I was a little bit disappointed in the performance of both the base model MacBook Air and the M2 MacBook Pro last month when I tested Final Cut Pro and noticed that while there was an improvement, it wasn't as big as I was expecting given the addition of ProRes media encoders. Well, I think I may have gotten to the bottom of that because when I ran the test on the 10-core MacBook Air, I expected it to be pretty much the same but where the M2 MacBook Pro took just under 8 minutes and the M2 MacBook Air base model took just over eight minutes, the 10-core MacBook Air managed to do it in 6 minutes and 25 seconds. That is nearly 2 minutes faster than what I was expecting and basically what this comes down to is that SSD because both of my other two M2 products here are the base models with that 256 gigabyte SSD and sure enough if we look at the system utilization while doing this Final Cut render, you'll notice that we're using swap memory. It's not very much; it can use up to two gigabytes and it's only using about half a gig or maybe a gig at times but because the base model has that slower SSD storage, it seems like the higher-end model is able to work more efficiently with that faster SSD and it's not just in Final Cut Pro in the Blender CPU render, the 10-core MacBook Air took 30 seconds less than the M2 MacBook Pro.
I was really surprised by this difference because I wasn't expecting it to be a two-minute difference that is pretty crazy but that's really the only thing I can think of as being the cause. But I'm curious to know whether you guys think that this is something that's important because we do have to talk about the fact that you know the MacBook Air is not exactly designed to be a powerhouse in the past before Apple Silicon. If I sat here and unironically made a video showing you Blender renders and Final Cut export times with 4K footage and all that stuff on a MacBook Air when it used to come with a Core i3, you'd be like Luke, what are you talking about this is just the base model? When people want and buy a MacBook, they don't care about any of this stuff so maybe it's just the fact that now the MacBook Air is actually feasible as a professional tool where it wasn't before that causes increased scrutiny. But I do think it's a little bit weird that for $1,200 you're not even able to really access the full potential of the M2 system because Apple cheated out on the SSD.
One thing is absolutely clear to me after all of this and that is do not buy the M2 MacBook Pro. The MacBook Air is the better deal even with the issues with the base model SSD even with the thermal throttling that we've talked about that we've seen on both of these devices. The MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro are not going to be as capable for high-performance tasks as the more expensive 14 and the 16-inch ones so you shouldn't buy these things expecting them to be able to do all of that and once you remove that expectation for sustained long-term heavy-duty performance, then the MacBook Pro loses all of its appeal. That's the only thing that it has going for it over the MacBook Air every single other aspect of this is better.
If your performance tasks are short and bursty, you're probably not going to notice the difference between this MacBook Air and the M2 MacBook Pro so why sacrifice the new thinner design, the bigger better display, the more beautiful color choices, the MagSafe port? Why would you give all that up just to get a couple of percent extra performance save a few seconds on your Blender renders? I think we've got some pretty clear answers from today's video. Number one, the MacBook Air is a better value overall than the M2 MacBook Pro and number two if you spend the extra $300 to get more and faster storage and more GPU cores, you can notice those differences.
So, I think it is worth it to go to the higher spec model but I don't think that that makes the base model a "quote-unquote bad deal" because at $1,200, and I'm sure it'll take just a couple of months before we start seeing these things at like $1,100 all that stuff, I think it's still honestly a pretty decent value. Let me know what you guys think of this comparison in the comments below and as usual, make sure to like, comment, and subscribe and with that, I'll see you guys in the next video.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: eneenie meenie miney moe catch a macbook by its notch which is better i don't know let's find out so won't you watch hey that kind of worked anyway i've got two macbook airs for you guys today we've got the base model in starlight and we have the higher tier one with 512 gigabytes of storage and the full 10 core gpu in midnight we're gonna talk about everything we've got performance thermals comparisons to the m2 macbook pro and of course we're going to discuss the infamous ssd gate issue is it a gate i don't even know wakey wakey so buckle up because you're in for an interesting ride let's get started today's video is sponsored by surfsharkvpn surfshark gives you the power to protect your online privacy control your personal data and access online content safely plus it comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee data privacy is a major issue these days that affects pretty much everyone so with surfshark you can be sure that your online presence is safe thanks to quarterly personal data security reports that keep you in the loop on all of your information surfshark is also great for travelers it works on unlimited devices and lets you keep your digital freedom by avoiding travel and geo restrictions as well as get around price discrimination which changes the price for hotels and flights based on your location and surfshark makes sure that your data is not stored because their servers are ram only everything is deleted as soon as it's not in use right now if you use the link in the description below or scan the qr code on screen you can get three months free by using coupon code miani thanks to surfshark for sponsoring and now let's get back to the video so this is a very interesting comparison because not only are we comparing chip differences we're also comparing the ssd differences and what impact that might have on some of our benchmarks so it's been well publicized at this point that the entry-level m2 products have essentially a cheaped-out ssd whereas in the past apple used two 128 gigabyte modules and ran