Apple 12" MacBook vs. 13" MacBook Air Comparison Smackdown

All right Mac people, this one's for you. There might still be some Windows naysayers in the comments, you know, it might happen, but this time we're smacking two Macs down. We have the 13-inch MacBook Air and we have the new 12-inch MacBook. Of course, one thing that separates them right now as of the late April 2015 time frame is availability. This guy is four to six weeks delivery time. This guy is available right now. Your 13-inch everyday MacBook Air, which used to be the cool kid on the block, didn't it? Before ultrabooks became more common. Now this guy is trying to be the new cool kid on the block. 12 inches, still a retina display that kicks the pants off of this display. Obviously more portability, two pounds versus three pounds. Size difference quite pronounced right here. This is the 13-inch model, obviously not the 11.6-inch model, but there's a lot of things in the Air's favor too. We're going to smack them down now. So here you have the classic 13-inch MacBook Air, latest generation with Intel Broadwell inside, full ULV core i5 and i7 CPU options. And here we have the new 12-inch MacBook. You can call it the retina MacBook, call it whatever you want, just to discern it from the polycarbonate bodies of old. 12-inch display versus 13.3-inch display. Of course, with the MacBook Air, there's also an 11.6-inch model too, which is closer in size actually to this guy. It's very compact for a 12-inch. So obviously you're carrying less with this. For those of you, portability is paramount. This is going to be appealing. The fact that it's only two pounds versus three pounds is going to be appealing. And I mean, they're both skinny machines. You can stack them up just like that and see. Our 12-inch MacBook, of course, is going to be the skinniest. Uh-huh. Notice the sides, quite different. Classic MacBook here. MacBook Air has actual ports and card slots and stuff. SD card slot, USB 3.0 port. This is our Thunderbolt slash mini display port output on our regular 12-inch MacBook friend right here. Just a 3.5 millimeter combo audio. And that gets into the, if it's going to be your main machine, you're probably going to need more ports. Of course, you can get adapters for the 12-inch MacBook for its USB-C port that handles both charging and peripherals. It supports HDMI out, it supports USB 3.0, it does mini display, but you're going to need adapters like the $79 AV adapter that Apple sells that does display out plus a USB port plus you can charge in at the same time. Meanwhile, back here on our 13-inch MacBook Air, we have the MagSafe power charging connector right there. Another USB 3.0 port and our headphone jack. So if you're one of those people that never uses USB peripherals of any kind, you probably don't care. Maybe you just use Bluetooth, then it doesn't matter much. If you don't plug in external monitors, well, then you're not going to care. But if you do, you're going to get some dongle adapters for this. And there's also a difference in horsepower inside. Something's got to give with this little MacBook here. They're trying to fit a lot of circuitry into a small machine. Now, granted, with the 11-inch MacBook Air, Apple does fit some more brains and ports and stuff in there, but Intel HD 5300 graphics, not quite as powerful as the graphics that we get inside of the MacBook Air. Both of them are going to be fine for playing stuff right on the screen itself. And if you're using a 1080p monitor, it's fine. But some of you, I know, want to go with even higher resolution monitors, 4K and stuff like that. And Apple says that this could do 4K at 30 hertz. But you know, the thing is, the machine is starting to get strained. And you can tell it's working kind of hard at that point to drive a high-resolution external display. Now, when it comes to horsepower for our 12-inch MacBook, it's the Intel Core M 5th generation Broadwell CPU clocked at 1.1 gigahertz. That's for the 1299 base model. Core M is a lower power CPU, so it's nice that it uses less power. It doesn't require a fan. Not that the MacBook Air is generally a hot or noisy thing. Not as fast as the MacBook Air. 1.6 gigahertz is the base model. Core i5, also Broadwell right there. And you can go up with even faster ones. You go up to 2.2 gigahertz Core i7. So for those of you who are using this as a main machine, you want to edit 1080p video with some frequency, you're working with software development coding, that sort of thing. You play a little Diablo 3 on the side, then the MacBook Air is a better choice. It's got that horsepower to do that sort of thing. Both of these can multitask. The MacBook 12-inch out of the box for the first 10 minutes was kind of weird. But then it got the operating system updates, the latest version of the assembly, and it's been pretty fluid. But still, if you're going to be running seriously demanding software, definitely at least a MacBook Air, if not the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display. For those of you who have serious computing needs, say you're running virtual machines, you're doing heavy-duty software development with thousands upon thousands of lines of code, that sort of thing. Our MacBook is really for the Word, Excel, PowerPoint crowd. Those of you who are just doing web browsing, streaming your Netflix or Amazon Prime video, Photoshop editing is actually surprisingly fine on this. And you can see that in our full review of the 12-inch MacBook. It's things like Adobe Premiere, iMovie with higher resolution video, where you start to go real slow. So there you have it. Faster CPU in here, Intel HD 6000 graphics versus 5300 graphics on the MacBook. MacBook is $999 base price. You get a 4GB of RAM and 128GB SSD. Our MacBook 12-inch model is $1,299 and you get 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD. So for those of you who care about RAM and storage a lot, you know you're starting to bring it up to where this is going to cost you about as much as this is going to cost you, if you get what I mean. If you're going to go for this with 8GB and 256GB of storage inside. Next thing up is the keyboard. Obviously you have an absolutely normal, well-praised, we like it