The new MacBook Air 15 performed very well in our review, even if there appear to be a number of shortcomings. In everyday life, however, these do not play a major role and, if you take a closer look, there are a few areas where Windows laptops still fall behind.https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-s-MacBook-Air-15-M2-is-expensive-but-practically-unrivaled.727913.0.html
"While some people don't like to hear it, the base model with 8 GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD is perfectly adequate."
Well, that's exactly right...
I have no problem with saying that this Mac is a good machine, I have just a problem with rating. I also have no problem with spec 8GB/256 SSD- good enough for people browsing web (the most of users) using online storage, office apps etc (even if overpriced, it can be justified).
This mac has great screen, great battery life, very good build quality and silent operation. But for the score 92% it's underpowered. Fails on wi-fi, ssd, cpu performance. Don't want to mention that on notebookcheck all reviewers always say that unupgradable RAM is on the cos side - in case of mac this is not a problem (don't want to mention about ssd).
I replace my home laptop (used also to work) every 2 years, work laptop every year. Many times I was considering buying mac pro, mainly for its performance, build quality and battery life. Due to some software issues, I decided to skip it. I am not against apple - I am against reviews and rating that look like apple's promotional advertisement.
Just compare it to zenbook 14X with i9 processor, oled screen with vh refresh rate (touch), wifi 6e, pcie 4 (replaceable) and cheaper. I have no words...
Unrivalled for? Surf the web and write emails? $1300 is really necessary for that? 1 minute of screen recording in 60 fps is 660-710 MB, btw. Good luck recording several 5-10 mins clips with 256 GB storage 😀
Soldered components affect the rating of every laptop we test. The MBA 15 did not get any points for maintenance in our rating (part of the chassis section). We always mention the lack of upgrade options in our review. just because we do not mention it as a specific con (only in the written review), does not mean it does not affect the rating.
There is another benefit to using Apple products, including MacBook Air, that no one talks about. Apple products are relatively free from viruses. As a result, they are much more user friendly. I am very happy with my MacBook Air. It's always ready to use. On the other hand, my windows laptop has to be booted up every morning, it needs frequent re-starts and constant virus protection.
Quote from: Niraj Chandra on June 24, 2023, 14:55:05There is another benefit to using Apple products, including MacBook Air, that no one talks about. Apple products are relatively free from viruses.
"Complete list of Mac viruses, malware and trojans" -
macworld.com/article/672879/list-of-mac-viruses-malware-and-security-flaws.htmlQuote from: Niraj Chandra on June 24, 2023, 14:55:05As a result, they are much more user friendly. I am very happy with my MacBook Air. It's always ready to use. On the other hand, my windows laptop has to be booted up every morning, it needs frequent re-starts and constant virus protection.
Disable hibernation and you won't need constant rebooting, it will just wake up from sleep and work equally good (or bad if it's a weak machine) as when you left it.
Quote from: Neenyah on June 24, 2023, 13:19:51Unrivalled for? Surf the web and write emails? $1300 is really necessary for that? 1 minute of screen recording in 60 fps is 660-710 MB, btw. Good luck recording several 5-10 mins clips with 256 GB storage 😀
Get higher versions if your requirements are more or get MacBook Pro 14/16 with 8TB variant. And by the way if you are a real professional who uses vram (not RAM) near 90 GB then it's not possible for windows systems even for a windows desktop. You just can't even open the file, Mac is the only option as the MacBook Pro offers 96 GB of unified RAM which will take more than a decade for nvidia, amd and intel combined to provide in a laptop form factor and with the power efficiency of Apple M chips.
No matter how much you spend on windows laptop their main weekness shows when they run on battery power. That's why windows is better in desktop but for laptop mac is the best. not for the price but for the actual purpose of buying laptop in the first place.
"Apple chips are passively cooled, which is a huge advantage. In the Windows camp, you have to rely on ARM chips from Qualcomm, which results in somewhat sluggish overall performance that cannot be compared with faster x64 laptops."
Not true !
Hey ppl come on, do your research... surely you must be aware of Intel's N-series chip existence ! because , for example, both ASUS and Lenovo IdeaPad 330 sports the Intel Pentium Silver N6000 (and older N5000) - 4 cores, totally fanless !
And... While some people don't like to hear it, the N series is perfectly adequate, even for video editing, but you must have 8 GB of RAM and replace HDD drive with SSD (though nowadays most come with SSD out of the box).
Besides... There's a new wave of CPUs coming through, all those recently presented Intels N100, N200 and N300 (8 cores!), all with very low TDP, something like 6 or 7 W. Very fast, certainly could compete with that Macbook of yours... while being passive cooled at the same time, of course. Oh , and 5 times cheaper :)
Quote from: Verona on June 24, 2023, 16:21:08Get higher versions if your requirements are more or get MacBook Pro 14/16 with 8TB variant.