them together to make 256 now the base model only comes with a single module which leads to lower ssd speeds and that is the case with the macbook air you can clearly see that the higher end model with 512 gigabytes is clearly and significantly faster than the base model but it remains to be seen where and how much that is going to impact the performance especially since we're also dealing with a difference in the gpu we have 10 cores here instead of 8 cores here so is it worth the extra 300 to get those things well let's start to break it down with some benchmarks first up in cinebench r23 no surprises here these things are basically identical within one percent of each other at all times and that also means by the way that they're going to lose similar performance as their heat sinks soak up so if you run cinebench back to back as we saw in the base model you can lose about 10 to 15 percent performance in about 30 or 40 minutes but what's not the same is the gpu comparison in 3dmark wildlife extreme the 10 core macbook air scores basically the same as the 10 core m2 macbook pro so that's actually pretty interesting because 3dmark wildlife extreme is a fairly short test and so we can see that on a short test where you're not going to be saturating this heatsink the performance of the m2 macbook air and the m2 macbook pro when they have the same gpu is the same we saw that again in blender in the bmw render it was actually only a one second difference with the macbook air coming out on top so that further reinforces that for short tasks where you're not going to be using a ton of gpu power for a long period of time you should not really notice that much of a difference between the macbook pro and the macbook air but where you might notice a difference between a macbook air and a macbook pro is in battery life but that wasn't the only thing i wanted to find out because as we saw back in november with the variance of the m1 pro and the m1 max battery life differed based on the actual hardware that you had so is there a difference between the 8 and 10 core macbook airs well to find out answers to all of these things i started with a one hour 4k youtube playback test over the course of this hour we saw the macbook air with the 8 core gpu dropped to 95 battery the 10 core macbook air dropped to 96 battery and the macbook pro at 98. so as you might imagine the macbook pro did a little bit better here but of course this is a youtube playback test on apple silicon they barely used any of their battery so we're gonna have to push these systems a lot more to try to open up some differences and really test the capacity so to do that i ran gfx bench back to back four times so what exactly happened well remember we started at 95.96 and 98 and by the end of those four runs we were down to 64 on the 8 core 65 on the 10 core and 69 on the macbook pro with the m2 chip so just like apple claims the m2 macbook pro does have slightly better battery life but i don't think it's really a massive difference it's not something that you would notice unless you have the devices side by side but the real story here is that the macbook airs were again really really similar they dropped by the exact same amount but the scores in gfx bench were not the same at all in fact the macbook air with the 10 core gpu was scoring pretty much identical to the m2 macbook pro 109 fps in aztec high tier off screen 535 compared to 553 in manhattan 1080p and 923 compared to 933 in t-rex so that's a little bit weird right you're getting about the same performance as the macbook pro here but there's not really a difference in battery life despite the difference in gpu performance and even more strangely if you look at this command line tool that shows us how much power the gpus are using we can see that the base model is using 10 watts and the 10 core model is closer to 14. so those extra two gpu cores are drawing more power as you would expect but it doesn't really seem to be impacting battery life but now we have to move on and talk about the curveball and that is final cut pro this was not what i expected to see you may recall i was a little bit disappointed in the performance of both the base model macbook air and the m2 macbook pro last month when i tested final cut pro and noticed that while there was an improvement it wasn't as big as i was expecting given the addition of prores media encoders well i think i may have gotten to the bottom of that because when i ran the test on the 10 core macbook air i expected it to be pretty much the same but where the m2 macbook pro took just under 8 minutes and the m2 macbook air base model took just over eight minutes the 10 core macbook air managed to do it in 6 minutes and 25 seconds that is nearly 2 minutes faster a very big difference that i was not expecting to see and basically what this comes down to is that ssd because both of my other two m2 products here are the base models with that 256 gigabyte ssd and sure enough if we look at the system utilization while doing this final cut render you'll notice that we're using swap memory it's not very much it can use up to two gigabytes and it's only using about half a gig or maybe a gig at times but because the base model has that slower ssd storage it seems like the higher end model is able to work more efficiently with that faster ssd and it's not just in final cut pro in the blender cpu render the 10 core macbook air took 30 seconds less than the m2 macbook pro and again there's really no other explanation than the ssd but that's a noticeable difference that's something that might actually have an impact honestly i was not expecting it to be a two minute difference that is pretty crazy but that's really the only thing i can think of as being the cause but i'm curious to know whether you guys think that this is something that's important because we do have to talk about the fact that you know the macbook air is not exactly designed to be a powerhouse in the past before apple silicon if i sat here and unironically made a video showing you blender renders and final cut export times with 4k footage and all that stuff on a macbook air when it used to come with a core i3 you'd be like luke what are you talking about this is just the base model when people want and macbook they don't care about any of this stuff so don't even bother talking about it so maybe it's just the fact that now the macbook air