this is the M3 Pro MacBook Pro and this is the M3 MacBook Air and the line that separates them isn't as clear as you might think while there appears to be clear distinctions between the two the biggest being the price with a $500 gap between the ones that I have here looks can be deceiving and in the real world for many things these are surprisingly similar today I'm going to dive into an in-depth comparison between the ER and the pro and go over what these have in common what separates them and what it makes sense that you one over the other so if you can't decide between either of these two or you're just curious to see how they stack up against each other and where the surprises lie stick around and let's get into [Music] it hey everyone Kyle Ericson here buying a new Macbook these days can be a challenge we're inundated with marketing material specs and opinions and the thing is we all use our Macs in different ways so there's no real one shoe fits-all solution for which machine is going to work best for you on top of that many of the specs that we focus on are given more attention than they probably should so what I want to do here is cut through as much of that stuff as I can and provide some context from both benchmarks and real world use and we're going to start off with the most obvious difference between the two the design these are both the darkest colors available in each model with the airb midnight and the pro and space black neither of these are actually true black and side by side you can see the air has more of a blue hue to it and both have a metallic Shimmer each of these has a new anodization seal to prevent against fingerprints which the previous versions didn't have and while that seems to work pretty well I do still find each prone to smudging and streaking even when I've cleaned them so if that's something that bothers you a lighter color might be your best option both variants I have here are the smaller versions of each model with the pro being the 14in and the air being 13 in the air is noticeably smaller and lighter than the pro with it being 2. 7 lb and 0. 44 in thick compared to 3.
5 lb and 0. 61 in on the pro which is about a 25% decrease in overall size I know it doesn't seem like much but you can definitely notice the difference especially if you're using this on your lap or in an awkward space but the thinness of the air does come at the expense of Port selection you're only going to have two USBC ports on the left side with a lone headphone jack on the right where on the M3 Pro MacBook Pro you've got two USBC ports and headphone jack on one side followed by another USBC Port SD card and and an HDMI output on the other just a small note to be aware of if you get the pro version with just the M3 the right side will only have an HDMI and SD reader so still the same amount of USBC ports as the air if you're someone who needs those extra ports and you prefer to not use dongles or hubs say if you're doing a lot of photo or video editing on the go you might really want the SD reader or if you want more advanced display support which we'll get into in a second the pro is much more capable in that regard personally if I'm on the go I rarely ever use the ports on the right side of my Pro most of the work that I do when I'm mobile is more productivity based and I might have an external SSD plugged in or something but that's usually it if I'm at home this is usually always hooked up to a hub or a dock on one port and a monitor on the other and all the displays that I've used over the last 2 or 3 years have all had USBC inputs and frankly any mid-range Monitor and above should have a USBC input these days so in that sense I do think that there is a less need for HDMI port but the MacBook Pro offers some flexibility there and has better overall support as well the M3 Pro will support to external displays with up to 6K resolution at 60 Herz with a lid open so essentially three screens where the M3 air will only support two external displays with the lid closed and one while it's open and there is a slight discrepancy in that the second display can only go up to 5K at 60 HZ I'd say the difference there probably caters towards a pretty Niche use case and rarely are folks going to need more than two full-sized monitors but if we're just focusing solely on the built-in displays for each the technology is quite different between the two the MacBook Air has a 13. 6 in liquid Retina Display with a 60 HZ refresh rate 2560 X 1664 resolution and 500 nits Peak brightness while the pro has a 14.
2 in promotion liquid Retina xdr Display capable of 120 HZ 3024 by1 1964 resolution with a peak brightness of 6 nits in SDR content and up to 1,600 in HDR that being said these panels don't actually look all that different from each other and in SDR content which is what we're looking at most of the time in Mac OS things look relatively the same even with the extra 100 its brightness on the pro with these side by side you can tell there is a slight difference but using these separately I don't know that that's really perceivable even using these in bright areas or in the Sun is going to yield very similar results especially if you're using these as work machines but with HDR content the xdr display definitely has better overall contrast and image quality you can notice the black levels are better on the pro but I will say for an IPS panel and a laptop the error is outstanding there's around a, 1500 to1 contrast ratio on the air and a good IPS panel is usually between 1,000 or 1200 to one so it far exceeds expectations there and there isn't a huge disparity between each model both have outstanding color accuracy so any color critical work is going to look great on either but the pro does have a promotion display with 120 HZ refresh rate versus 60 in the air just know that on a monitor 120 htz is less noticeable than on a phone or a tablet because with those devices you're constantly scrolling and using physical touch as a means to do things where with a Mac or a PC unless you're gaming or working with 3D animation things are more static and refresh rates don't matter quite as much you can see when I'm monitoring the refresh rate the only time that I get close to 120 htz is when I introduce a lot of motion scrolling articles and the like with a mouse and a trackpad on these larger screens doesn't feel all that different but like I said things like working in 3D are much smoother on the pro but I don't know how many people are interested in doing that kind of work on a display this small anyway in apps that have a lot of Windows or panels it's going to feel pretty cramped on either of these machines so if you plan on using this as your only display and you're working within apps that have complex UI it might be worth stepping up to a 15 or a 16in model just strictly speaking to the size of these specific MacBooks we're only talking about a 0. 