Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “2018 MacBook Air vs Surface Laptop 2”.
Hey what’s up folks how’s it going. This watch hope you guys are all doing well and today we’re going to be doing a direct headhead comparison between the all-new, 2018 macbook air and compared directly against the microsoft surface. Laptop 2.. Both are very similar in terms of design feature sets, form factor things like that, and they also promise very similar battery performance. So we’re going to be taking a look at both pcs in terms of multiple facets to hopefully determine which one is the best one and hopefully determine which one is right for you.
So, let’s get right into it now, certainly one of the biggest trademarks of the original macbook air was the fact that it was so thin. But, according to microsoft, the surface laptop 2 is around 14 millimeters at its thickest point, and the new air is around 15.6 millimeters at its thickest point. All this is very deceiving because both notebooks have a tapered design. Most notably you’ll see that the surface laptop has taller feet so, in actual reality, even though the body it might be thinner, it actually stands a little bit taller than the macbook air.
Moreover, they both have the same overall footprint size and weigh the exact same amount at 1.25 kilograms. Now the similarities start to end once you open up both clam shells, the surface laptop 2 uniquely has this claw, slash, alcantara lining and the macbook air? Pretty much just looks like a macbook pro just with the light bar taken out now. That also means you have the same exact, low profile, keyboard design as found in the current generation of macbook pros, which could be a huge turn off for some people. Looking for a little bit more tactile feedback, key travel and there’s been some mild concerns about reliability with the current generation of macbook keyboards.
Luckily, the design on the surface laptop 2 keyboard is pretty much the same one that your grandpa uses. So you get a decent amount of key spacing key travel. It’S also led backlit.
I like the macbook and really no complaints from me. Thus far now with that being said, i do prefer the force touch trackpad on the new macbook air. Not only is it larger than the one that we found on the surface laptop, but it’s a lot more responsive, especially for multi-touch commands. Well, then, again, that’s not the biggest concern for the surface laptop, because if you want a touch screen well, you do have one. The 13 and a half inch pixel sense display is fully optimized for up to 10 points of contact.
You can also use the surface pen as well as the surface dial, and it definitely makes sense to have it. We still don’t have any capacitive touch on any of the macbook pcs. I can see why mac os 10 is still not optimized for touch eventually, it will be, but at this point in the game, it seems like apple’s a little bit behind now in terms of the display quality itself. This is where i think the macbook air comes back in the lead. You have a native resolution of 2560 by 1440. It has a pixel density count of 227 ppi versus on the surface laptop too. We have 2256 by 1504. So a little bit lower resolution and a little bit less pixel density at 201 ppi and a different aspect: ratio to a 3 2 aspect ratio versus 16 by 10 on the macbook air beyond those notions in real life.
Uh to my eyes, i prefer the macbook air display. It seems a little bit more contrasty. The color is a little bit more saturated and it’s just a little bit more of a pleasurable experience. That being said, there’s really nothing to complain about on the surface laptop as well now moving right along if you’re looking for connectivity options. Well, definitely don’t look at the macbook air because you’re, basically only looking at two thunderbolt 3 slash usbc connections, one you’re going to use for charging and one you’re going to use to plug in this adapter to get access to everything you need.
Ironically, the surface laptop 2 has every connections, besides the only port that we have on the air, so you have a full size. Usb 3.0 connection, a headphone jack, a mini displayport connection, just not a usb type-c connection, which is uh kind of ridiculous, especially in 2018. Now, at this point, the macbook air is actually very limited in terms of its internal capabilities, since you only have one processor option: it’s the core: i5 82 10 wide chip, which is a dual core chip with four threads frequency range of 1.6 to 3.6, gigahertz and 8 to 16 gigabyte ram options, so the surface laptop 2 definitely has the superior specifications.
So we have a core i5 core i7 option. Both cpus are quad cores with 8 threads, just difference in terms of boost frequencies, and we have the same ram configuration as the macbook and as well as the same kind of integrated style, graphics from intel. And when we take a look at some of our cinebench benchmark results, you can see that the macbook is only scoring 285 points versus 458 points on the surface laptop, but in terms of single core performance, the macbook isn’t too bad scoring about 41.94 points on geekbench Uh versus 2879 on the surface laptop, but in terms of the multi-core score, the surface laptop with more cores and threads is beating out the air by a significant margin of over 10 000 points versus 7 600 points. And, of course, when it comes to the graphical performance, although both these two machines are completely unsuited for any kind of serious gaming applications, just to give you guys an idea, what the internal integrated graphics scores are uh on valley, 720p high details, we’re getting about 24.2 Average frames per second on the surface laptop versus 17.4 average frames per second on the new macbook air.
Now. Lastly, let’s go over the battery performance on both a laptop so in terms of capacity itself, you’re looking around 50 watt hours for the new macbook air, which might be smaller than the previous generation air. But it is larger than what the surface laptop 2 has, which is 45.2 watt hours now to test out the battery performance. We did a video playback drain test, so we play a video on loop on the vlc app turn off. Wi-Fi set the brightness to around 50 on both pcs, and here is the runtime over here.
Now i’ve done this a couple of times on both pcs, and this is the average of three runs. So i got about eight hours 47 minutes on the surface laptop too versus the 2018 air got 11 hours 17 minutes now. I did also repeat the test on my 2016 slash late 2015, a macbook air as well, and i’ve got around 10 hours 11 minutes on that same exact test.
Uh, keep in mind that that pc has over 300 uh recharge and discharge cycles on it. So the new air is definitely outperforming the surface laptop too in terms of our video playback test in terms of real-life battery performance, that’s always going to be dictated by a whole bunch of different factors. My money would definitely be on the air in terms of lasting longer on an average usage profile, and it’s certainly even better than the previous generation macbook air, which was legendary to begin with, so definitely very impressive to see now.
One thing i want to address is regarding the price point, and now the surface laptop 2 is significantly cheaper at around a thousand dollars versus you’re, looking at just under 1200 for the base configuration of the macbook air and the only real thing you can upgrade is Ram and internal storage and based on the performance results that you saw. Uh you’re really not getting anything in fact, you’re losing a lot of performance compared to the surface laptop too, and you can option out the surface laptop to be a lot faster and a lot more capable than the current generation air, which is certainly one of the Factors: that’s stopping me from uh, taking the plunge and fully adopting the new macbook air. I simply think that the internal specifications are way too underpowered, especially for a notebook pc in 2018..
I definitely love to hear your thoughts if you guys have any special questions. Let me know give us a thumbs up if you like this video and hopefully we’ll see it real soon. If you haven’t checked out already, we do have a comparison with the new ipad pro versus the surface pro 6.. That’S going to be a really awesome! Video check out the description or click on the card above us to view that video, but we’ll see you later take care. .