Can ANY Laptop Beat a MacBook Air? [Intel vs AMD vs Snapdragon vs Apple]

The new ultra core processors seems very promising. However I just got a m3 MacBook Air, and certainly no windows laptop ive own in the past comes close to the build quality of MacBook. Sure it the base model with 8gb is low but it's never slowed down on me. I do like the fanless design as it absolutely silent.

100% .. i have a macbook pro. next buy will be lenovo with ARM when that is better supported. Running linux of course. No one wants windows replay.

I wonder if all battery tests were done at 60hz. It would effect the results a lot in my opinion.

To be fair, the Asus Zenbook S16 is pushing a 16" 3K 120Hz OLED

All my laptops costing less than my air beat my air, at everything I do I have no idea what this vid is on about, battery life longer than a work day or flight from shore to shore, is wasted tech.

My frigging 7 year old cheapo 2in1 with 32 gigs ram beats my air with 8 ggs at everything I do, Apple has alot of nerve dressing any computer with 10 year old configurations and charging premium prices, but of course, all is good with Apple adherents so Apple gets away with this

Me, I need a new box, my 7 year old wants 64 gigs ram and doesn't support it, these new boxes dressed with 32 are soldered, 32 gigs is not acceptable with soldered ram, the box will not be current in 2 more years, minimum is 64 gigs on a soldered MB

LPcamm2 is already offered by PC, it's thinner, faster than any soldered ram, LPcamm2 is socket ram, If these companies want to solder, dress these with RAM not enough to be current for 5 years, then charge prices accordingly, instead of licking chops at peeps chucking their premium priced laptop in 2 years

Standby using less than 10 percent in a day is wasted tech, if you're not going back to work in 24 hours use hibernate and use less than any mac using sleep, and with modern SSDs no practically usable difference in wake time

Ps, get out of modern standby if you can, if not just hit that airplane button so the box doesn't poll wifi, and it stops connecting, turn off wake on lan

Or best yet, sleep is obsolete with SSDs, which do NOT fail sooner than HDD because of standby, nobody exceeds duty cycle on laptop SSDs

And finally, "ARM" is a lie, it needs exponentially more transistors and/or more efficient NM to be close in performance, everyone thinks is the ARM instruction set or Apple pixie dust, it transistor count, zen4 hx laptop with 10 billion transistors beats it's contemporary M ultra sporting 100 billion, ultra is desktop.

ARM is a lie

It's ironic that I can play more games through proton on Linux than a Microsoft built arm laptop on their own OS xD

Even Asahi on Macs is starting to leap over Windows on Arm

Dude from about 2 minutes in you start talking a whole load of jargon and spec waffle. You need to be aware of your target audience and the average consumer doesn’t care about that stuff or understand it. The MacBook Air is the base MacBook and people buying it or similar alternatives just need a computer that works, they don’t need massive power.

You’re like a secondary school teacher trying to explain space physics in Masters level language. The minute you start using that sort of language you’ll lose half your audience.

Just a bit of advice. Be aware more of your audience and pitch it accordingly.

you can say asus latest effort is the best integrated audio can do

One person said a Windows user will never buy a MacBook and a Mac user will never buy a Windows laptop is just wrong. I'd buy a MacBook Air if it had an OLED screen and was 120hz. It seems like we'll be waiting another decade before that happens.

Of course. Air is useless for any serious software engineer. At least you need MacBook Pro with pro M2 or M3. Else just burn you lap or table with heat. And battery for couple hour only. Stop misleading people.

For me whats surprising is that apple has complete control over their hardware and software, and windows devices are scattered between different choices of componentsand brand but are actually becoming competitive with apples unified system, thats pretty darn good

Chaps, do you think we will see Surfave Pro 11 with Lunar Lake?

There are a ton of reasons I have and always will buy a Mac laptop over any other garbage. Laptop isn't just speed. Customer support for macs is 100 times better than some random windows laptop brand. The fact that I can walk into any Apple store and get help with my computer says a ton. Try that with some random Asus laptop or Samsung laptop you're not going to get crap. Plus their customer service is absolutely horrendous. That's not even mentioning AppleCare which you cannot get that kind of insurance on most other laptops. The build construction and quality Outlast any Windows laptop I've ever owned. The longevity of the operating system is much better. Not to mention OS is far better than Windows 11. Windows is a f**** hot pile of garbage right now. And that's the main reason I would never buy any of these that you're comparing them to is they're all running Windows which is crap

Picked up the S16 with the 370 and the thing is a beauty. X86 with all day battery and good enough iGPU for some light gaming. Now a days it feels less about the CPU and more about other things like screen size and ram. I had to go for a 16 inch laptop and could not be any more happier with it. Linux support is finally to the point where 6.12 rc2 supports all hardware. Running Endevour on it. Plus it is great to know if I ever need the power, it is there. It would bother me if I went with the lunar lake varient.