6 in gap between the air and the pro so about the same difference as a regular iPhone and a plus or a pro and a pro Max which at this size if they're not side by side they don't really feel too different from each other in general that kind of encapsulates my experience with these displays if they're side by side it's pretty clear the pro offers a better display it's going to be great for some use cases like 3D modeling game and HDR media but if all you're doing is productivity related tasks or have a lot of static content displayed on these the air isn't all that different which is a similar story with performance the configuration between these two are very similar and I would say are likely the most popular choices when it comes to these MacBooks the M3 air has an 8 core CPU and 10 core GPU 16 gigs of unified memory and a 512 GB SSD well the M3 Pro is the base chip with an 11 core CPU 14 core GPU 18 gigs of memory and also has a 512 gig SSD just looking at synthetic benchmarks alone in geekbench you'll see about a 3% increase in single core performance and 24 in multi-core on the M3 Pro over the M3 air give or take and surprisingly in xcode Benchmark they seem to go back and forth a lot around the same times but the fastest actually came in on the air in just 108 seconds that was the outlier though and most of the time they seem to stick between 120 and 140 seconds and not having a clear winner there leads into a lot of real world tasks as well doing everyday tasks like productivity graphic design photo editing or software development all feel relatively the same compile times on the projects that I've tested again seem to trade blows and I suspect that the pro will be faster if you have an enormous project that takes a long time to build but I haven't felt any slowness on either of these although you do see higher temperatures on the M3 air when you really start ramping up system usage because the air is a fanless design all the cooling is passive and when I run the CPU or the GPU at 100% usage I see temperatures rise between 102 and 105° C on the chip where the M3 Pro goes to about 85 this is likely why in the benchmarks that I did earlier even though the single core performance should be exactly the same between these two you see a slight edge with the M3 Pro because of heat and throttling on the air I've edited a couple of videos on the M3 air now and most of the time it feels almost identical to the MacBook Pro it might be just a touch slower to complete things like stabilization analysis or with motion tracking and the only major difference is when I start stacking a boatload of resource heavy effects where the air will start to get a little bit janky that's a relatively minor thing and I can get around that by just background rendering that section of my timeline but if you have a whole bunch of these effects and are really leaning heavily into that stuff that's why one area where the pro will feel a touch smoother to see any real gains there or in the actual video rendering speed you're going to have to move up to a Max chip where you've got two encoding and decoding engines where these only both have one and the M3 Pro is just a hair faster but not anything that you'd notice not having these side by side for anything that's heavily CPU related or that relies on the media engine I just don't know that the M3 Pro is going to have a huge leap in performance for a lot of folks even with things like SSD speed where the pro is going to be quite a bit faster with 30% better right speeds and 50 to 60% better read speeds over the M3 air SSD there's virtually no perceivable difference there at all in real world use whether you're loading up a bunch of files at once or transferring large amounts of data within apps there's also more memory bandwidth on the M3 pro at 150 GB per second versus 100 on the M3 I mentioned this last week but even on the best PCS you're going to get under 100 GB per second so the Bas M3 is still super performant and there's a pretty good chance that you're never going to notice that difference on the flip side if you're using apps that rely heavily on the GPU and don't have to deal with the media engine in the same way that apps like Final Cut Pro do the M3 Pro shreds the M3 air in performance in cine bench 2024 there's about a 65% increase in performance with the M3 Pro and the MacBook Pro over the M3 air and apps like blender are noticeably faster not only is the viewport preview a little bit smoo but it renders out almost twice as fast than the M3 air which is wild even if you're a hobbyist or you're just learning rendering out an animation on the M3 Pro can save you a boatload of Time Versus doing it on the air but for context the air does perform around 15% better than the M2 Pro so it's no slouch either the reason why both these machines saw huge jumps in GPU performances here is because all the M3 series chips now include Hardware enabled Ray tracing mesh shading and dynamic caching which allows Graphics related apps and games to run much smoother when gaming the M3 air will run titles like no man's sky and Resident Evil 4 insanely smooth at around 60 frames per second that's where you see that 60 HZ refresh rate limit on this display become a bottleneck where on the pro I can get upwards of 90 FPS on the same games running at a higher resolution with higher settings the M3 air does have some trouble with rust when you turn up the settings a little where the pro has less issues but I was stunned at how good these are for gaming usually Everything feels very fluid and both have great sound quality which makes things feel a bit more immersive the 14-in MacBook Pro is probably the best laptop that you're going to find outside of the 16-in version when it comes to sound quality it has a 6 speaker array with Force cancelling woofers where the air has a four speaker system that doesn't have Force cancelling woofers the pro is much richer in full sounding gets about 7 DB louder than the air and there's a clear audible difference between the two if audio quality is really high in your list of things that are important the pro is a clear winner but like I said both sound outstanding for their size the air is a little more closed in but is well balanced and I will say because of the way that the speakers are oriented on the air versus the pro I do find that it sounds better if you've got it in clamshell mode at a desk so on the off chance that you're planning on running a setup like that that is worth noting when it comes to the microphone and webcam quality it's again a bit of a wash but here's a Le on both just to give you an idea of what to expect this is the webcam on the M3 MacBook Air there's new microphones in here so this should sound a little bit better than the M2 air but now I'm going to hop over to the M3 Pro and we'll see what that one sounds like and looks like so now I'm on the MacBook Pro and you can see it looks relatively the same uh I don't know what the audio is going to be like in terms of how different this is going to sound because both of these have three micro rays but this is is what it looks like and sounds like I think either are fine for your standard Zoom meeting and really anything where you rely heavily on a network connection both have been very stable on Wi-Fi and with Bluetooth and have the exact same Bluetooth 5. 3 and Wi-Fi 6E support finally last but not least the battery life both of these machines advertise in 18-hour battery life and I don't think it's fair to do a direct one-on-one comparison here because the pro is 5 months older and it's going to have more wear but I will say that both of these will last you a full day on a single charge no problem the M3 air has a 52.
6 wat hour battery where the M3 Pro MacBook is 72.