is actually feasible as a professional tool where it wasn't before that causes increased scrutiny but i do think it's a little bit weird that for twelve hundred dollars you're not even able to really access the full potential of the m2 system because apple cheaped out on the ssd but one thing is absolutely clear to me after all of this and that is do not buy the m2 macbook pro the macbook air is the better deal even with the issues with the base model ssd even with the thermal throttling that we've talked about that we've seen on both of these devices the macbook air and the macbook pro are not going to be as capable for high performance tasks as the more expensive 14 and the 16 inch ones so you shouldn't buy these things expecting them to be able to do all of that and once you remove that expectation for sustained long-term heavy-duty performance then the macbook pro loses all of its appeal that's the only thing that it has going for it over the macbook air every single other aspect of this is better and if your performance tasks are short and bursty you're probably not going to notice the difference between this macbook air and the m2 macbook pro so why sacrifice the new thinner design the bigger better display the more beautiful color choices the magsafe port why would you give all that up just to get a couple percent extra performance save a few seconds on your blender renders so i think we've got some pretty clear answers from today's video number one the macbook air is a better value overall than the m2 macbook pro and number two if you spend the extra 300 to get more and faster storage and more gpu cores you can notice those differences so i think it is worth it to go to the higher spec model but i don't think that that makes the base model a quote-unquote bad deal because at twelve hundred dollars and i'm sure it'll take just a couple of months before we start seeing these things at like a thousand eleven hundred all that stuff i think it's still honestly a pretty decent value so let me know what you guys think of this comparison in the comments below and as usual make sure to like comment and subscribe and with that i'll see you guys in the next video youeenie meenie miney moe catch a macbook by its notch which is better i don't know let's find out so won't you watch hey that kind of worked anyway i've got two macbook airs for you guys today we've got the base model in starlight and we have the higher tier one with 512 gigabytes of storage and the full 10 core gpu in midnight we're gonna talk about everything we've got performance thermals comparisons to the m2 macbook pro and of course we're going to discuss the infamous ssd gate issue is it a gate i don't even know wakey wakey so buckle up because you're in for an interesting ride let's get started today's video is sponsored by surfsharkvpn surfshark gives you the power to protect your online privacy control your personal data and access online content safely plus it comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee data privacy is a major issue these days that affects pretty much everyone so with surfshark you can be sure that your online presence is safe thanks to quarterly personal data security reports that keep you in the loop on all of your information surfshark is also great for travelers it works on unlimited devices and lets you keep your digital freedom by avoiding travel and geo restrictions as well as get around price discrimination which changes the price for hotels and flights based on your location and surfshark makes sure that your data is not stored because their servers are ram only everything is deleted as soon as it's not in use right now if you use the link in the description below or scan the qr code on screen you can get three months free by using coupon code miani thanks to surfshark for sponsoring and now let's get back to the video so this is a very interesting comparison because not only are we comparing chip differences we're also comparing the ssd differences and what impact that might have on some of our benchmarks so it's been well publicized at this point that the entry-level m2 products have essentially a cheaped-out ssd whereas in the past apple used two 128 gigabyte modules and ran them together to make 256 now the base model only comes with a single module which leads to lower ssd speeds and that is the case with the macbook air you can clearly see that the higher end model with 512 gigabytes is clearly and significantly faster than the base model but it remains to be seen where and how much that is going to impact the performance especially since we're also dealing with a difference in the gpu we have 10 cores here instead of 8 cores here so is it worth the extra 300 to get those things well let's start to break it down with some benchmarks first up in cinebench r23 no surprises here these things are basically identical within one percent of each other at all times and that also means by the way that they're going to lose similar performance as their heat sinks soak up so if you run cinebench back to back as we saw in the base model you can lose about 10 to 15 percent performance in about 30 or 40 minutes but what's not the same is the gpu comparison in 3dmark wildlife extreme the 10 core macbook air scores basically the same as the 10 core m2 macbook pro so that's actually pretty interesting because 3dmark wildlife extreme is a fairly short test and so we can see that on a short test where you're not going to be saturating this heatsink the performance of the m2 macbook air and the m2 macbook pro when they have the same gpu is the same we saw that again in blender in the bmw render it was actually only a one second difference with the macbook air coming out on top so that further reinforces that for short tasks where you're not going to be using a ton of gpu power for a long period of time you should not really notice that much of a difference between the macbook pro and the macbook air but where you might notice a difference between a macbook air and a macbook pro is in battery life but that wasn't the only thing i wanted to find out because as we saw back in november with the variance of the m1 pro and the m1 max battery life differed based on the actual hardware that you had so is there a difference between the 8 and 10 core macbook airs well to find out answers to all of these things i started with a one hour 4k youtube playback test