't really expect the average gamer who's going to be buying this is going
to be wanting to play Cyberpunk. Saying that, I just unlocked Vsync and it's
basically still locked at 30 FPS. So I think Vsync is like, "Hey man, you're
not going to get much higher than this anyway, you might as well stay here." 35? 37? 38? All righty, there we go. Our
final results. Now, obviously our resolution here is a little bit lower
than resolution of the display because when you set it for that max setting, it
does add some dynamic resolution scaling. But our average FPS was 33.
One of the final benchmarks that our Labs team ran was doing Premiere Pro and
Photoshop again on the same devices and this fell right where you'd expect.
Better than last year's M4, but slightly worse than the MacBook Pro M5. So again,
it's it's right in its target range here. As for our total battery life on
this device, we saw an improvement over the M4, which again, you would expect,
but I think what's impressive is the fact that it was using the same battery size, that 53.8 watt-hour battery. It
goes to show some of maybe the efficiency improvements that they've
made or [music] maybe battery chemistry, just batteries
have gotten better over time. Obviously, it falls behind the MacBook Pro M5, but
that's also got a bigger battery. So I
think again for being a year-over-year revision from the M3, M4, M5, the fact
that we're seeing slight improvements over time is great. Cuz then I think if
you're someone who did buy an M3 or an M4, you don't feel like you're being too
far left behind if that makes sense. Like, "Oh man, last next year's is so
much better than the one I bought. I feel like
I think one of Apple's almost biggest things that they've done to shoot
themselves in the foot was they made M1 and M2 like too good. So I think that
anybody who has still has one of those laptops, they're like, "I still don't
need to upgrade yet." The last thing before I shut it down, you've obviously got your fingerprint scanner if you
want, but this is the part where I would normally open it up.
It does have screws. Should we try? Yes. Let's try.
Ah, there we go. That makes so much more sense. Okay, so the clips that I was
struggling with were actually not really clips. You can see here
that these four screws up at the top, 1
2 3 4, were kind of slotted into here.
So in order to remove it properly, I had to slide it down to get it removed. But
other than that, it was actually a pretty easy removal. I just didn't
necessarily know the right direction to pull it. So do your research, kids. I don't really
know what I was expecting. This is a LOT MORE BORING >> [laughter] >> THAN I THOUGHT it was going to be. Can I
like remove anything? No. Well, thanks for watching. I hope you guys enjoyed
it. You know how sometimes I've opened laptops and I've gone, "Wow, this looks
freaking awesome." But it's always because it's looked so like complex.
Dude! I look at this and I'm like, "Wow, this is sleek." [music]
But it's because you can't see anything. They've done a really good job at just making it look good. You know what I
mean? Like look at look clean. It's got an Apple aesthetic even on the inside. I
don't really have anything else to say other than that cuz it doesn't look like I can get much further without actually
like really starting to peel a bunch of stuff. This is like the Epstein file
laptop. It's got all the redacted. Just sorry, I I don't know if you should
include that joke or not, but But you know what though? I think the
iFixit kit had something kind of nailed, right? A step in the right direction for
repairability. Maybe it's been a while since I've opened a MacBook, but that
was four screws and a sliding one
direction. [music] It was pretty easy to open up. Obviously, going a little bit
deeper is going to require a little bit more knowledge, a little bit more getting your hands dirty, I should say,
but it's so much better than what they used to have in terms of opening a
MacBook. Now, I kind of glossed over the price at the beginning when I said it
was similar to the last year's also 512 GB of storage. So the starting price for
this configuration that we have here is $1,100.
It does go all the way up to $2,700 if you want to add more storage and a
little bit more CPU performance and stuff. But $1,100 is a lot of money, you know?
But is it worth that extra money over what you can get with the Neo? I think
it really does depend. I think if you're just a student who needs access to the
internet, you should get a Neo. I don't think you should get this device. I think if you're someone who needs a
little bit more performance than what the Neo offers,
I think the price increase could be worth it for you. But if you guys enjoyed this video, maybe go check out
the MacBook Neo or maybe any other Windows laptop. I'm sure the editor will
put one on screen right now that you can go look at. It's right there.
Or is it over there? I don't actually know where it ends up. So go take a
look.