Gadgetory

hey guys Boston this is the 2018 MacBook Air and for $1200 there's been a lot of controversy about the performance of this laptop and on top of that just exactly what's inside this thing so of course the question is how powerful is it really interestingly there's only a single processor option for the MacBook Air this year it is a dual core Core i5 8210 why this is an eighth generation Y series processor which does give it a dual-core chip with hyper-threading and the clock speeds actually aren't all that impressive is it 1.6 gigahertz base and a 3.6 gigahertz boost a far cry from a lot of the quad core systems that you can often find this price point so there's some interesting things with this chip first of all it has UHD 617 graphics something I've never seen any kind of Intel chip yet and also interestingly this is a 7 watt TDP so what that means is that most of these white series processors are used and things like the 12-inch MacBook now that does not have any kind of fan and originally I was actually told at the Apple event that this MacBook Air is fanless however a lot of reports have shown this actually doesn't a fan also I update it and heard the fan so let's open it up and see what's actually inside I thought we had to like clarify that I heard a loud fan is usually a pretty good indicator there's a fan inside just saying take this off and immediately we see that there is a fan so it should be a big surprise so what's kind of interesting about the MacBook Air this year is that this is one of these smallest fans I've ever seen for cooling in a laptop now this is actually not strictly necessary if they would have gone for a slightly lower NY series processor with a lower flight 5 watt TDP for example the fan would have not have been necessary but on the flip side that means that you're really relying on a lot of other issues with cooling so say you're in a very hot environment the actual chassis of the computer really can't dissipate as much heat whereas adding even a small fan like this should make a big difference and it gives you the added benefit of getting a couple extra watts of TDP which will give you a little bit more performance I will say it is a very very clean layout so now that we have the trackpad here but we also have our three battery cells now what's interesting about this battery is that at least based on the rumors and certainly taking a look at it seems to sort of back that up is that unlike most MacBook Pros that are current where you kind of have to replace a large chunk of the laptop to be able to get rid of the batteries with this it looks like you could probably swap these out pretty easily you also see the fairly large speakers and then we've got what is a pretty small motherboard and I assume that's probably our t2 chip underneath here hey look at that the Apple t2 chip so this is actually very similar to some of the SSDs that you'll find inside an iPhone but this handles a lot of these sort of lower end processes on the macbook including encrypting the SSD running your touch ID it's got secure Enclave it's got the ISP which runs the webcam there's a lot of very smart things that are on the iPhone it all run from this tiny little t2 chip alright so with the computer put back together let's actually see how it performs starting out with we do have Geekbench which is the classic all right there we go 4301 on single core and 7725 on multi-core it is an upgrade over the last generation MacBook Air but it is not a big upgrade over well much anything else I mean sure it's decent as a dual core we really have moved on to quad core across the board for the most part now except we have the Geekbench compute test this one's kind of interesting because this does have a unique GPU I've never seen these 617 available now it is one of the Intel UHD series GPU so it's probably not going to be anything crazy but maybe a little bit faster maybe they added two more numbers to the last when I tested this is 22 135 that actually a little bit faster no to be fair I'm running metal right now but that's actually pretty decent so that's a fair bit over the 615 and that's closer to what you would find with the for UHD 620 graphics I've got to say we're just getting in the video and I've already found some interesting stuff with this MacBook let's keep going and get into a little bit of Cinebench so what's interesting here is I actually think the Y series processors have been changed this generation so not to get too far into nerd town but traditionally Y Series on the Intel side means it's their very very low TDP chips which are traditionally used in fanless designs now obviously this is slightly higher and it is of course using a very small fan but instead of getting the traditional dual-core chip with the low-end GPU we're getting the same low-end CPU so obviously we need to keep that TDP low we are getting that bigger GPU so for context the 12-inch MacBook is $100 more expensive and with that you get the core m3 and that's not even really going to be on par with what we're getting out of this you really would need to bump up to something closer to the core i7 to get equivalent clock speeds and I don't think you're going to get anywhere near that same GPU performance all right so 121 on single core and 250 on multi-core that's not that impressive to be totally honest it's fine but it's basically what I would expect out of a wiser like the 12-inch MacBook for example the GPU though that's what I want to see right now 32 yeah there we go again so with the 12-inch MacBook you're looking at a score roughly around 25 24 something like that so 32 is a pretty decent bump now all of this being said this is not an incredibly powerful laptop right I mean this is still a MacBook Air it's still got a dual-core processor but it's basically especially on that GPU side I'm pretty impressed next up let's test the SSD performance on the MacBook Air now I do have the base model which has a very very tiny 128 gigs of storage kind of not even cool at this point but well okay that's pretty cently fast so 1917 megabytes per second on the read and 476 on the right that's pretty solid so for context that's faster than any other one swing a gig drive I've tested and it's not too far off of the 13-inch MacBook Pro with the 256 gig drive this is a very fast SSD next step we have something a little bit more intense a full 4k video edit inside Final Cut Pro 10 so for reference this is a project from the disses channel so it's almost exactly five minutes long and it's a mix of pro res a lot of graphics and stock footage and it's about I don't know 70% renders or so so let's kind of scrub through here it's performance actually holding up reasonably well oh and just so you guys know I am editing off of a samsung t3 SSD mostly because there's not enough storage in the macbook to fit well anything but especially not a bunch of 4k video I mean that's not bad it's definitely able to play it back but I'm curious about is what the actual export times will be so with a fully rendered timeline of pro res 42 let's see how long this five-minute 4k video takes to export so settings are correct this is h.264 alright ready set go all right so just over 6 1/2 minutes to render a 5 and a timeline no no you're not going to want to spend a lot of time editing on the MacBook Air specifically with 4k footage but it is possible however we have a slightly different method for speeding things up in true building the ultimate fashion map repair supports full Thunderbolt 3 which means that we can add an external GPU because why not so this is the gigabyte gaming box with a full AMD rx 580 GPU inside now recently Final Cut has received full support for external GPUs and especially with such a thin and light laptop like this I'm curious to see just how well it performs now we know we don't have any kind of crazy scientific tests here what I do have is well a curiosity of how far we can actually push it so specifically with final cut it does look like the GPU is being used it's hard to benchmark exactly how much of a difference it makes but just for some reference here this is all playing back at higher quality and I am running it at full 4k and an unrendered timeline and the computer is able to keep up reasonably well so we were going to try fortnightly running on the internal GP of the MacBook but I don't want to be here all night so let's uh get big scroungy for you going ah why do we ever try to play fortnight on Mac there's always such a disaster or just waiting and crashing and just being garbage so the new MacBook Air is a little bit more powerful than I expected but it is definitely did you switch did you start loading what are you serious it actually took 20 minutes - oh ok alright hopefully you guys enjoyed this video the 13-inch MacBook Air is a little bit more powerful I expected and you can't do some stuff with it but don't get your hopes up like playing the game of fortnight or anything if you're bored though you can feel free to check out this is where there's lots of it is that aren't boring if you'll excuse me going to go be really frustrated it why this is taking 20 minutes to load and then logs me out