over the course of this hour we saw the macbook air with the 8 core gpu dropped to 95 battery the 10 core macbook air dropped to 96 battery and the macbook pro at 98. so as you might imagine the macbook pro did a little bit better here but of course this is a youtube playback test on apple silicon they barely used any of their battery so we're gonna have to push these systems a lot more to try to open up some differences and really test the capacity so to do that i ran gfx bench back to back four times so what exactly happened well remember we started at 95.96 and 98 and by the end of those four runs we were down to 64 on the 8 core 65 on the 10 core and 69 on the macbook pro with the m2 chip so just like apple claims the m2 macbook pro does have slightly better battery life but i don't think it's really a massive difference it's not something that you would notice unless you have the devices side by side but the real story here is that the macbook airs were again really really similar they dropped by the exact same amount but the scores in gfx bench were not the same at all in fact the macbook air with the 10 core gpu was scoring pretty much identical to the m2 macbook pro 109 fps in aztec high tier off screen 535 compared to 553 in manhattan 1080p and 923 compared to 933 in t-rex so that's a little bit weird right you're getting about the same performance as the macbook pro here but there's not really a difference in battery life despite the difference in gpu performance and even more strangely if you look at this command line tool that shows us how much power the gpus are using we can see that the base model is using 10 watts and the 10 core model is closer to 14. so those extra two gpu cores are drawing more power as you would expect but it doesn't really seem to be impacting battery life but now we have to move on and talk about the curveball and that is final cut pro this was not what i expected to see you may recall i was a little bit disappointed in the performance of both the base model macbook air and the m2 macbook pro last month when i tested final cut pro and noticed that while there was an improvement it wasn't as big as i was expecting given the addition of prores media encoders well i think i may have gotten to the bottom of that because when i ran the test on the 10 core macbook air i expected it to be pretty much the same but where the m2 macbook pro took just under 8 minutes and the m2 macbook air base model took just over eight minutes the 10 core macbook air managed to do it in 6 minutes and 25 seconds that is nearly 2 minutes faster a very big difference that i was not expecting to see and basically what this comes down to is that ssd because both of my other two m2 products here are the base models with that 256 gigabyte ssd and sure enough if we look at the system utilization while doing this final cut render you'll notice that we're using swap memory it's not very much it can use up to two gigabytes and it's only using about half a gig or maybe a gig at times but because the base model has that slower ssd storage it seems like the higher end model is able to work more efficiently with that faster ssd and it's not just in final cut pro in the blender cpu render the 10 core macbook air took 30 seconds less than the m2 macbook pro and again there's really no other explanation than the ssd but that's a noticeable difference that's something that might actually have an impact honestly i was not expecting it to be a two minute difference that is pretty crazy but that's really the only thing i can think of as being the cause but i'm curious to know whether you guys think that this is something that's important because we do have to talk about the fact that you know the macbook air is not exactly designed to be a powerhouse in the past before apple silicon if i sat here and unironically made a video showing you blender renders and final cut export times with 4k footage and all that stuff on a macbook air when it used to come with a core i3 you'd be like luke what are you talking about this is just the base model when people want and macbook they don't care about any of this stuff so don't even bother talking about it so maybe it's just the fact that now the macbook air is actually feasible as a professional tool where it wasn't before that causes increased scrutiny but i do think it's a little bit weird that for twelve hundred dollars you're not even able to really access the full potential of the m2 system because apple cheaped out on the ssd but one thing is absolutely clear to me after all of this and that is do not buy the m2 macbook pro the macbook air is the better deal even with the issues with the base model ssd even with the thermal throttling that we've talked about that we've seen on both of these devices the macbook air and the macbook pro are not going to be as capable for high performance tasks as the more expensive 14 and the 16 inch ones so you shouldn't buy these things expecting them to be able to do all of that and once you remove that expectation for sustained long-term heavy-duty performance then the macbook pro loses all of its appeal that's the only thing that it has going for it over the macbook air every single other aspect of this is better and if your performance tasks are short and bursty you're probably not going to notice the difference between this macbook air and the m2 macbook pro so why sacrifice the new thinner design the bigger better display the more beautiful color choices the magsafe port why would you give all that up just to get a couple percent extra performance save a few seconds on your blender renders so i think we've got some pretty clear answers from today's video number one the macbook air is a better value overall than the m2 macbook pro and number two if you spend the extra 300 to get more and faster storage and more gpu cores you can notice those differences so i think it is worth it to go to the higher spec model but i don't think that that makes the base model a quote-unquote bad deal because at twelve hundred dollars and i'm sure it'll take just a couple of months before we start seeing these things at like a thousand eleven hundred all that stuff i think it's still honestly a pretty decent value so let me know what you guys think of this comparison in the comments below and as usual make sure to like comment and subscribe and with that i'll see you guys in the next video you\n"