Well yes, obviously, but I talk about the article here and the Air 15 with its mentioned 8/256. Quote from the article:
Quote"For example, there is no WLAN with 160 MHz, PCIe 4.0, and the specs (8 GB RAM, a slow 256 GB SDD) of the base model are meager. However, you also have consider the device's intended purpose, and the new Air 15, like its smaller sibling, is aimed at casual users who primarily use the laptop for surfing, writing emails and viewing photos/videos. While some people don't like to hear it, the base model with 8 GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD is perfectly adequate."
One literally doesn't need to pay $1300 to do that when you can do all that equally good for not even half the price.
Quote from: Verona on June 24, 2023, 16:21:08And by the way if you are a real professional who uses vram (not RAM) near 90 GB then it's not possible for windows systems even for a windows desktop.
Real professional? So others non-M1/2/3 users are fake professionals? Last time I checked in a Windows desktop you can add like 4x GPU (say 4090) and that's 65536 CUDA cores + 96 GB of GDDR6X.
Just one 4090 with 24 GB is significantly faster (because not everything is related to the amount of VRAM) than anything Apple can offer; actually M2 Ultra's GPU level of performance is around the RTX 3050 desktop, so nothing particularly wow, and the CPU itself is weaker than comparable AMDs and Intels, refer to this article:
"Apple's M2 Ultra Seemingly Can't Beat AMD and Intel Rivals" -
tomshardware.com/news/apple-m2-ultra-geekbenched M2 Ultra is certainly a beast but it's not a true professional-grade workstation-level SoC. Its (all Ms, not just M2U) main advantage is power efficiency
with Apple-optimized native software like Final Cut Pro. Add something like Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve and Apple is simply incapable to match that level of performance from Windows competition, even in performance per Watt (
"PC vs MAC for the SAME PRICE - Which is better for VIDEO exporting?" -
youtube.com/watch?v=_D0K3-uZMyY). And then battery suffers a lot too.
There is also so many x86-exclusive professional software, it's not available on current M-Macs nor it will be. Can you install ABB RobotStudio Suite (
new.abb.com/products/robotics/robotstudio) on your M1/2 Mac? No, you can't, despite 96 GB of unified memory. Apple's targeted audience is content creators. Content creators are not the only real professionals among professionals. And I would say that ABB is really not a "fake professional" company, nhf.
Oh yeah, btw, you can't buy the Ultra-tier SoC in a laptop. Max is their strongest SoC for laptops and that one is essentially half the power of an Ultra. Ultra is also quite literally two Max chips put together. And that same Ultra is getting smoked easily by AMD and Intel, so...
@Verona, I have tested my Nvidia RTX 4070 GPU and compared it with someone else's test of an Apple M1 for machine learning by the same application. Result: The 4070, even at its default power target and voltage, is 5 times as hungry, 32.5 times as fast and therefore 32.5 / 5 = 6.5 times as efficient (application speed per watt)! Nvidia - not Apple - is the king of efficiency!
Thank you Robert for that info! Very useful and good to know 🙏
8 GB on a MacBook is nothing like 8 gigabytes on a Windows machine don't forget. People have done a lot of things (video editing) with 8 GB MacBooks...
Quote from: Eric on June 24, 2023, 23:45:588 GB on a MacBook is nothing like 8 gigabytes on a Windows machine don't forget. People have done a lot of things (video editing) with 8 GB MacBooks...
What are you trying to say? Inhowfar differ application experiences?
On a system with unified memory, software needs it for every storage purpose. On a system with RAM and VRAM, software needs VRAM for GPU-/TPU-specific storage and needs RAM for general purpose storage. Both systems can run out of storage space. If VRAM is filled, some swapping to RAM may be needed, but if there is sufficient VRAM, this swapping need not occur - just basic transfer between VRAM and RAM (with or without help of the CPU). Conceptually, unified memory is simpler for the software because modifying pointers to storage addresses is enough (as long as there is enough storage).
Then there are different operating systems with different needs to use parts of unified memory or RAM for themselves. With small RAM, such as 4GB or 8GB, Windows uses a significant fraction for itself. Badly programmed basic software (such as browsers) also needs some space.
But what does all this mean in practice? For basic needs, 8GB RAM might be just too small on a Windows computer. I do not know but maybe less so unified memory on a Mac?
So are you just trying to tell us Linux or MacOS is more efficient for small amounts of storage? Or are you trying to make an argument that unified memory instead of RAM + VRAM has a practical advantage (which?) for software that needs VRAM at all on a system with the two types of storages? If the latter, how do such practical advantages result in faster speed for what kinds of softwares (while other kinds of softwares, as I have already explained, are very much faster on RAM + VRAM because GPU / TPU speeds dominate the storage architecture's conceptual disadvantage)?
