In this video, we’re comparing Apple’s newest M4 MacBook Air laptop with the Microsoft equivalent. This is the Microsoft Surface laptop. Both of these laptops have almost identical specs, and they both cost exactly $1,000. I expected very similar performance between these two laptops, and that is absolutely not what I found. Spoiler alert, the MacBook Air destroys the Surface Laptop in this video. Restarting. No way. No way. We’re We’re up to six restarts to use the computer for the first time. It has restarted six times [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] now. First impressions, as expected, this laptop is beautiful. surprisingly thin, surprisingly heavy. When you open it, you don’t have to turn it on, press any buttons, it just boots right up automatically. And one thing that I used to despise about Apple, but now I actually love it, is just how tight their entire ecosystem is. So, I’m going to have to log in to my iCloud account, but all of my Apple software is connected to that one account. So, my text messages are going to work on this laptop. All of my photos from my phone are just going to show up on this laptop. My email is going to work. My calendar is going to work. And it all syncs wirelessly and automatically with my phone with a single login. Here I have the Microsoft Surface laptop. Packaging from the outside looks very Applelesque. Oh, look at this. This feels very much like unboxing a [Music] MacBook. I’m laughing because this looks and feels exactly like a MacBook Air. I like it. I like it. I think it looks great. All right. I’m not quite sure how to turn this on. When you open the MacBook, it just comes alive. This one, even when I hold the power button, not working. Uh maybe the battery is dead. All right, this is booting incredibly slow, but maybe it’s because it’s the very first time it’s turning on. Uh, so this is very, very slow. Oh my gosh, it’s still loading. I It’s like it does something and I think, “All right, here we go.” And then it just opens up a new screen that’s like frozen on that screen. This is so crazy. Gosh, this is just so bad. Something went wrong. You can try again or skip for now. I don’t even know. I don’t even know what I’m skipping now. Checking for updates. Now, instead of opening up the desktop and letting me work, it is looking for updates. I mean, I just I just assumed this stuff would have been improved. I don’t want this video to come off like, you know, this was all the plan and I’m a Mac fan now, so I made this to crap all over Windows. That’s not what my plan was. I I saw this laptop. It looked like it was beautifully designed. We haven’t even gotten into Windows yet, so I can’t say definitively, but oh my gosh, it’s just brutal to use this. Now we’ve just got a pure black screen. Nothing is happening. How can they still make computers like this in 2025? Just a moment. We got to wait a little bit more. One more moment, please. No freaking way. We’re checking for Windows updates for the third time now. We’re getting you the latest features. Check out what Copilot Plus PC is capable of while you wait. Which laptop is better? the new Surface laptop or the new M4 MacBook Air. If you need maximum compatibility and performance, the M4 MacBook Air is the safer choice, especially in the Adobe ecosystem. Windows own C-Pilot Plus is is saying to buy the MacBook Air. Now, keep in mind, I think I’ve already downloaded and installed system updates twice now. This is the third time, but this is the longest time. And now we have multiple steps for this Windows update. So, we’re on step one of three, but we’re at 99%. So, maybe steps two of three and three of three will be faster. Um, who knows? We’re now on step two of three, 57%. I don’t know how much time has passed. You guys know uh we’re getting very close to being able to use this laptop. All right, your update is installed. Select back to restart your PC. Preparing to restart. Gosh, more waiting. Restarting again. What? How many restarts are we up to? Is this the fifth restart? The screen just keeps going black and then the Windows logo and then black and then the Windows logo. And now we got the Windows logo and something spinning. Updates are underway. Please keep your computer on. Restarting. No way. No way. We’re We’re up to six restarts to use the computer for the first time. It has restarted six times now. System update underway. Please keep your device on. Now it says we’re at 100%. But we’re stuck at 100%. It’s just going going even though we’re at 100%. Oh, restarting the seventh restart to boot the computer for the first time. Seven restarts. This is unbelievable. This little Windows Square logo has probably popped up on the screen and disappeared 30 times since I have tried to turn on the computer one time. It just keeps flashing up and going to black and then going to some other screen and then going to black and then coming back up again. Updates are underway. H welcome. Will it load for the first time? Please start. Oh my god. Unlock your Microsoft experience. We are still not into Windows yet. All right. Now, it’s asking me to scan my face to log in faster. Let’s try that. Okay, that