M4 MacBook Air vs Zenbook S14 - R.I.P. Intel Lunar Lake?

Apple has officially taken back the value crowned away from the Lunar Lake laptops with the brand new M4 MacBook Air which seemingly only gets better and better as we test it more. I mean, only $1000 or $950 right now on Amazon is just nuts value, so in this video, we're gonna compare the M4 Air to the Asus ZenBook S14 which came out with a bang last year with Intel's new Lunar Lake chip which was extremely impressive last year, catching up and surpassing the M3 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro in terms of value. This thing has killer performance and much improved battery life compared to the previous designs. It has greater software compatibility versus its rival Snapdragon X Elite chip while having even more graphics performance. The only problem is that Apple shocked everyone with the new M4 MacBook Air's pricing of only $1000 while doubling the RAM to 16GB and giving us the insanely powerful M4 chip. So now it's $400 less expensive than this ZenBook which starts at $1400 with the same 16GB of RAM. However, this does come with a 1TB SSD while the MacBook only gives you 256 and costs $400 to upgrade to 1TB which perfectly levels out the playing field, $1400 and $1400. So with that said, which one of these wins in terms of value? Let's find out, starting with design and portability. First of all, I love the MacBook Air's unibody aluminum design, it's just very high quality especially with the new sky blue color which I really really like. But of course, Ceraluminum on the ZenBook is amazing, it's such a nice finish, I love these little design details, it's really really good, probably by far my favorite out of any Windows laptop. And surprisingly, in terms of the weight, this thing is actually a little bit lighter, 2.65lbs compared to 2.7lbs on the Air, that's really impressive. However, it is a little bit thicker, 0.47lbs compared to 0.44lbs, once again, probably not a big deal, it's really really close. The one thing this thing does win at is the ports because here you do have HDMI 2.1, you have two Thunderbolt ports, and you also have a 10Gbps USB-A on the other side so you get quite a bit of port options while with the MacBook Air, on one side you literally just have a headphone jack, two Thunderbolt ports, and MagSafe 3 which I do like keeping the other two available, but in terms of ports I think this is the winner. Now the nice thing about the ZenBook is that it does have dual fans so it helps with overheating issues like the fanless MacBook Air has, so we're gonna see how much that matters in terms of performance a little bit later, but in terms of the design on the inside, I do really like how the MacBook Air has these nice black contrasting keys which look really really cool compared to the kind of color matched ones here, it doesn't really kind of stand out, and of course these stickers are just so annoying, I wish they would just stop doing that, no more stickers please. Now in terms of bezels, they both look really nice, nice and thin, and I love how this has Windows Hello which basically works like Face ID, but on a laptop while the MacBook Air has Touch ID which is fine, but Face ID would be so much better. Now digging into the actual display quality, this is by far the biggest downside on the MacBook Air because it still has a basic LCD display which it's had for many years, thankfully it's 500 nits of brightness, but it's LCD and only 60hz refresh rate which sucks because this ZenBook has a killer display which Asus is known for their awesome displays, it's up to 120hz, OLED, also 500 nits, but that OLED is amazing. 100% DCI-P3 color gamut, the colors pop, the blacks are so deep when you're watching videos, everything pops, it looks amazing, so much better than those grays on the MacBook Air. The only issue is that this display is pretty reflective, so when you're in very bright environments, you literally like can see yourself in your hands, that's probably because of the touch layer, this thing is touchscreen, which is cool, but it kind of makes the reflectivity worse. But all in all, the display is nicer on the ZenBook, this thing wins. And now with all that said, let's jump into performance, once again we have the new Lunar Lake chip which was a huge step up for Intel, they absolutely killed it, I mean they put on-package RAM, basically unified memory, very nice improvement for efficiency, everything else, everything got improved, bravo on that, but Apple's M4 is just so crazy good. Check out this single core performance in Geekbench 6, 35% faster on the M4 chip, that is absolutely insane. Then looking at multi-core, because Apple added a couple of extra cores, and the cores are all faster, 34% faster multi-core compared to this Lunar Lake chip, that is a huge boost. And then if you're looking at web browser snappiness, we tested Speedometer 3.0 like we always do, holy smokes, 82% faster on the M4, which means it's gonna be more reliable, you're gonna have snappier browsing. We then also tested web design performance using Figma, this is a project provided to us from our partner, 500designs, one of the best design studios based out of California, and here, surprisingly, the Lunar Lake did really well, only 5 seconds slower than the M4, so it's actually performing quite well in terms of that real-world browser web-based app performance. But then we got into Cinebench 2024, the 10 minute stress test, and this is where I thought the Lunar Lake was gonna kill it, because this ZenBook of course has those dual fans, a nice cooling system, but wait a second, the M4 beat it! It was 15% faster, even though this is fanless, it suffers from thermal throttling, I mean, this same M4 chip in the MacBook Pro that has a single fan performed a lot faster, like, a lot faster. So this thing scoring 702 points was very impressive to me, so bravo there, and then moving into graphics performance, we tested 3DMark's Steel Nomad Lite, which is like a modern AAA gaming workflow, and take a look at that, the MacBook Air beat it ever so slightly, but guess what, that's only the binned 8-core GPU version, and it still beat Lunar Lake, which Lunar Lake is faster than the Snapdragon X Elite, if you upgrade to the 10-core GPU version, 30.1FPS, making it 24% faster than Lunar Lake. And then finally, we tested some video editing with a 5 minute 4K HEVC export, we tested DaVinci on the ZenBook, Final Cut Pro on the MacBook Air, and they had exactly the same time, 2 minutes flat, which means they're both limited by their encoders, so Intel, good job with these new encoder updates, because it is much faster than before. And then finally, in terms of battery life, this is a huge deal, because the M3 MacBook Air was already around 2 hours better than the Lunar Lake ZenBook, but now, the M4 Air is even better, like we tested comparing the M4 Air to the M3 Air, a lot better battery life there, so now it's probably around 3 hours better than the ZenBook, that's a lot. So now getting into the conclusion, the M4 is just a massive jump in performance, beating the Lunar Lake chip hugely in single-core, multi-core, especially Cinebench, with no fans, super impressive. Graphics is equal, even with the binned 8-core chip, that is very impressive, and even with all that, you have better battery life. But the really cool thing about the MacBook Air is that it has the lower $1000 base price, which means that if you don't need a huge SSD, you can basically buy it for a lot less, like as low as $950 on Amazon on sale using the links below, but I would recommend getting at least 512GB, which brings you up to $1200, so you are saving money there, and even at $1400 with 1TB, I still think this is a better value kind of considering everything, like the performance, the reliable macOS software, the better overall resale value vs Windows laptops that kind of lose value very quickly. But of course, it's not perfect because the ZenBook has a much better display, it has better ports, so if you care about the display more than the performance, then this ZenBook is a great option. However, Apple also has their $1600 M4 MacBook Pro, which does come with a nicer 120hz mini-LED display, it comes with extra ports, it comes with fans for even faster performance, and right now, it's on sale for only $1450 on Amazon, so it's actually also a killer deal, links below. But now getting back to the original question, I think that yes, Apple has definitely taken back the value crown with especially the pricing on the M4 MacBook Air. I mean $1000 with double the RAM, it has officially taken back the crown, I don't see why you would buy any other laptop right now instead of the MacBook Air, unless of course you want some Windows gaming, or things like that, then of course you have options like this. So with that said, let me know your thoughts down in the comment section below, and subscribe above for more videos like this one, check out one of those two right there. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you in the next video!