M3 Macbook Air vs M3 Macbook Pro
Should you buy the brand new fanless M3 MacBook Air or go for the M3 MacBook Pro well in this video we’re going to find out by comparing everything including
the designs the portability displays performance speakers ssds thermals and more now I’ve got the specs on the screen
Specs of each MacBook
You can tell that this is the 15-in MacBook Air for $1,300 and this MacBook Pro starts at 1,600 but it’s constantly on sale for $1,400 which makes it a great deal
and it has 52 gigs of SSD compared to 256 so if you were to upgrade this model it would actually be more expensive 1,500 compared to 1,400 now you can get the 13-in model for even less only $1,100.
13 vs 14 vs 15 Display Differences
It has a smaller 8-core GPU and of course, the screen size is smaller as you guys can see right here the difference in screen size is just a little bit bigger with the 14-in MacBook Pro and a
lot bigger with the 15-in MacBook Air which is why I’m using this one now the 15in does have better thermal performance in terms of not thermal throttling as much and better battery
life but other than that they’re basically the same two now before we get into the other display differences and performance I do want to
close these down and show you guys the exterior differences here you can see that the 15-in has quite a bit larger footprint.
Exterior Differences & Ports
It actually is a lot thinner now in terms of weight the MacBook Pro is actually a little bit heavier even though the footprint of the 15inch is larger and the thing I really
the bottom section is just impossibly thin it’s just really really nice and it’s easy to put it into your backpack
and it just feels so much more portable even though it has the larger 15-in display now moving on to the port they both have Max Save 3 which is really nice and convenient and they both have
two Thunderbolt ports on the side right here as you can see we have the headphone jack on that MacBook Pro which
we actually have on the other side of the MacBook Air but the best thing about the MacBook Pro is that you also have
HDMI and you have an SD card slot which means you don’t have to carry around any adapters or dongles you don’t have to
remember it’s always there which is so nice and now let’s get into comparing the actual speaker quality.
Speaker Quality Comparison
started let me know what you thought down below but to me the MacBook Pro is still so much louder in terms of the bass and the high frequencies overall
sounds amazing even though the 15-in MacBook Air actually has a six-speaker system just like this MacBook Pro while 13in the Air only has four speakers
so even though this is the better air it still cannot compete with the MacBook Pro now they both have 1080p webcams.
Webcam Comparison
This is the 15-in-air right here and it now supports the voice isolation mode for the microphone so it should sound better with less background noise
and this right here is the MacBook Pro and as far as I can tell the actual image does look a little little bit different almost like this has more noise so for
For some reason, the air looks a little bit better.
Display Quality Differences
Differences because the M3 MacBook Pro actually has three major advantages in terms of the actual display technology the first one is the brightness of the
display because the MacBook Air is limited to 500 nits of brightness while the MacBook Pro does 600 standards when you’re just browsing the web and using
it like you normally would the second one is actually the promotion technology which means that the M3 MacBook Pros
display can go up to 120 htz refresh rate which means it’s buttery smooth when you’re browsing the web and just using your Mac like you would through
the menus and everything else while the MacBook Air is always limited and locked to 60 HZ and it can’t go down to 24 like
the MacBook Pro can when you’re watching movies to save battery life and the third Advantage is actually the mini LED
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Mini-LED Quality Comparison
The Advantage of the display is the mini LED technology the M3 MacBook Pro going to go up to 1,600 nits when viewing HDR and here with this YouTube
video you can instantly tell the difference the MacBook Pro is brighter the blacks look darker and deeper much
better contrast and it just looks so much better overall with the MacBook Air looking kind of really gray and dull in comparison just look at this scene right
here where you can see just how dark the MacBook Pro looks because it actually uses local dimming zones so those LEDs are actually completely off Pitch Black
whereas the entire display on the MacBook Air is all gray especially when you’re looking at the night
so this is a huge difference but if you don’t watch a lot of movies or videos on your MacBook you probably might not notice.
SSD Speed Comparison
now let’s go ahead and get into performance the first thing I want to test is the SSD speeds let’s start
black magic disc test right here and wow this is a huge difference in right speed the M3 MacBook Pro is literally twice as
fast as the MacBook Air 347 compared to 1558 and that’s of course because this one comes with a 512 gig SSD right out
of the get-go compared to the base 256 gigs with the MacBook Air but as far as the read speeds they’re very very close
2875 on the MacBook Pro compared to 2714 and that’s actually a good thing because the M2 MacBook Air had an issue
where it only had a single Nan chip which made the read speeds very slow about 1,500 and that impacted everything
in terms of the multitasking performance the SSD swap memory and general performance.