was fast. Dude, what are all these questions? You do not restart. Getting things ready, guys. I think we’re about to be able to use this laptop. Nope. Nope. More questions. Always have access to recent browsing data. No. You’re in luck. You’ve landed a free trial of Microsoft 365 family. Decline. Microsoft 365. Get more cloud storage with Microsoft 365. Decline. Did you know you can use Microsoft 365 for free? Next. How do I get out of this? Let me use my computer. Your device comes with free Xbox Game Pass Unlimited. [Music] Skip. We have done it. We have turned on the computer. Oh my gosh. We finally have both laptops turned on and we can compare them side by side. First, let’s start with hardware. I am shocked by how much the Microsoft Surface looks like and feels like a MacBook. The materials of the laptops themselves feel almost identical. The shape and the design looks almost identical. The weight feels almost the exact same. When I pulled the MacBook Air out of the box, I love this new blue color until I started touching it. And I don’t know if you can pick this up on camera, but this laptop picks up fingerprints more than any laptop I’ve ever used before. So, that is a huge downside if you get this pretty color here. I have to say I really like the finish of the Microsoft Surface. Uh I do see fingerprints on it, but not nearly as bad as the MacBook Air. So, in terms of the finish itself, I’m going to choose the Microsoft as my favorite. Now, when it comes to the screens on each one of these laptops, they’re both amazing. You’ll notice that the MacBook Air has this notch cutout, which really hasn’t been a big deal to me on my MacBook Pros. I don’t even think about it. But it is worth noting that the Microsoft Surface Laptop has the camera along the top of the bezels. And interestingly, the bezel around the Surface Laptop is actually a little bit thinner than it is on the MacBook Air. Right now, I have both screens set to maximum brightness. And you’ll notice that the Microsoft laptop gets a little bit brighter. If I match the brightness of these two screens, see that the blacks look much nicer on the MacBook Air. So, we’re getting a much higher contrast ratio on the MacBook Air. When I scroll on both of these laptops, I can see significantly more jitter on the MacBook Air. This is just a guess, but I believe this screen has a refresh rate of 60 Hz. And uh scrolling is not nearly as smooth as it is on my brand new iPhone, which has prootion. And why isn’t scrolling working on the Windows computer now? What is going on? Why did it break? That was weird. It was like the whole website froze up for a second on the Windows computer. Anyway, like I was saying, scrolling on the Windows machine feels incredibly smooth. So, I’m guessing this is 120 Hz refresh rate. One other huge feature that the Surface has over the MacBook Air is that the Surface is a touch screen. So, I can touch the screen and of course, it’s not at all on the Mac. So, if you like touching your screen, the Surface is the clear winner there. When it comes to ports, both of these laptops have magnetic power cables. They also have two USBC ports, a headphone jack, but the Surface is the winner here because it also comes with a single USBA port, which is something I know I would use all the time if Apple would give it to me. Let’s do a speaker test. We’ll start off with the Surop gets a little bit louder than the MacBook Air, but um neither of those sound great when they’re that loud. Let’s bring them down to around 50% volume. tried wildlife photography before. For the last few days, I have thrown somebody who’s never even tried wildlife photography before. For the last few days, there’s a little bit more richness and fullness with the MacBook Air. Not a ton. I think you would be happy with the sound quality out of either of these, but if I personally had to choose one, I lean slightly towards the MacBook Air, but only slightly. As I navigate around the operating system of both of these computers, I just keep noticing weird little hang-ups on the Windows machine where I’ll just open like a settings menu and it’ll take 10 seconds to load and show up. It just feels strange for a new computer to be this sluggish. So, right now I’m clicking down here on this app for weather and it just doesn’t load. It’s like I have to click on it 10 15 times and then it loads slowly and then when it opens it’s just weird trashy fake news and like clickbait stuff. It’s just very strange that Microsoft wants this built into their operating system. Ranking all you can eat chain buffets from worst to first. Big changes are coming to KFC in 2025. All right, moving on. Let’s talk about the keyboards here. I love the way all Mac keyboards feel. They have a relatively short travel. The Microsoft Surface keyboard feels fantastic as well. Although it feels a little softer and a little gummier. And I know gummy sounds really bad when it comes to a keyboard. It’s not a bad thing. I think many people might actually prefer the softer feel of the Surface Laptop. For me personally, I prefer the MacBook Air, but it’s very close here. I think both of these keyboards are fantastic. Now, the