Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Surface Laptop vs Macbook Air”.
Hey what’s up folks how’s it going. This is waj hope you guys are all doing well. So if you’re shopping for a new laptop this summer, perhaps for school, there’s definitely a lot of competitive options right now, but i think there’s two excellent solutions. Firstly, is the new a surface laptop from microsoft and the other one is obviously the old trusty macbook air 13.3 inch edition. So what we’re going to do is actually take a look at both of these computers.
Take a look at the overall design, the features and benefits that both them present and see which one is best suited towards your needs. So let’s get right into it and find out which one is best now. Firstly, in terms of design and form factor, the surface laptop is a little bit smaller in terms of overall footprint and not by a huge margin they’re both going to generally take up the same amount of space in your bag in terms of actual thickness the air. A tapers from a three millimeters to 17 millimeters versus the surface laptop is a 14 millimeters throughout the entire body and when it comes to weight again, there’s not a huge difference, but the surface laptop is a little bit lighter measuring around 1.25 kilograms versus a 1.35 Kilograms on the air now in terms of build quality, both machines are made out of a really high quality, aluminum grade construction, but there’s a level of customization when it comes to the cosmetic angle of things that microsoft gives you a little bit more options. You have several varieties and color combinations that you can custom configure your surface laptop. So that way, it kind of fits your styles and individual tastes internally, you’re going to see that the surface laptop is actually lined with alcantara, which definitely feels a pretty unique. This material is typically found in high-end luxury, sports cars, and things like that. So this fabric is actually pretty soft, uh durable and you can easily kind of wipe things down if it gets a little bit dirty.
But it should provide you a nice comfortable basis for typing and using the trackpad, and that being said, the keyboard and trackpad combination on the microsoft computer is pretty much on par with the experience that you’re gon na get on the earth. So there’s really no advantage or disadvantage that any of the laptops present, based on my experience when using the keyboard and trackpad. So you have plenty of key uh type, spacing it’s a standard kind of uh, chiclet style keyboard on both platforms, and they both have a backlight. So you could use it in pretty much any lighting condition now in terms of physical ports and connectivity options.
The surface laptop is a little bit more limited. You have a single usb 3.0 connection, a headphone jack and a mini displayport output. Now on the air, you have a two usb 3.0 connections, a a thunderbolt, a two connection and a full size, uh sd card slot, which is definitely handy as well as the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack. So a little bit more uh connectivity options on the air which is interesting to note now, even though we’re huge fans of the macbook air, especially when it comes to battery life, one of the biggest issues with a buying one or currently right now is that the Design and overall feature set is actually quite outdated.
They haven’t upgraded the airline for several several years and one of the biggest problems i have with it is certainly the display. Now it’s nice and large 13.3 inch is a great overall compact size, but it’s still a tn panel and although it has led backlighting, which makes it fairly decent to view at uh straight on. If you do have a couple of people with you, though uh, what you’re going to typically find is they’re going to find huge shifts in terms of color and brightness when you’re looking at the display at different oblique angles, and the resolution is not that great fourteen. Forty by nine hundred and when you take a look at the display on the uh surface, laptop you’re gon na find a huge difference.
Uh 13.5 inch a display. It is using the pixel sense technology. So the same technology you’re gon na find in many of the surface line, uh pcs from a microsoft.
So it is touch screen based and it’s also a smart uh touch screen where it can actually analyze, what’s uh being interacted with the display, which is pretty cool but in terms of resolution you’re, looking at 2256 by 1504 and in terms of color rendition and viewability, It completely blows the display on the air out of the water, so a really great overall experience and plus you have the convenience of the touchscreen form factor as well, which is really nice. It is also using corning gorilla glass, so everything has kind of a nice sheen to it. It can be a little bit reflective at times, but in most cases it’s not going to be a huge deal.
Now we have the most economical configurations of both systems being compared over here. So on the surface side, we’re using the intel core i5 7200u – it’s clocked in around a 2.5 gigahertz. It is a dual core processor, like the one that we find similar in the air.
We have four gigabytes of ddr4 memory over here and integrated hd 620 graphics. Now you can obviously configure with more ram and a better cpu and integrated gpu combination on both pcs, but again we’re just comparing the baseline configuration. Now we actually have the uh 2015 version of the air, so it comes with a core i5 5250.