Geekbench 6 CPU & GPU
Now let’s get into CPU performance using Geekbench 6 they both have the same M3 chip with the same 8 gigs of RAM and there you go we have
of results and it’s basically the same score of about 3100 for the single core which is going to mean you get a very Snappy performance with either one and about
12,000 for multicore performance as well so for anything that’s quick and snappy you’re going to have the same
performance no difference at all which is why we also do our stress tests but first I do want to test the metal graphics performance as well and look at
that we have basically the same score of about 47,000 metal points and now moving on.
3DMark’s Wild Life Extreme GPU
let’s do a more realistic gaming test and now once again we have basically the same score about 492 FPS in this quick Wildlife extreme unlimited
test which is why we also do this stress test which is a 20-minute test which is going to get these systems nice and hot
now here we can actually see that the chassis of the MacBook Ear starts to heat soak and the score keeps going
lower and lower and lower down to the lowest Loop score of 5900 compared to the MacBook Pro which is still sticking at about 7900 points
and the stability score that we got was 98% on the MacBook Pro compared to only 73% on the MacBook Air so basically over
the course of 20 minutes the MacBook Air starts to really slow down in terms of graphics performance and that is where
you would really want to buy the MacBook Pro if you’re doing high-end extended tasks and now moving back over to the CPU side
Cinebench 2024 CPU Stress Test
We have the new cab bench 2024 which is going to run a 10minute throttling test which is basically going to push the CPU to the limit to see how
much throttling we get here right off the bat we’re already seeing a difference in terms of the wattage with the M3 MacBook Pro still running at
higher wattage of about 19 and this thing is already going down a little bit the temp’s a massive difference there is 93° on the MacBook Pro already 102 and you can see it right there at 107°C
on the MacBook Air which is basically the limit that Apple sets, it cannot get hotter than that and if it does it starts throttling down the power which it already is right here you can see
13 Watts Look at this chart right here look at this little measurement of wattage just going straight down diagonally as it’s trying to cool the chip down and over here on the MA Pro
it’s staying completely flat it even went up a little bit higher and that’s because it has the fan with the heat sink attached to it so it very quickly is able to dissipate that heat which the
MacBook Air cannot do and now that fan is kicked up on the MacBook Pro 4600 RPMs I still can just barely hear it and just the performance in terms of wattage
is just going on the MacBook Pro it’s been over 6 minutes now running this test
Thermal Throttling Comparison
I want to pull out my seek thermal camera to take a look at what we have right here in terms of temps looking at the MacBook Air it looks like
we’re at 44° C right there on that hot spot compared to around 36° C which is a huge difference in terms of the actual surface temps of
these hot spots on both machines which is why the MacBook Air is cooling itself down so much in terms of cutting the power and sacrificing performance.
Performance Conclusion
There you go we have our score we have 577 points for the MacBook Air and 633 points for the MacBook Pro that’s about 99.7% faster over a 10minute stress test
now does that matter for the MacBook Air well not really because a lot of people that are going for this MacBook era at least in terms of that market are going to be doing tasks that are fairly quick
easy and snappy like let’s say some quick photo editing exports in a couple of minutes or a video edit export 5 minutes you’re not really going to see that big of a difference now the people who are
going to have extended workloads like gaming for half an hour or hours that’s where you really want to get the MacBook Pro
where it’s going to sustain the performance unlike what we saw in 3D Marks Wildlife where it was literally like 25% faster and it throttled a lot on the MacBook Air that is where the
MacBook A is not really a good choice while being fanless and now before.
Battery Life Comparison
I am giving you guys my final thoughts on which one you should be buying in 2024 I do want to go through the battery life looking at the 15-in MacBook Air we are
left with 57% battery life after a few hours of filming all in all we had some active areas and some idle areas as well as 57
compared to the MacBook Pro which is 45% so that the MacBook does have better battery life even though the
actual battery size is smaller 66.5 W hours compared to 70 on the 14-in MacBook Pro and the reason for that is that we have a promotion so higher refresh
rate on the MacBook Pro we have a little bit brighter display 600 nits instead of 500 and because this thing was
throttling down and lowering the power usage and that also helped with the battery life as well so in terms of battery it’s definitely the 15in that wins and now with all of that said
Which M3 MacBook should you buy?
and tested here are my final thoughts on which one you should be buying honestly with the 14-in MacBook Pro being on sale for $1,400 right now and that it comes with
the 512 gigs are included which means it’s going to be cheaper than $1,500 with this thing similar specs I would just go for the MacBook Pro I mean you get
the brighter display you get 120 HZ promotion you get the fan to make sure you never have any issues with throttling just in case you do some kind
of heavier longer workloads and you also get the extra ports HDMI and SD card slot yeah basically there’s no way you can go wrong unless you care more about