Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “iPad Air M2 vs Macbook Air M2 (Full Hands On Comparison)”.
What is up folks how’s it going? This is watch from MW technology and today we’re going to be taking a look at the new 13in iPad Air with the M2 Chip and directly comparing against my older generation MacBook Air. That’S also powered by the same M2 Chip. Really performance-wise both of these are going to be very similar, but we’re going to put them head-to-head. We’Re also going to weigh the pros and cons of using a traditional laptop compared to an iPad, in conjunction with an apple pencil and magic keyboard, to see which is the most most powerful and versatile personal Computing device now. The first thing I want to mention is the price point of the new 13in iPad Air, which starts at $ 77.99, but on Amazon, it’s actually uh been on sale for around $ 769, which is definitely an awesome deal for the tablet itself.
Since it comes with the M2 Chip now, if you want the magic keyboard as well as the apple pencil, that’s something going to drive up the cost to another $ 480. On top of your iPad, if you get the 13in version, which is going to be a lot more expensive than the MacBook Air, but there is a cheap way to do it. Where you get. The 11in version of the iPad, which starts at $ 5.99, get a $ 100 third-party keyboard and be under $ 700 and still have an M2 iPad with a keyboard. Now on uh Apple’s site, they still sell the M2 MacBook Air for about just under $ 1,000.
But you can get it on Amazon for around $ 850 for the Baseline configuration that comes with the a core M2 GPU 20 156 GB of long-term storage and 8 GB of RAM. Now from a portability standpoint, if you’re just going to use the iPad by itself. It’S certainly a lot more portable.
It has a much smaller overall footprint while giving you the similar screen size and uh. It’S thinner at 6.1 mm versus 11.3 mm on the MacBook Air, and it’s about half the weight at 600 G as well. Now that story changes quickly.
Once you add the magic keyboard which brings your thickness from 6.1 mm to 14.8 and pretty much doubles the weight of the iPad, bringing it very similar in terms of the weight of the MacBook Air, pretty much negating any kind of portability advantage that we had previously. Now, in terms of ports and connectivity options, you’re going to have a slight Advantage with the MacBook uh, since it has a separate charging connection with the Mac safe, 3 Connection, a 3.5m headphone jack, as well as two Thunderbolt connections for data as well as power. The iPad, on the other hand, by itself, only has one USBC connection, but if you get the magic keyboard attachment, you do gain another USBC connection on the side, which uh does give you a little bit more versatility in terms of connectivity and charging options.
In addition to that, we also have a touch ID located on the power button side. We also have a magnetic connector at the top portion of the iPad when it’s in landscape mode, for attaching the apple pencil, which is how you charge and pair the apple pencil to the iPad and speaking of the apple pencil. That’S one distinct advantage that we have on the iPad and you could use it for notetaking illustrations, lots of creative stuff.
It has new hover features which lets you uh see what commands it’s going over without actually having to physically touch the screen to the pencil. There’S the new scribble mode, which effectively replaces a keyboard with the apple pencil, where you can hand write into different text boxes and automatically convert that into text which you can edit using different gestures. You can swipe from the bottom right or left to add different uh quick commands like take a screenshot or open up a notes and really with all these functionalities, you’re effectively replacing a keyboard and mouse with the apple pencil.
And if you don’t need a keyboard, there is a way where you can use the iPad as a pretty powerful computer with just the touchcreen and the apple pencil itself. Now, let’s talk about the magic keyboard, which is the same for both the iPad, a and the iPad Pro, which you have large full-size keys that have a backlight. You have a scissor mechanism with 1 M of travel distance for each key quiet in terms of operation, but gives you a little bit of feedback when those keys are pressed and depressed and uh it’s fairly comfortable to type on and something you can easily get used To the touchpad itself is about half the size as what you would get with the MacBook Air, but it’s multi-touch very responsive, and you can do a lot of gestures with it, which expands the functionality of the iPad to a great extent.