big one, trackpads. Apple has dominated the trackpad game since forever, and it’s impossible to explain just how precise this trackpad is until you feel it for yourself. So, the next time you’re in a Best Buy or a Costco, if you’ve never felt an Apple trackpad before, feel it. And of course, Apple has had the absolute best scrolling and gestures forever as well. Everything just works beautifully and exactly how it should on the MacBook Air. And I’m excited to say the Microsoft Surface Laptop has come closer to replicating the MacBook trackpad than any other laptop I have ever used before. If I didn’t have these side by side, I would absolutely think I was using a Mac laptop here. Now, the pressure that’s required to make the click is slightly heavier on the Microsoft than it is on the Mac. I find that to be a little annoying, especially when I go right back to the uh MacBook. The MacBook click, it’s just so perfect. I feel like the Surface is like 95% of the way there. Certainly the best Windows trackpad I have ever used, but it’s not quite as good as the MacBook. And I don’t know if you can see this, but the scrolling, even though it’s much smoother on the 120 Hz screen, it’s not nearly as smooth as scrolling on the Mac. Something about the Mac, it just has the most perfect feeling. When I let go, it just continues to move the exact distance that feels right. When I do this on the surface, sometimes it goes the distance you would expect and other times it stops. It just again, it’s like 95% as good as the Max trackpad, but that final 5% is noticeable. I have to say Apple is still the winner when it comes to trackpads. All right, I’m going to download Photoshop, Lightroom, Adobe Premiere on both of these laptops. I’m very curious to see how they can run this software. All right. So, this is probably going to be a big problem here. A few years ago, Apple left Intel. They started making ARMbased chips inhouse. And there was a little problem at the beginning with software because to get your software running the best on these new chips, you really had to rewrite the software. But you could make old software that was written for the old processors work with the new stuff. It just wasn’t going to be as optimized. We are now running into that exact same problem with the Microsoft Surface laptop. This laptop now runs on ARMbased chips and Adobe is telling me that they do not yet have software optimized for these new chips. They’re claiming that I can still use Adobe Premiere on this laptop, but again, it’s not going to be optimized for the chip. So, that’s probably going to be a huge disadvantage for the Surface. This will not show up on camera. I’m zooming into a large Photoshop document here. It is perfectly smooth on the Mac. And again, I know you’re not going to be able to see this on camera, but there’s just a slight lag jitter going on on the Surface. And man, it just feels much better on the Mac, which is so strange because the Surface has the faster refresh rate, but I’m not seeing it here. If you happen to like hot command because of a disk error. So, the Surface laptop doesn’t even want to do it. Like right now, I’m clicking yes and it’s just like frozen on the surface. And while Photoshop is frozen, I keep getting these ads popping up in the bottom left of the screen. It’s like, “Look at this sports core. Read this headline.” I’m going to have to go back to my old friend. Controll alt delete. And we’re going to have to force quit. All right. Photoshop is completely frozen. It won’t even let me end the task manually in the task manager. It’s just totally frozen up. So, I’m going to have to restart this computer. As long as I’m restarting the Surface, let’s do a restart test. And we’re back. And it opened up all the applications that I had open previously. As you can tell, the Microsoft is still completely frozen. I don’t know if I should hold the power button and force this to shut down. A screen just popped up and said software update underway. It better not. It better not. Oh, but it is. System updates are underway. Please keep your device on and plugged in. I cannot believe it. Just in case there was something going on with software, let’s try to restart these computers one more time. We have no software open. There should be no problems. There should be no updates. 3 2 1 go. And we are in Mac OS. We got the pure black screen on the surface, but here we are. Okay, that was acceptable. And then it just read my face. I didn’t have to type in a password. I love it. Back to the test that didn’t work before. Opening a 100 megapixel raw file in Photoshop. 3 2 1 go. Apple is significantly faster. Wow. Okay. All right. Let’s open up Lightroom and let’s try to export a bunch of RAW files. Gosh, the surface is so much slower now. I don’t remember if this software was optimized or not, but man, I mean, this is like three times slower, four times slower, five times slower than the Mac just opening the software. There we go. All right, I have 48 100 megapixel raw files that I’m going to export to the desktop on both of these laptops in three, two, one, go. And you can watch the progress bar right up here. Surface just finished. MacBook was the clear winner here. But the other thing that I just realized, I have been doing all of these tests with the MacBook on battery and the Surface plugged in. So, that’s not fair. So, I’m going to unplug the Surface. Now, let’s do one final stress test. And this time, it’s going to be video exporting in Adobe Premiere. I’m going into the settings on the surface. And under the power mode, when on battery, I can choose better performance. Hopefully, that will give us the fastest possible export. 