Unboxing The 2020 M1 MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro

so i got the new macbook air as well as the new macbook pro i thought a comparison would be cool

i mean people are saying all kinds of positive things about these chips

it's really amazing it's hard right what do you do you go to the drawing board you try to do your

own silicon and you try to replace a piece of intel which they've been the established brand

in this space for so long and then to get the initial impressions that are out there and the

benchmarks and all the rest of it i mean it's pretty amazing the numbers i'm seeing so it got

me pumped up pumped up enough to go pick both of these up now the curious part here is how much

overlap there is for these two devices i get it this one says pro it has the touch bar and all the

rest of it but from a performance perspective they're really tight and from a weight perspective

they're really tight it's like a 0.2 pound difference this would be a really confusing

choice i think for a lot of buyers i know some people they want the thing to say pro

and they might want to i don't know it's a slightly beefier build to it but you can save

some money and go with the air you don't have a fan oh that would be the biggest difference so you

have active cooling on the macbook pro which may avoid thermal throttling under a heavy load however

i've seen some tests already on the air and it's looking pretty promising even doing work for a

while without a fan and that speaks to what apple's been able to do with the m1 chips so as far as the

spec is concerned i think i got the higher end of the pre-configured spec like not custom order or

anything like that so that means 8 gb memory to go with 512 ssd you can see here 2.8 pounds for the

air and three pounds for the pro it's obviously this is different if you go up to the 15 inch pro

but i mean that's a lot of overlap there if you're looking for a portable laptop 13.3 inch display

retina led backlit same resolution 2560 by 1600 two thunderbolt ports that's the same on both of

them as well headphone jack stereo touch id yeah full size backlit keyboard yeah yeah that's the

same check check and both of these have the eight core cpu and the eight core gpu so holy moly what

a tough choice well that's what this video is about hopefully it makes that choice a little bit

easier so let's go ahead and unbox these test them out and see what i'm thinking first up let's do

the air this is a little bit less expensive to get into at the baseline so if you're looking for

a budget model actually in the past i've recommended macbook airs to people for many many years because

of the price point portability and so forth then there was a bit of a keyboard fiasco that took

place i had a couple of them fail on me got some bad news bad news look at that there that's what

it does and i kind of stopped recommending them for a bit with that butterfly keyboard

now apple has modified that design and it's supposed to be better now so hopefully that's

the case and i can start recommending this again for someone who's looking for an entry macbook

However what a bit strange here and I played with so many laptops in this range size wise the air is not very air i i understand it a high performance laptop at this point but it right around three

pounds and i mean i've looked at plenty of 14-inch laptops that are half a pound lighter than that

or more so it's not the lightest laptop in its class however what class is it even in if i can

boot up final cut pro and export a 4k file a 4k youtube video in two minutes that's a whole

different class if that's the way this thing is behaving all right so space gray color that's

another difference between the two the color options if you want a gold one for example you're

in air territory the unboxing experience is wonderfully simple as you come to expect from

apple we have a fairly long type c cable to go to the power brick there's also a little bit of

paperwork as well as probably some apple stickers there they are space gray apple stickers are in

there and this is the power brick this might be another difference maybe this power brick is not

as powerful as the one on the pro this is a 30 watt usb type c power adapter that's the air now

Now let's head over to the Pro. Okay, so that's the Pro

And while you really can't tell much of a difference, whether it's weight or form factor

they are so similar at first glance. Now the Air, it tapers

This one is a little bit more symmetrical, but I do kind of like the taper on the air when it comes to typing because you have less of a ridge to overcome

I mean, this is nitpicking because all of these are so thin at this point

You can see the lip is very small to get over here

It's one of my favorite typing experiences. As far as the ports are concerned on the Pro, it's going to be a headphone jack on the right side and two Thunderbolts on the other side

that's a bit of a letdown because previously on the pro you could get some extra connectivity

and that just brings it closer to the air now uh hopefully that's enough for most people but that's

what you're working with on the 13 inch pro for the time being two type c ports in the package

you get the same type c connector get the same paperwork as well as your apple stickers and you

do get a bigger power brick as you can see here it's a 61 watt power brick what that likely means

for you is a faster recharge on this particular unit however you are going to be carrying a less

powerful power brick so it's a bit of a trade-off there as well all right so open up the pro

and it boots up right away you see how apple does that and it smells apple fresh as well so here you

see the chiclet style keyboard which is no longer using those butterfly key switches that were a

a little bit problematic on the previous models and you still don't get a tremendous amount of

travel but if you're familiar with the older apple laptop keyboards it's kind of like that

but a little bit lower profile now the other big difference here is the touch bar along the top

which i don't consider it a major differentiating factor between the two because i just don't use it

