Shaun Kim
M2 MacBook Air is compared with M1 Max.
This is a follow-up to my previous video, comparing M1 Max with Intel MacBook Pro.
M2 MacBook Air (Mid Night Black 8GB RAM, 512 GB SSD) vs M1 Max MBP (Space Gray 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD)
Speed Test:
M2 MBA base models with 256 GB SSD are reported to be slower than the predecessor, M1 MBA. So I bumped up the SSD instead of RAM, which is against my usual choice. Fortunately, 512GB model showed 2.5-2.8 GB/s for read/write speed. M1 Max showed 5.5GB/s.
Blender. I am rendering 3D streamlines over Tesla Model 3 (https://youtu.be/SbA88ynYqdg). But the thing was that M2 MBA only had 8GB of RAM. The video footage was already 10GB, so I could not render animation. On a single frame, M2 MacBook Air was 1.5x slower.
QuickTime. Here I’m combining 4 minutes of 4K videos. M2 was 1.8 times slower. Because QuickTime is Apple’s app, it is best optimized, so it still shows astounding improvement over Intel MBP.
DaVinci Resolve. Exporting 9 minutes of 4K video. M2 MacBook Air was a bit of disappointment. The same task took M2 MacBook Air 2x more time than M1 Max MacBook Pro.
Overall, M2 MacBook Air is a perfect laptop to actually use it on you lap. It still can be used for some professional use, like 4K video editing and 3D rendering. The performance can be limited because it doesn’t have any cooling fan, but it means it is quiet and stays cool with conductive heat transfer. M2 MBA comes with higher price tag than the predecessor, M1 MacBook Air from 2020. But everyone knows Apple made a mistake then, pricing them affordable.
Timestamps
00:00 Unbox
00:48 SSD Speed Test using BlackMagic Disk Speed Test
01:52 Blender Rendering with Metal GPU
02:44 QuickTime 4K Export
03:19 DaVinci Resolve 4K Export
04:12 Overall verdicts
#apple #m2macbookair #m1max