U dual core processor, which is clocked down about one point at six gigahertz, and we do also have eight gigabytes of gdr3 memory configured over here, as well as internal pci, express ssd based memory, which is going to give us kind of an edge up when it Comes to read and write performance as you’ll see from the benchmark results now taking a look at the actual benchmark results when it comes to pure cpu performance, the microsoft, a surface laptop is definitely presenting a pretty uh nice edge. We’Re getting a 3 600 points on the single core performance and about 7 200 points on the multi-core performance and you’re, seeing that the air is certainly lagging uh quite significantly. Behind those, a test results same thing with the cinebench results, we’re getting a 324 points versus 257 points on the 2015 version of it, the macbook air. Now, i think the new version of the air, if you buy it right now, might be slightly faster, but probably not by a huge margin.
Now one significant difference comes from the read and write performance apple over here still uses very high-end. Pci express solid-state memory, and the performance is certainly outshining. What’S in the surface laptop and although the surface laptop is fairly snappy and it’s day-to-day kind of operation test. Uh software installs fairly quickly, the operating system boots up fairly quickly, it’s still not as fast and as fluid as the experience you’re gon na find on the air, as these uh numbers are demonstrating over here now. Lastly, even though these machines are not made for gaming and they’re, not gon na give you any really great uh graphical capabilities, they’re, both using integrated uh, cpu-based, uh, graphics, anyways.
We just want to see how they kind of compare against each other. So i fired up heaven benchmark at 720p high overall details. We got slightly high average frames per second on the surface laptop about 22.4 versus 20.9 average frames per second on the air, not a huge difference between both of them and again you’re not going to be doing any kind of hardcore gaming on these machines.
But if you want to see how they compare in terms of the gpu performance uh, here you go right over here now. Both computers actually promise really tremendous battery life. Uh microsoft, claims 14 and a half hours of video, playback and apple claims.
Over 12 hours of video playback, now to kind of uh put these two competitors against each other in a real world circumstance. What we’re going gon na do is basically turn off. The wi-fi play the same video looped in the vlc player app and we’re gon na crank the brightness uh all the way uh to a hundred percent you’re, just gon na see how long both of these computers last now.
Basically, in that a scenario, the air i got around at 10 hours 28 minutes before it died and the surface laptop got about 9 hours 31 minutes before it died. So you’re, seeing an hour difference essentially between these two pcs uh, giving it uh the air uh. Definitely a little bit of an edge, so certainly that could be attributed to uh the os 10 being a little bit more battery efficient, or perhaps we have a larger battery on the air itself.
But, generally speaking, i think most people are definitely going to get a slight performance, uh battery increase when using the air compared to the surface, but the surface is still doing a tremendously good job, especially for a windows based pc. Now. Lastly, we’re going to talk about pricing now when it comes to student pricing, there’s actually a pretty a nice little discount that both microsoft and apple gives you essentially the surface laptop uh, regular prices at just around 9.99 versus.
If you’re a student, you can get it for 100, cheaper 8.99 and on the apple side, uh. The pricing uh from the stock version is fairly similar. I just under a thousand dollars, but if you’re a student you do get it for 8.49. So a little bit of a nice little discount, if you’re a student when it comes to the apple side but generally you’re, seeing that the price is pretty much kind of on par with each other.
If you’re a student, you can get the air for a little bit cheaper, uh. The benefits of the surface laptop. If you just want to quickly recap, is the design is just a little bit more compact. It’S a little bit more lighter weight. Gives you a little bit more color options in terms of the aesthetic, certainly has the better display faster cpu specifications uh for sure, and when it comes to the benefits on the macbook air, you do have a little bit more connectivity options with the extra usb connection. As well as the sd card slot – and you definitely have the better battery life as well as the faster read and write performance, but besides that it’s obviously going to fluctuate depending upon whether you’re comfortable with using windows or mac os 10. So a lot of your personal preferences will certainly be a big deciding factor on which pc is best, but hopefully this video gave you some sort of direction to go to both pcs are excellent value for the money and would be an excellent choice regardless. But hopefully this video helped you out if it did give us a thumbs up a big thanks to you guys for watching this video and supporting our channel.
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