quite a lot, keyboard right here. Backlit, normal, standard Apple trackpad. No forced touch here on the Air series yet. Just getting it out of the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display and the MacBook. Now the bone of contention has been the unusual keyboard for our MacBook. It does have key travel, just not a whole lot. It's an odd keyboard, but it works very well. It doesn't have the same tactile feel that gives you that, wow, I have a lot of confidence in what I'm typing. But I think you'll probably find that you do type quite well with butterfly key mechanism, stainless steel domes, that whole thing. And you do have the forced touch trackpad, which really is a joy to use, I have to say. Not just the fact that it clicks on the top as well as the bottom, but it just feels more precise and even more usable. So there you have it. Better trackpad on the 12-inch MacBook, more normal keyboard on the MacBook Air. But as we look upward and look at the display, big important difference here, and I think this is going to be a selling point for a lot of people. Yes, you get a bigger display on the MacBook Air 13.3-inch, not so if you get with the 11.6-inch model, obviously, but the colors are so much better. The color gamut is so much wider on the 12-inch MacBook. It exceeds 100% of sRGB, where this guy here is about 76%. And that means that highly saturated photos and things like that are just going to bloom and look distorted. You won't see the detail on them. Also, there's viewing angles. As you go off angle, you can see the colors are shifting. It's starting to look like nuclear sky there, isn't it? And with this guy, it stays good, nice looking, and it stays fairly bright. Now, Apple uses a very high-quality TN panel on the MacBook Air, but it's still TN, not IPS, so you don't have the viewing angles. And that also leads to the problem with the MacBook Air series, where you have to sometimes move it forward, move it back. See, as I'm moving it forward, the colors are washing out. And when I move it back, it looks good. Of course, there's going to be some glare. Then it starts to look, there it is, nuclear sky all over again. So you have to angle it to get it just right, which combined with glare, sometimes when it's just right, it's the way that glare is can be annoying. MacBook Air 13-inch model has 1440 by 900 resolution. The MacBook has a retina display, 2304 by 1440 resolution. So more pixels there, sharper looking, you know, the deal. When you look at a retina display, especially with a better color saturation, the better contrast, you're going to fall in love with it. So for those of you who just really care about the quality of display, where you're staring at all day, the MacBook is going to win hands down. These have dual band Wi-Fi and O2-11AC, Bluetooth 4.0. Again, they're backlit keyboards. Webcam, you've got a higher resolution webcam on the MacBook Air. So for those of you who do a lot of video conferencing, that could be important to you there. In terms of battery life, Apple claims nine hours for the MacBook and 12 hours for the MacBook Air, and they're pretty much dead on there with what you can get with both of these. Yes, the MacBook Air will last longer. Of course, you're carrying around a pound more. There's a pound more, probably a battery in there more than anything else. To be honest, that's why it's going to run longer. Charger for these, neither of them is huge, but obviously it's going to be a smaller charger for a little MacBook. It's not much bigger than an iPad charger, in fact. When it comes to servicing either of these guys, not so much. You know, Apple pretty much glues everything together, makes it kind of hard. So pentalobe screws hold the bottom on for both of these. And for our MacBook, everything is soldered on the motherboard. It's the storage, the RAM, you name it. So not so super serviceable. The battery is kind of a stack battery design. The MacBook Air is somewhat more serviceable, but neither of these are the kind of thing that even I, and I take apart everything we get in for review, I wouldn't really want to take these apart and service them if I could help it. So let's look at a 1080p video and listen to it. Both of these are at 50% and this is our wireless microphone sitting between them so that, well, equal chance of being picked up. This is a big event in the world of laptops, ultrabooks, portables, iPads, steroids. No, it's really more than that. Yeah, so not super liberalized, 50% brightness. I mean, volume, not bad. Let's listen to the 12-inch MacBook. Laptops, ultrabooks, portables, iPads, steroids. No, it's really more than that. This is the 12-inch Mac. Surprisingly, the 12-inch MacBook has the more full speakers. It also gets a bit louder. So not something you'd expect. The smaller guy actually does better. Notice the difference in screen size. So think about that when you watch movies. Is living large more important than how sharp and colorful they look? Because you do get a larger angle of view here. And again, if you want to drive external displays, the HD 6000 graphics is going to do a better job at larger, very high-resolution displays than will the HD 5300 graphics on our 12-inch MacBook. So there you have it, a smackdown where either way Apple's going to win, right? So I think you probably understand now that this is an awesome second machine. If you've already got an iMac, a desktop of some sort, a PC, laptop, anything that has heavy lifting capabilities, unless you're the kind of person who's lucky enough to not have to do a whole lot of heavy lifting and you just do MS Office, Word, streaming video, then this guy could be fine as your main machine if you have no other needs. But for everybody else, there's all the ports you get on this. Relatively speaking, it's an ultrabook. It doesn't have a super amount of ports, but compared to our 12-inch MacBook, it sure does. It has more processing power. It's better for driving high-resolution external displays, too. So you see, there's something to be said for each of these. I'm Lisa from Mobile Tech Review. Be sure to watch our video reviews of both of these products, read our written reviews, and subscribe to our YouTube channel.