that much if you the type of person that thinks you going to take tremendous use out of it then that another advantage for the pro model fingerprint scanners up here in the right hand corner as well that be the same for both the body itself hasn changed

all that much from the previous version so i've seen some teardowns and really it's almost like

just swapping in the chip the fan design is similar as well i've heard that it sounds a bit different

but if you look at this thing with the bottom plate removed you're basically looking at the

previous generation macbook with that new silicon in the inside so that's kind of cool that they

were able to just sub in their new component however it will be interesting to see as well

what they're able to achieve when they design something from the ground up for the m1 chip

specifically instead of fitting it into a previous design based on intel all right so let's open up

the air and compares it's just lift and go one-handed that's a some attention in the engineering

and all the rest of it the fit and finish of these things is no joke i mean i don't need to tell you

now that they fixed the keyboard thing and i think you could make the argument that for some people

the lack of touch bar could be an advantage because for me when i reach for say audio settings

it will sometimes change dependent on the application that i'm in i may see something

different it could be a bit finicky in fact in the past they had the escape key inside of the touch

bar and people hated it so much that they actually brought it out of the touch bar and pro models

there is an argument having more physical keys which is what the air gives you for less speaker

layout looks the same trackpad looks very similar they may be ever so slightly different they are

trackpad is a little bit longer on the pro i set up these laptops it's been oh there's been a little

bit of an ordeal but not too bad i i had to find and track down this 16 inch i have a pen as well

that's kind of i tracked down the 16 inch macbook pro which is the most recent professional macbook

from apple i did a number of edits on this system i've edited on macbook pros for i don't know a lot

of this whole YouTube thing. So I'm very familiar with them. We're looking at a 2.6 gigahertz

six core Intel Core i7, 16 inch from 2019. An expensive machine, far more expensive

than either of these two new machines running on Intel, dedicated graphics

Of course, you have a fan in there as well. We're gonna see if the fan kicks up

how it behaves and what it sounds like. Mo put together a nice little timeline here

One minute edit on Final Cut Pro. a number of clips from a sony a7s3 that codec in some circumstances can be a bit of a nightmare for

editing software at higher resolutions and then there's been some uh effects applied some

stabilization a couple of titles some music and so this is meant to simulate a workflow well it

actually is a workflow this is what we would do is what i would do export a video clip upload a

video clip this is where this m1 stuff gets exciting because if i can be close performance

wise to this unit on the far right the expensive pro model 16 inch with these devices on the left

with apple's silicon at a starting price of around a thousand bucks us well that's a significant

lead all right so this is the apple devices computer setting in 4k h faster encode setting 3840 by 2160 across all three units also software is exact across the board here we talking about the latest final

cut we're talking about the latest mac os three two one so we're not quite at real-time speed right now if that number

stays if it remains at that pace we're a little slower than real-time speed

all right so just under a minute 30 one minute 28 35 on the big old macbook pro now we're going

switch over to the macbook air three two one oh baby oh now you understand why people are excited

this is a macbook air this is a fanless design and look at this so oh my goodness gracious would

you look at this it is completed right now right now 44 seconds ah you're talking about a macbook

air doing this in half the time that is a huge improvement over the previous generation let's see

uh if the macbook pro is any different uh the new macbook pro the 13 inch now this one as well

has an active fan in it presumably if you were doing really long exports and the system started

to heat out this one could i mean at least theoretically maintain its performance over a

longer period of time when compared to the air so that's worth considering although the starting

price is a bit higher on this particular model and it's a little bit heavier barely three two one

oh like barely it's probably just my tap after all the spec sheet is the same and we're not

pushing them so hard that the fans need to turn on or that you would have a thermal issue so

you can expect these to essentially perform the same and that actually it kind of speaks to what

i was saying earlier about these two devices the new m1 models it speaks to this difficulty in

figuring out what you should select if you should save your money and just get the air depending on

what type of tasks you do or if you feel like you need the pro but they have a lot more in common

than they do different i will say i noticed that the display on the 13 inch pro is maybe ever so

slightly brighter than on the air in fact i feel like this display on the 13 inch pro is even maybe

slightly brighter than the 16 inch and i didn't even notice it it wasn't enough for me to notice

until i had them side by side but it's a tough choice this starts at $999 this starts $300 more

i think the macbook air is going to be a serious recommendation for me at the moment for anybody

who works in video for anybody who works in final cut pro to have a sub three pound package that's

going to export a one minute 4k video in a heavy codec in in better than real time i mean what a

time to be alive 2020 things are happening shout out to apple i'm impressed i saw it now in real

life and in real time it's a new m1 macbook pro 13 and the new m1 macbook air 13