2020 MacBook Air vs Surface Laptop 3 - Better than a Mac?

 

Surface Laptop Better than a Mac?

hey guys it's Ghost Rider today we're gonna be comparing apples brand-new 2020 MacBook Air against Microsoft Surface laptop 3 and believe me this is a very tough choice both laptops are excellent the surface laptop 3 is one of my favorite Windows laptops this is mine I bought it personally I'm keeping it's excellent not only are we going to be looking at the CPU and graphics performance we're also gonna test things such as speakers the webcams and microphones the keyboards we're also gonna look at thermal performance once these laptops heat up and authentication and much more now I've linked to both these down in the video description below there are some great deals on the surface of laptop 3 which makes it a much tougher choice and I'll talk about pricing at the end there's also a few discounts on the new MacBook Air now let's go ahead and get into I'm gonna close these up right here and let's compare the exteriors now if I put the MacBook Air on top of the surface laptop 3 you guys will see that as far as width they're about the same but the surface laptop 3 is taller or deeper that is because the aspect ratio of the screen is different and then as far as the thickness on the backside here the surface laptop is a little bit thicker and same thing with the other side if you guys take a look over here it's a little bit thicker and holding both of them in the hand the surface laptop 3 feels a little bit chunkier it's a more edgy kind of squarish design whereas the MacBook Air has this nice kind of slate shape but as far as the actual weight they are very similar we have 2.8 pounds for the MacBook Air and 2.8 5 pounds for this all-aluminum model of the surface laptop 3 I have this model which is black and it is a fingerprint magnet it is crazy whereas the MacBook Air it resists being prints much better even if you have the space gray version and it just feels nicer built over also build quality definitely goes to the MacBook Air as far as ports the MacBook Air has a headphone jack and it also has two Thunderbolt 3 ports that run at full speed and that is all with the surface laptop 3 on this side we have a headphone jack

We have a USB C port in the USB a port and on the other side you can use it for the charging connector and then taken docks that they sell separately now this USB C port is not vulnerable three compatibles and that's one of the biggest downsides of the surface laptop three now that means that with the MacBook Air you can easily connect this to a Thunderbolt three dock instead of a USB C dock and I'll give you a lot more performance a lot more capabilities and you can plug in an external graphics card to this laptop whereas you cannot do that with the surface laptop three now as I open these up I have to commend Microsoft for doing a great job on the hinge it is a one-handed open and as you guys may have noticed the surface laptop three automatically logged me in and that is because it has Windows hello now the MacBook Air doesn't have that I wish it had a face ID but it does have touch ID so it works really well now that we have both open you guys could see that there is a difference in displays the MacBook Air uses a sixteen by ten display which is nicer a little bit more vertical space but Microsoft takes it a step further and gives us a three by four display so it starts at about the same point here but this one is even taller which means that more stuff can fit on the screen now as far as a resolution not a huge difference but the MacBook Air is slightly sharper now we also have some differences in terms of brightness the surface laptop three is actually a little a bit brighter than the MacBook Air but it doesn't have as good coatings for reflectivity now the reason for this could be because the surface laptop three is actually a touchscreen so if you're somebody that likes to have touch capability this definitely has it now let's move down a bit and look at the keyboards the surface laptop three has an excellent keyboard the keys are large they feel really good they're not mushy and previously in our last comparisons 