Now, one of the main compromises that you’re going to have with the magic keyboard compared to the MacBook keyboard. Firstly, the keys themselves sit flush on top of the tabletop surface, so you don’t get an elevated position, which is generally a little bit more comfortable for most people. In addition to that, you don’t have the function road that you have on the MacBook. That means you can’t directly change things like screen: brightness, backlight brightness, as well as media controls, volume, playback, and things like that. Now, if you hold on the command key, you can get access to some keyboard shortcuts that will make life a little bit more optimized on iPad OS, but it would have been nice to have a full function: roll on the keyboard itself and uh, probably the biggest Gripe that I have is that the trackpad on the MacBook is almost double the size of the magic keyboard, which makes gestures and overall using the trackpad a lot more pleasant on the MacBook compared to the magic keyboard now mov on. Let’S talk about the displays on both these two devices both have a quote: unquote: 13in display, but in reality the iPad is 12.9 in versus 13.6 on the MacBook. Both are using LCD IPS panels uh, but the uh brightness is greater rated on the iPad of 600 nits versus 500 nits on the MacBook, and the native resolution is also higher on the iPad, with a PPI count of 264 PPI versus 224 on the MacBook. Now, when looking at both both displays in reality, I definitely prefer the iPad.
It not only is brighter, which gives you a better contrast, ratio, saturation and overall vibrancy, but it has better viewing angles in addition to having that higher native resolution, which is going to render out finer sharper details, especially when viewing high resolution photos and videos now moving Over to the mean potatoes internally, as we mentioned before, both are running the Apple M2 Chip, which means they have eight core CPU with four performance cores. Four efficiency cores and if you get the Baseline version like what we have, you get an 8 core GPU. Instead of the 10 core GPU, which is an optional extra on the MacBook but comes with actually the iPad Air further in terms of RAM and storage configuration, you have a lot more options on the MacBook, as you would imagine, so you can start from 8 GB Of RAM and up to 24 GB of RAM and the storage options run from 256 all the way to 2 tabt on the iPad uh. You seemingly only have one option of ram, which is 8 GB, and the storage options start at 128 gigs to about 1 tbte.
Now we want to do some synthetic benchmarks since there’s not a lot that we could do besides. Geek bench we’ll just throw up uh the geek bench score, which is uh unsurprisingly, pretty much the exact same multi-core and single core performance at 2600 single core and about 10,000 multicore. The GPU Benchmark on metal is a little bit different since we have the 10 core version of the M2 on the iPad and the a core version on the Macbook.
So around 41,000 points on the iPad versus 40,000 points on the MacBook Air. Now I was actually curious to see whether that slightly faster GPU performance on the iPad will actually translate into faster render output times for things. Like Final Cut Pro, so we took the exact same 4K Final Cut project, which was about 10 minutes long and we uh rendered out 2 h.264 for YouTube distribution, and it took about 6 minutes 8 seconds to finalize that uh export on the iPad and about 6 Minutes 9 seconds so just 1. Second difference on the Macbook, so pretty much the same, there’s no real Advantage from that perspective, but it’s really cool to see how fast an iPad can render out these files just as fast as a laptop, which is pretty impressive. Now, as you can see from the results, and what you would logically conclude is both the Apple M2 chips are identical in terms of performance, regardless of the Mac OS 10 platform or the iPad OS. What really matters is which one you prefer.
I personally prefer, from a workflow standpoint, a Mac OS 10 cuz. I’Ve been using it for decades, but if you’re coming at it new, unbiased uh, you can certainly more or less have the same capabilities on iPad OS. Thanks to things like stage manager which allows you to use multiple windows on one screen and all the gesture. Fe and all the different functionalities that has been added to the iPad OS over the years, making it more and more capable.
