Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Macbook Air M3 vs Macbook Air M2 – Full Comparison”.
What’S up folks how’s it going? This is watch from MW technology and today we’re going be taking a look at the M3 MacBook Air and directly, comparing it against the M2 MacBook Air. We’Ve had the M2 for the past year. It’S been awesome, no complaints and I wanted to determine whether there is actually a significant performance bump coming from the M2 going to the M3. Obviously, the M3 has a whole new architecture, 3 nanom compared to 5 nanom. So that’s definitely going to be a little bit more power efficient, not to mention a little bit more powerful from a multicore and single core perspective, as well as the GPU has been given a little bit of a leg up.
So we’re going to go through a whole bunch of different synthetic benchmarks, we’re going to render out some video in premere Pro as well as the battery life. So, if you’re interested, let’s get right into it now, physically speaking, you’re not going to really notice any difference between the M3 and the M2 MacBook Air, they have the exact same Dimension weight as well as keyboard and display configuration. Now, when it comes to Ports to connectivities, both laptops have two display: ports, SL Thunderbolt connections, and if you want to Output to an external monitor, you can hook up One external monitor on both laptops natively, but on the new M3. If you close the lid, you can hook up um extra second external, monitor up to 6K resolution versus you’re, always kind of limited to One external display on the M2.
Now you can obviously uh eliminate all these limitations. If you buy a display, link, enabled adapter or dongle dock for your laptop, but this is what it’s natively supported. Moreover, let’s finally get into our synthetic Benchmark results and obviously we have to do a geek bench test so on the multi-core and single core performance. Obviously, the M3 was faster, but not by a huge margin on the multicore score.
We got about 11,000 points versus about 10,000 points on the M2, and the single core performance is slightly higher at 3,000 points versus 2600 points on the M3 and M2 respectively on geekbench metal. We also got a slightly higher score on the M3 about 40,000 points versus 39,000 points on the M2. Moving on and testing out, the graphical performance, specifically using unen Valley, Benchmark set to 1920 x 1080 Ultra detail settings.
We got an average FPS score at slightly higher on the M3 about 59 frames per second on average, with a minimum frame rate of 34 frames per second versus 57.8 average frames per second and a minimum average frame rate of about 20.2 frames per second. On the M2, so from a gaming perspective, the M3 is slightly better, but not by a huge margin which is to be expected. Now.
Probably the most important test for me personally is how the M3 three handles Premier Pro specifically in terms of render output times, and we had uh around a 2-hour project that we rendered out in 1080P and more or less both computers were pretty much the same. In terms of the minute count, both took about 20 minutes to finish specifically on the M3, it took about 20 minutes 12 seconds to Output that file and 20 minutes 50 seconds to Output that file on the M2. So not a significant difference, you’re just waiting a couple of more seconds which is uh perfectly reasonable if you’re still on the M2 now. Lastly, I want to talk about the battery performance between the two.
Obviously, the MacBook Air is legendary in terms of what it can do in terms of battery life, and these two are certainly no exception. They have the exact same capacity of 52.6, wat lithium ion batteries and they both can have a video playback run time about 18 hours and 15 hours on wireless web. According to Apple, we always like to do our own video playback test to determine uh real world battery life uh results, so what we typically do is in airplane mode 50 % screen brightness. We play the exact same 1080p video file on both laptops Loop it to infinity and see just how long they last now, I do want to state that the uh M2 MacBook r that we have is obviously a year old, so it does have a little bit Of battery degradation and the battery health is at 93 %, which is still pretty good, but it’s not going to be as good as a new M2 MacBook Air that you just buy off the shelf. But with that being said, the actual results were on the M3 MacBook Air. We got a total run time about 19 hours and 4 minutes and on our older M2, we got about 17 hours and 3 minutes now, most likely. If you were to get a brand new M2 MacBook Air and redo this test, I think they would probably perform a lot more closely and we wouldn’t have this discrepancy. But 17 hours is still plenty of video, playback and uh. We’Ll see how this battery degrades over time, but I’m still fairly happy with the overall battery life that I’m getting on my M2 air. But besides that guys, that’s really it now. If you’re coming from an M1 MacBook or older, I certainly think the the M3 is probably the best Mac that you can buy is especially on the air side. The price is awesome, I think about $ 1,100, a USD if you bu the brand new M2 uh MacBook Air. I think the price is just under ,000, so it’s a $ 100 difference between the two, if you’re looking at the brand new pricing, but if you can get a good deal on a refurb M2, a or perhaps even use and you’re looking at $ 2 to $ 300 price difference, I think uh. That price would justify the shortcomings when it comes to to the overall performance and for if you’re, doing, video, editing and real life tasks, I don’t think you’re going to perceive any difference between the two.
So this M3, a is definitely a mild upgrade and uh definitely not necessary for anybody that has a recent or relatively new Macbook other than that guys. That’S really definitely love to know what you guys think of the new M3, a if you have any specific questions. Let me know check out the description down below for more details about everything we’ve talked about and if you haven’t done already, please make sure you subscribe and have post notifications turned on and like the video, we’ll see you real soon in the next one and take Care .