3 2 1 go. And the MacBook has finished. It took approximately 20 minutes. And the Surface says it has 31 minutes remaining. In terms of the progress bar, it’s approximately 1/3 done when the MacBook is 100% done. I don’t want to sit here and wait for this to finish. I’m going to go ahead and cancel this. And right as I hit cancel, a popup for one drive pops up and says, “Do you want to spend more money to get more storage for your one drive?” Like I do not know how to turn these popups off. It’s so obnoxious. So, what are my final thoughts on both of these laptops? Well, I am a massive fan of the MacBook Air. You can probably uh gather that. I feel like this laptop is probably the perfect laptop for 99% of people out there. For me personally, I lean towards the MacBook Pro because I want a little bit more of the performance that comes with that thicker laptop. But for the average person, I feel like this is the perfect laptop. The Microsoft Surface laptop has so much potential in terms of hardware. This is incredibly similar to the MacBook Air. Beautifully designed. I actually prefer the finish on this laptop to the MacBook Air. It doesn’t attract fingerprints quite as easily. The screen looks amazing and many people might actually prefer it. It has a faster refresh rate at 120 Hz which gives you much smoother scrolling. It doesn’t have the notch on the top of the screen and it actually has thinner bezels as well. The screen is also brighter than the MacBook Air and it’s also a touch screen. I love the keyboards on both of these laptops and even though I slightly lean towards the feeling of the keyboard on the MacBook Air, I can see many people actually preferring the feel of the Surface. The trackpad on the MacBook Air is still king. It’s the best trackpad I’ve ever used. However, the trackpad on the Surface is the second best trackpad I have ever used before. It is shockingly close to the MacBook Air. Now, everybody’s going to have their own opinion on which operating system is best, but we can all agree that Microsoft’s ridiculous update system that requires the computer to restart itself again and again and again and again is outrageous in 2025 and they have to do something to fix this. I also can’t stand all of the bloat wear that comes on these Windows computers. I can’t stand that it’s constantly showing me ads and trying to get me to click on headlines. I hate that every few minutes a new popup comes up trying to get me to buy more One Drive, whatever the hell that is. There’s no doubt Apple wants you in their ecosystem. And yes, they try to sell you their iCloud account as well, but it doesn’t feel nearly as intrusive to me as it does on the Windows machine. Now, when it comes to the performance of both of these laptops, the MacBook Air destroyed the surface in every single test. Even when I’m navigating the operating system, when I’m just in Windows clicking around, there would just be random times where I would click on something and nothing would happen and I would wait 10 seconds for a window to open or a window would open but it would just be blank for 10 seconds until stuff popped in. That never happens on the MacBook Air. And then of course things got even worse when we got into more complex software on both of these machines. certain features in Photoshop didn’t work at all on the Surface and then Photoshop crashed and then I wasn’t able to reopen Photoshop and then I had to restart the computer completely. But when I did it had to do more updates even though it just did updates like 5 minutes previously. Exporting large raw files in Adobe Lightroom was incredibly slow and then exporting a 4K video in Adobe Premiere was even slower. I don’t know how many of these performance issues are an issue with the hardware itself versus the software not yet being fully optimized for the new ARMbased chipset, but you have to remember that Apple went through these growing pains 3 or 4 years ago with the original M1 MacBook Pro. And if you go back to my original review of that laptop, I had major issues. I had issues with the operating system glitching out. I had issues with every single Adobe program crashing and failing to export. So, it might be a little unfair to compare these two laptops when Apple has such a large head start. However, if you’re a photographer and a videographer like me and you use these Adobe programs, I certainly would not buy a new Microsoft laptop with this chipset until all of this stuff is ironed out. I love the design of this laptop, but at this point, I cannot recommend it. Well, guys, thank you for watching this video. 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