MacBook Air and Pro vs Surface Laptop 5 

But if you were the CEO of either of these companies, would you still feel the same? Would you want your rival to be a pain in the neck all the time due to their undying spirit of constant innovation / bettering their products?

Thanks, will do!

Thanks. I did mention the fans near the end, if that helps.

Whats your specs of your sl5 and how is the battery life?

16gb and 256nvme , i5 12 generation. I strongly recommend to not buy 8gb devices as they are not expandable and become old too fast. Battery life, not sure, as it extremely different on use cases, I guess with light activities you can expect 7 hours without worries. I have to say that the performance is not the best part, but is a device that doesn't focus on performance, the best aspect is the build quality, the pleasure user experience, very thin, good keyboard, good webcam/mic/sound for meeting, system clean without bloatware, fast charge with magnetic connection (is a must, you know how many laptop broken just for the power cord...), very good monitor, also the external docking is very pleasure to use. I have also tried some games, is definitely not a game machine, as the high definition of the monitor and the integrated gpu is not a winning combo and it becomes hot. At normal price is quite overpriced, but you can find awesome refurbished or promos. As said, as per spec and hardware Mac wins, but if you buy a Mac and then you install and use lot of MS softwares... I suggest going to Surface family. :) (and the full black matte is very nice to see) @@edbenzino

@LordPBA thanks alot. I have a surface laptop 3 but 8gb ram. Its starting to slow down so looking around on what to get next. I do enjoy using the surface products. I have a surface go tab as well that definitely needs an upgrade. So was thinking of getting a surface pro

I think either of them will do school work and the surface can also be a tablet, but the battery life in the Air will just destroy the surface. Storage space can be bought later with external if needed but I would get at least 16gb, no matter which option.

@@JerrySchulze thank you very helpful

They Ipad pro is a good tool for portability and things like note taking in class with the apple pen but it definitely does not replace a the capabilities of a laptop or computer. There are many things that are very limited on the ipad many apps. I would go for the MacBook if you can only buy one of them.

Thanks for checking it out.

me2

There is zero distortion on any of the MacBook series. It's just hard to capture the true sound with a microphone ): I'd say the MacBook Pro 16" is second to none, and the MacBook Pro 14" is second place out of all Laptops. Some Windows laptops can surpass the air, however.

You aren’t wrong. What do you think of the performance difference?

I have lived the iPad lifestyle, did it for 2 years. It is better now but still nowhere near a desktop OS capabilities.

@@JerrySchulze That maybe true, but it is close enough for me, and is easier for me to use.

You get more for less. ARM compatibility is not there yet to list a few reasons.

There are lots of ways Windows can be better, just not enough for me right now. I went full Windows from about 2012-2019 because I was annoyed at macOS changes.

Much cheaper

@@mariozamora9684It’s not ARM, it’s Apple Silicon on Macs. They license ARM to design their own instructions and everything else. So you can’t compare it to ARM on PC or any other platform. Hell they also design the hardware. Totally different plus they have designed and implemented other technologies like Unified memory, custom hardware encoders/ decoders, Neural Engine for AI and machine learning and their own GPU with HW RayTracing all in one chip with huge amounts of cache memory. That’s why it’s super fast while takes very low energy. And Apple has mastered old x86 intel based software compatibility by creating Rosetta 2. Which is not an emulator but a translation layer and it works wonders. That’s why most old SW was compatible since day one unlike Windows on ARM which took almost 10years and never took off! Very bad support, while most apps on Mac had already transitioned to Apple Silicon architecture for native speeds. Running Adobe and similar programs is so much faster on Apple Silicon. Running windows and old intel x86 based programs is faster on Apple Silicon compared to them running natively on Windows PC, which is ironic but it shows how good thought of Apple’s Silicon is. I use every kind of system as a computer engineer and I tell you this from practical experience as well as scientific point of view, away from marketing jargon. Is it perfect? No, still need more improvement in the GPU but its builtin GPU competes with NViDIA 4070 or even 4080 with the new M3 RayTracing. Silent most of the time. Cold as dead, fast as a rocket and runs off battery as it’s plugged in. That’s a revolution you see once in a lifetime. And I’m in computers since late 80s!

I use Macs partly because everything in my line of work is either available on Mac or Mac-only,but the fact is, outside of gaming, there are still a lot of business, engineering, architecture, etc. applications that are Windows only or run better on Windows. For business, Microsoft Office has applications and features that are not in the Mac version.

Agreed. Microsoft doesnt make great value products there are tons of windows devices that can do more for lesd than the surface devices other than maybe their surface tablets.

I have always preferred Surface line up because they don't need any 3rd party software to be updated, or to work properly, just a simple and clean windows installed. This is a big difference in performance and stability.

yes

@@JerrySchulzewas the m3 pro MacBook Pro kinda muted quality when it came to the mics? What was your experience