As to video editing on 8GB. For years, I video-edited without problem on 2GB RAM under Windows 7. It all depends on how efficiently an OS uses RAM and what kind of video editing one does. My basic splitting of videos only needed the size of the video file itself. I guess it can be much for storage-demanding if one applies complex filters on a video. Also, newer Windowses fill more RAM but Windows 10 works well with 8GB and basic video splitting. For basic stuff, browser windows / tabs have become the most storage-hungry now that files on the internet have grown and browsers are programmed badly.
And what do you think all those "content creators" do when it comes to video editing on YouTube? They just jibble and join/split some fragments here and there...
They don't really need a MacBook to do that, it can be done on any 300$ machine.
Quote from: ramirez789 on June 24, 2023, 16:42:40
"Apple chips are passively cooled, which is a huge advantage. In the Windows camp, you have to rely on ARM chips from Qualcomm, which results in somewhat sluggish overall performance that cannot be compared with faster x64 laptops."
Not true !
Hey ppl come on, do your research... surely you must be aware of Intel's N-series chip existence ! because , for example, both ASUS and Lenovo IdeaPad 330 sports the Intel Pentium Silver N6000 (and older N5000) - 4 cores, totally fanless !
And... While some people don't like to hear it, the N series is perfectly adequate, even for video editing, but you must have 8 GB of RAM and replace HDD drive with SSD (though nowadays most come with SSD out of the box).
Besides... There's a new wave of CPUs coming through, all those recently presented Intels N100, N200 and N300 (8 cores!), all with very low TDP, something like 6 or 7 W. Very fast, certainly could compete with that Macbook of yours... while being passive cooled at the same time, of course. Oh , and 5 times cheaper :)
You seriously believe that the cpus you mentionned match a base M2 chip?
Let me show you how wrong you are.
Geekbench results for your so powerful N300 (8 cores! you said), Asus Vivo slate 13 oled, relased a month ago.
Geekbench single core : 1235
Geekbench Multicore : 4205
Passmark: 9534
Now lets take a look at M2
Geekbench single core : 2638
Geekbench Multicore : 10014
Passmark: 15368
Lets go even further, lets compare your 8 Core fantastic chip with a 2020 base m1.
Geekbench single core : 2366
Geekbench Multicore : 8656
Passmark: 14118
As you can see, a 3 year old M1 CPU destroys any of, even the latest june 2023 intel CPUs you mentionned. And dont get me started on GPU performance as we all now how Intel Graphics perform compare to M1.
I know that apple bashing is still thing in 2023, but maybe its time to accept that when it comes to laptops, Apple is the one who managed to raise the bar this high.
Quote from: ramirez789 on June 25, 2023, 13:14:33And what do you think all those "content creators" do when it comes to video editing on YouTube? They just jibble and join/split some fragments here and there...
They don't really need a MacBook to do that, it can be done on any 300$ machine.
So now we can comfortably edit and export 4k videos on a 300$ windows machine. This is ground breaking news.
Please show us a brand new 300$ windows machine can achieve this in a smooth and efficient way.
Option 1 : You don't know anything about Video Editing
Option 2 : You don't know anything about the CPU/GPU performance required to edit a video.
Option 3 : All of the above.
Damn, all hail the M1/M2 Mac!! In video editing Intel(+QuickSync) + Nvidia can't do anything against those fastest chips in the known universe and even when M1s & M2s are 6x slower that's actually being 6x faster but we read clocks wrong 🤯 Such a power for real professionals, Intel and Nvidia are turned into useless dust by the mighty Apple 🥵
Reality is "slightly" different 👉 "PC vs MAC for the SAME PRICE - Which is better for VIDEO exporting?" ( youtu.be/_D0K3-uZMyY ) 👈 where we can see the M2 Pro being completely obliterated by just the i5+3050 combo but ok, who needs reality when Apple is damn good and fast and superior and when even the latest June 2023 Intel CPU can't match such insane and never-seen-before performance 🥵🥵
Hard to read it... I wonder if anybody tried to run windows server vw or any 64bit os vm on these macs. Computing it's not only editing photos or videos. Not only gaming. Unrivalled laptop is useless unless you want to use arm windows option, but it's really hopeless. You can also use azure, it's still limitation. For many people like me, macbook is not even worth $500. It's just a gadget.
Well that's true Olaf, no denying there, but also Apple is primarily targeting content creators, so video editors, photographers, designers, animators and 3D also to some extent (lack of GPU power is limiting for something really professional and intensive) and of course iOS/macOS developers. They absolutely don't care about anything or anyone else, including gaming.
So just by that fact it's funny to call the Air 15 unrivalled when it gets easily beaten in all those mentioned targeted usages too; for example in video rendering, where 3 minute long 4K h.264 vid in DaVinci Resolve is rendered in 3:23 on M1 Pro MacBook Pro vs 1:32 on Asus ZenBook Pro 16X with i9 13905H + 4080. Even cheaper and weaker Dell XPS 17 (9730) with i7 13700H + 4070 is completely obliterating that M1 Pro MBP with just 1:47 to render the same clip ( youtu.be/Ne7O9qE2puY?t=770 ).
Amusing article.