But of course, when you compare individual, apps, you’re always going to get a lot more functionality with the native Mac OS 10 app than the ported version on iPad OS, for example, I would say they get about 50 % of the functionality on the Final Cut app Compared to the full desktop version, but as we move throughout the months and years apple and the developers are really focusing quite a lot on the mobile platform. And these functionalities are only going to grow until they’re, pretty much pared and then probably overtake the desktop version of the apps now. Lastly, let’s talk about battery life. The MacBook Air is pretty much legendary for its battery performance and the M2 is certainly no exception. It has a 52.6 wat battery, much larger than the 36.5 9W hour battery that we have on the 13-in iPad. Air Apple claims that you get about 18 hours of video play playback 15 hours of wireless web on the MacBook and uh. According to Apple, you get around 10 hours of battery life on the 13in iPad Air. Now we always like to do our own video playback test, where we play HD video on Loop, 50 % brightness on the display in airplane mode and simply see how long the device lasts from 100 to 0 %.
Now, even though our battery health is around 93 % on our year and a half old MacBook Air, we still managed to get over 17 hours of video video playback time and on the iPad. In the exact same situation, we got actually 11 hours, which is actually better than what Apple claims, so very, very impressive, certainly not as good as the MacBook, but keep in mind. We have 70 % more battery capacity, which is going to always deliver a lot more playback time, as well as more usage throughout the day and uh less charging frequency.
Now, to summarize everything we’ve talked about, I just want to briefly mention five advantages: that the iPad has over the MacBook and five advantages that the MacBook has over the iPad. First, let’s talk about. The iPad definitely has a better display higher resolution brighter. The other thing that it has is a rear-facing camera. That means, apart from the 1080p front-facing camera that you only have with the MacBook, you can also Record 12 megapixel Stills, as well as 4K 60fps videos with the rear facing camera on the iPad. Furthermore, being a tablet in terms of form factor, it is going to be thinner and lighter if you’re, not using keyboard attachment and plus you get the touch functionality which you do not have with the MacBooks. Furthermore, if you like stylus and Apple products, well, the iPad is your only solution at this point, with the apple pencil being exclusively for the iPad. So if you like doing physical notes, illustrations or even replacing your keyboard with the new scribble feature, it’s definitely a cool option. Last but not least, if you get the 11in version of the iPad, it’s the cheapest. An M2 processor has ever gotten under $ 600 and you can pair that up with a third party keyboard and be well under the price of any M2 MacBook Air. Moreover, let’s talk about the advantages on the MacBook Air side. Firstly, it has a full-size keyboard with a function key, a much better trackpad and it’s a lot more comfortable to type on and to use as a laptop compared to using an iPad with a magic keyboard.
You have more native ports and connectivity options built into the MacBook Air compared to the iPad, in addition to the fact that you can configure the MacBook a lot more from a hardware standpoint, specifically in terms of how much RAM, storage and GPU performance you want. Of course, we have to mention that the battery performance is almost doubled, especially if you get a brand new version of an M2 MacBook Air and last but not least, even though iPad OS has gone from pretty much useless to quite good. It’S still nowhere near as good as the full-fledged Mac OS software, which is probably one of the best desktop operating system ever made.
Now, with all those considerations, if you had to ask me personally, which one I would prefer, if it had to be my only computer, I would obviously go with the MacBook Air. It’S just a lot. More functional has a lot more capabilities and uh pretty much. No limitations at this Junction, it’s great from a portability standpoint with its battery life and uh. If you want to use it as a desktop setup with a keyboard and mouse and external monitor is definitely capable enough to do so. Ipad is still an awesome tool for note, taking, especially if you’re a student or need something to physically write on and digitize at the same time and from a performance standpoint, it’s just as capable as a full desktop or a laptop PC, but uh it’s just.
It’S limiting factor is going to be the iPad OS, which has improved but still limited, nonetheless, love to know what you guys think if you haven’t done so already, please make sure to like And subscribe and have post notifications turned on love to know what you guys Are rocking right now, if you’re, using an iPad or a tablet for your main PC, if you’re using a laptop, desktop things like that and if you haven’t done so already check out the description down below for more videos and more product links to everything. We’Ve talked about and we’ll see you real soon in the next one. Take care. .