Finally a quiet x86 laptop, it is amazing.

always go with x86, arm is just awful on laptop. Low compatibility

Just a notice: XeSS and FSR don't use the same scale factor. Since version 1.3, you should use balanced profile to match FSR and DLSS (2.0x factor)

It should be noted that Apple's fanless design is an absolute marvel and I do wonder how other manufacturers haven't been able to resolve that with some liquid cooling, machining (new Zenbook) and smart fan/heatsink design. They should have all nailed that by now to the point that you don't hear anything. It's almost as if every time they launch a new model, they are still figuring out how to cool it properly. The CPU is smaller, it uses less power but what about the heat? How will we cool it down? God, I've been working on it for 20 years now and I still don't know what I should do to handle the heat.🙂

I bought my daughter the Surface Laptop 7 for school to replace her MacBook Air and she's in love with. It's probably the closest for a direct replacement on design and battery life

The problem with the MacBook is the lack of RAM and it's now becoming an issue with everything Apple. They can't handle browsing like other devices which is 80% of a PC's use. They are already obsolete the moment you buy them. The $1,300 Macbook Air with 8GB has half the memory of a $800 Zenbook I just bought with an OLED screen.

I see it with my iPad 9s which have 3GB and can't load many websites. The iPad 10 would have the same issue. You have to hit the iPad Air with the M2 and 8GB of RAM.

RAM is the bottleneck.

Fair review.

Apple ssd capacity hasn't changed since a decade ago. if you see they were selling the same 256gb, 512gb in 2012-2013 👎

x86 is about to be over.

Streaming videos is a USELESS metric when it comes to measuring battery life.

Letha Stravenue

they don't have a powerful gpu as m3

The surface laptop has almost exactly the same battery size as the Macbook.

This guy clearly biased against intel.

None of these reviews mean anything until a few years goes by to even compare to a Mac. Lets see if they still work like new in 2-3 years. My m1 Max ans M1 air all work like factory new

How the fuck can Windows laptops still not have the stupid stickers put on straight at least?? Decade now. Just cant put two stickers on straight

Ryzen

If it runs MacOS I’ll buy it. It’s not all about hardware. The correct arguments should be chips against chips or Windows against MacOS.

Dude yapped for 10 minutes before saying anything of substance.

Hmmm, the software compatibility issues I hope will be ironed out asap. On the ARM versions I mean.
And not looking forward to PCs where you can no longer upgrade the RAM…

Btw, the naming conventions on the new Windows laptops are ridiculous!

Great video! I’ve never had a Mac before, but now I have a big decision to make. I’m a basic user with no demanding tasks. I currently have a Lenovo Legion Y520, which is 8 years old, and now I’m considering either the Apple MacBook Air M3 base model or the Asus ZenBook 14 OLED with a 1st gen Intel Core Ultra 7-155H, 16GB RAM, and 1TB storage. Which would you recommend between these two?

It is not just the size…. it is what you can do with it … Are you talking about laptop! 🤔 may be .. 😂

The base model MacBook Air has only abysmal 8gb of RAM. There is not much life in there.

The high-end Ryzen 300 chips are the only ones which compete with other high-end ARM chips in performance and their battery life is more than good enough.

I'd do anything just to get off of windows. Hate the direction that that os's been going in lately. Transfered to macos a while ago and can't see myself switching back

went for the ryzen because the price performance battery was unmatched. sure the new intel looks good, but nowhere to be found 2 weeks ago when I looked for it. for 1000 euros flat the asus vivoboook 16 inch oled 32gb ram and 1tb ssd is really really good.

Wait how was the battery life on the ultra 7 258v?

Anyone remember just a while ago when he told us that Snapdragon was the second coming of Christ?
Money talks

I've commented on quite a few of these comparison videos so far, based on the Surface Laptop 7 15" as my daily driver. For my use case, it's 2 day battery life. Sleep/wake is instant. No lag, and clicks/transitions are super responsive. I only use one x86 app. Hope Qualcomm stays the course with the X series.

When doing a review of battery life on 5 laptops, you then have 4 on screen and talk about stand-by time on "these two" Is this a pop quiz or something? Should we remember which those are somehow? Also, what do you see as "stand-by" ?

The very first factor in most people’s decision making should be the operating system. I’m a windows guy - tried Mac OS for 6 months but didn’t like it, which is disappointing because the Hardware is great.

For the Windows laptops, I think the Intel Core Series 2 is the standout. No compatibility issues, great battery life and outstanding single core performance, which I would argue, is more important than multi core for most people purchasing these types of laptops.

Great video.

my next laptop is going to have intel chip

Where I live the zenbook S 16 with 32 gigs of ram and a 2TB SSD costs 100$ more than a 15 inch MacBook air with 16gigs of RAM and a 512SSD. I don't know man, for that amount of money this little storage is insane to me. 512GB is ridiculous in 2024.

Great video mate!