We're in the Mac books had the butterfly keys this definitely one but Apple updated this to their new magic keyboard which is the best of their previous two and this one is better not buy a lot just a little bit mostly because it's a little bit more tactile it's a little bit more stable gives you a little bit more feedback and it also has really good travel but I don't think you're gonna go wrong with either one of these laptops if you do a lot of typing now moving down a little bit lower this is where we see some differences in the surface laptop pari has a really good trackpad one of the best Windows laptops it is quite large but it is a click trackpad meaning it's easy to click at the bottom but if you go higher it is much more difficult to click whereas the MacBook uses a force touch trackpad which is all glass and it doesn't actually, click there are magnets in there and that allows it to feel completely the same no matter where you're clicking you can actually adjust the feedback level and tune it and that is just so nice it definitely is a step above this is the quality of the MacBook Airs built-in 720p webcam and microphones and here's the quality of the surface laptop 3 s built-in 720p webcam and microphones go ahead let me know down in the comments section which one looks and sounds better to you now it's time to compare the speaker's the MacBook Air has speakers that are user-facing through the speaker grilles over here whereas the surface laptop 3 has speakers that just fire through the keyboard it seems because I can't find any ports anywhere I just flipped my Lavin mic to be completely even between these two laptops you go ahead and put on your best pair of headphones and let's see which one is better to thank you you'll let me know what you think down in the comments section below keep in mind I am recording through a lav mic and this is going online but what I can hear personally is that this is a tough call so the surface laptop 3 is definitely a little bit louder judging off of my Apple watch, it peaked about one decibel louder and you can tell that it also has a little bit more bass and then the high frequencies all are a little bit more kind of sharp whereas the MacBook Pro is more balanced and the mates have more clarity if I had to choose one to live with I would probably say I would rather have a little bit more loudness even though the overall sound quality might be a little bit worse just because in certain environments that can be really useful now it's time to get into performance both these laptops are using Intel's latest 10 nanometers I 5 quad-core processors 8 gigabytes of low power ddr4 memory and they both use Intel iris + g7 graphics which are a great deal at this price point compared to a lot of the competition so this is going to get interesting I'm gonna go ahead and start the CPU benchmark the MacBook Air has a 1.1 gigahertz base that goes up to 3.5 compared to a 1.5 that goes up to 3.7 so surface laptop 3 I believe it uses u processor and whereas the MacBook Air uses a Y processor and that just means that the MacBook Air is designed to save more power be more power-efficient and we're gonna talk about battery life in just a bit as well and here are our results not only does the surface laptop 3 beat the MacBook Air in single-core performance by just a a little bit with a very excellent score in multi-core it's actually about 35% more powerful and not as pod just because of the extra wattage that it can use for the CPU now let's go ahead and test out graphics it looks like the surface laptop 3 gets about a 20% higher score in terms of graphics and I wanted to do a gaming test here but unfortunately the surface laptop keeps crashing my Unigine test and I kept reinstalling it from different websites and that's I'll talk about Windows here and just a little bit but let's go ahead and test out thermals a little bit more we're going to use Cinebench r 20 which I have open right over here and I'm be looking at the frequencies as well to see what kind of a sustained load can these laptops handle and also what about the fans let's say run right off the bat we get 3.5 gigahertz here and 3.6 here it actually didn't hit 3.7 and as soon as the test starts running we're getting 3.3 gigahertz on the surface and we're already down to three-point or two-point three on the MacBook Air so this is throttling really quickly 

The MacBook Airs fans are already spinning up at 4,500 rpm we've been sitting at a hundred reso seus for a while and now we're down to 1.7 gigahertz whereas with the surface of the laptop we are running at 2.7 much higher and we're still at 77 degrees Celsius so the thermal performance is actually quite good and as far as fans I cannot hear the surface of laptop 3 but it could definitely here at the MacBook Air it's still really quiet and this is a very quiet room here but we definitely notice some differences so surface laptop 3 is done with a score of 1680 really high score two-thirds the way through with the fans did kick up but it was still quieter than the MacBook Air and it was able to maintain 2.7 gigahertz throughout the whole time and I didn't see it hit above 80 degrees Celsius which is impressive the MacBook Air still has a ways to go here and we're now running at 1.5 gigahertz and hovering right around the hundred Celsius mark and the results are in with a surface laptop three scorings about 70 percent higher than the MacBook Air and why do we have such a big difference between Geekbench and Cinebench well Cinebench as pushing all the four cores to their max bricks and a period of time and the only way the MacBook Air can keep itself cool enough without shutting down is by slowing down the chip if we had better cooling maybe there'd only been about a 15% difference instead of what we are seeing I know a lot of you guys asked for SSD tests so here we go we're gonna start both of these and we're seeing a pretty big difference Apple's SSD in terms of write, speed is a lot faster as far as the read comparison so the surface laptop is just a sliver faster basically the same at 1400 but the MacBook Air is close to three times as fast for the right speeds so we compared a bunch of different areas but what about pricing and value well the MacBook Pro surprisingly if we're just looking at MSRP z' is about $200 cheaper with the same amount of RAM SSD storage and also an i-5 quad-core processor but with that said you can get some great deals on the surface laptop three I'll go ahead and have a link in the video description to Amazon where you can get 300 bucks off of this laptop and that brings these two much closer together it makes us actually a little bit cheaper now as I mentioned it's a very tough choice with the surface laptop 3 you're gonna have better performance especially under extended load for both CPU and graphics and that could be great the screens a little bit taller which is nice for productivity on such a small device and in general it is an excellent laptop where the MacBook Air really shines is Mac OS I definitely notice using both of these that the MacBook Air is snappier opening up programs web browsing unzipping files doing downloads everything feels snappier and I don't have as many issues as far as crashes and apps not working for example I really wanted to run the unit in heaven I could not get it to work there are just errors like this and on top of that we do have a difference in battery life the MacBook Air gets about two to three hours better battery life and mixed uses and we also have Thunderbolt 3 ports which allow you to connect them EGP you if you want to do more serious work or even doing some gaming under windows boot camp so because of that if you look at the kind of overall package I would choose the MacBook Air but if you don't care about operating systems and you want better performance with the laptop itself I would go for the surface laptop 3 there you guys go if you have any questions let me know down in the comment section below and click above to subscribe if you guys want to see more videos and if you want to see how the MacBook Air stacks up to the MacBook Pro you guys can click right over there this one max and I'll see you in the next Blog.