One screen didn't look more vivid than the other when I watched a trailer for No Time to Die. Daniel Craig's piercing blue eyes looked a saturated tone of aqua blue, and the lipstick worn by Ana de Armas was a deep scarlet. Details were also very sharp; I could see every scar webbing its way across the antagonist's masked face. When I looked closely, the MacBook Air's panel seemed to have better contrasts because black and gray hues were darker.
According to our colorimeter, the Surface Laptop 3 covers 121% of the sRGB color gamut, which makes it more colorful than the MacBook Air's screen (100%). The screens on these two laptops are equally bright. In fact, the Surface Laptop 3's panel, at 348 nits, was just a few nits brighter than the MacBook Air's screen (343 nits).
This will be a closer contest once Apple does away with the Butterfly keyboard, but even then, the new scissor keyboard on the 16-inch MacBook Pro doesn't come close to the excellent one on the Surface Laptop 3.
My fingers felt instant relief when I stopped typing on the MacBook Air and switched to the Surface Laptop 3. It felt as if my fingers moved from typing on a wooden desk to a plush pillow. The keys on the MacBook are shallow, stiff and offer practically no feedback. Not to mention the notorious reliability issues with the keys. In contrast, the Surface Laptop 3's keys have a pleasant soft-touch coating and decent key travel. I bounced from one key to the next on the Surface Laptop 3 without experiencing any discomfort.
I typed at 113 words per minute with an accuracy of 98% on the 10FastFingers.com typing test when using the Surface Laptop 3. That is a bit slower but much more accurate than the 116 wpm at an accuracy of 91% I scored on the MacBook Air.Apple still makes the best trackpads, and the 4.6 x 3.1-inch surface on the MacBook Air is no exception. The oversized pad tracked my movements and gestures effortlessly. I'm just not a fan of Force Touch, the fake haptic feedback that only simulates an actual click.
That poor performance from the MacBook has real-world consequences. The Air needed 36 minutes and 6 seconds to convert a 4K video to 1080p resolution using the Handbrake app. The Surface Laptop 3 took about two-thirds of that time, finishing the task in 24 minutes and 55 seconds. To Apple's credit, the company equips its laptops with some seriously fast hard drives. The MacBook Air's 256GB SSD raced to 1,011 megabytes per second using the Blackmagic disk app. Microsoft is only now catching on; the 256GB M.2 PCIe SSD in the Surface Laptop 3 copied 4.97GB of multimedia files in 9.4 seconds, for a rate of 541.4 MBps.
Expect good endurance from both of these laptops. The Surface Laptop 3 lasted for 9 hours and 17 minutes on our battery test, which involves continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi. It was a close call, but the MacBook Air powered down shortly before, after 8 hours and 51 minutes.
The base MacBook Air comes with a Core i5 CPU, 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD — specs that are similar to the lowest-priced Surface Laptop 3 — but the MacBook Air costs a bit more, at $1,099. You won't spend as much to upgrade storage, though. The 256GB model costs $1,299 — the same as the Surface Laptop 3 — and going from 8GB to 16GB of memory costs $200.
According to our colorimeter, the Surface Laptop 3 covers 121% of the sRGB color gamut, which makes it more colorful than the MacBook Air's screen (100%). The screens on these two laptops are equally bright. In fact, the Surface Laptop 3's panel, at 348 nits, was just a few nits brighter than the MacBook Air's screen (343 nits).
This will be a closer contest once Apple does away with the Butterfly keyboard, but even then, the new scissor keyboard on the 16-inch MacBook Pro doesn't come close to the excellent one on the Surface Laptop 3.
My fingers felt instant relief when I stopped typing on the MacBook Air and switched to the Surface Laptop 3. It felt as if my fingers moved from typing on a wooden desk to a plush pillow. The keys on the MacBook are shallow, stiff and offer practically no feedback. Not to mention the notorious reliability issues with the keys. In contrast, the Surface Laptop 3's keys have a pleasant soft-touch coating and decent key travel. I bounced from one key to the next on the Surface Laptop 3 without experiencing any discomfort.
I typed at 113 words per minute with an accuracy of 98% on the 10FastFingers.com typing test when using the Surface Laptop 3. That is a bit slower but much more accurate than the 116 wpm at an accuracy of 91% I scored on the MacBook Air.Apple still makes the best trackpads, and the 4.6 x 3.1-inch surface on the MacBook Air is no exception. The oversized pad tracked my movements and gestures effortlessly. I'm just not a fan of Force Touch, the fake haptic feedback that only simulates an actual click.
- Asus gl551jk Battery
- Asus gl551jm Battery
- Asus gl551jw Battery
- Asus gl551jx Battery
- Asus gl771 Battery
- Asus k43 Battery
- Asus k45 Battery
- Asus k60i Battery
- Asus k60ij Battery
- Asus k501j Battery
- Asus l0a2016 Battery
- Asus l0690l6 Battery
- Asus m50 Battery
- Asus m50v Battery
- Asus n45 Battery
- Asus n45e Battery
That poor performance from the MacBook has real-world consequences. The Air needed 36 minutes and 6 seconds to convert a 4K video to 1080p resolution using the Handbrake app. The Surface Laptop 3 took about two-thirds of that time, finishing the task in 24 minutes and 55 seconds. To Apple's credit, the company equips its laptops with some seriously fast hard drives. The MacBook Air's 256GB SSD raced to 1,011 megabytes per second using the Blackmagic disk app. Microsoft is only now catching on; the 256GB M.2 PCIe SSD in the Surface Laptop 3 copied 4.97GB of multimedia files in 9.4 seconds, for a rate of 541.4 MBps.
Expect good endurance from both of these laptops. The Surface Laptop 3 lasted for 9 hours and 17 minutes on our battery test, which involves continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi. It was a close call, but the MacBook Air powered down shortly before, after 8 hours and 51 minutes.
- Asus n45f Battery
- Asus n45j Battery
- Asus n45s Battery
- Asus n46 Battery
- Asus n46v Battery
- Asus n46vm Battery
- Asus n46vz Battery
- Asus n53sd Battery
- Asus n53sm Battery
- Asus n53sn Battery
- Asus n53sv Battery
- Asus q500a Battery
- Asus rog Battery
- Asus s301 Battery
- Asus u46 Battery
- Asus u46e Battery
The base MacBook Air comes with a Core i5 CPU, 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD — specs that are similar to the lowest-priced Surface Laptop 3 — but the MacBook Air costs a bit more, at $1,099. You won't spend as much to upgrade storage, though. The 256GB model costs $1,299 — the same as the Surface Laptop 3 — and going from 8GB to 16GB of memory costs $200.
Comments
Post a Comment