 Hey guys, welcome to another battle vid. Now this one is a fun one because we have three brand new laptops, including the MacBook Air M2. And this is a battle between M2 versus Intel 12 gen versus AMD Ryzen 6000. Yes, this is going to be a lot of fun. So let's take a look at the devices we have here and let's start rolling. We'll start off with the M2 MacBook Air. The M2 MacBook Air is a 13.6 inch laptop. You've got a HD Retina display. You've got that notch. You've got, of course, that new design profile. And you've got two USB type C ports that are Thunderbolt that are on the left hand side as well as also MagSafe port for charging. You can use any of this to be to charge. And its starting price is 1199. Now this, of course, is running the M2 chipset. I do have eight gigabytes of RAM. Of course, this is a system and a chip. So it's all integrated together and we'll see how that performs. Now moving over to the Dell XPS 13 plus. This is also a 13.6 inch laptop. It's got, of course, a wider footprint. I really love the look of it. It's got that new flush keyboard and that new flush trackpad look to it. You've also got the kind of touch bar, nom lock. Now the display is 3.5 K. It's almost 4 K. And this is powered by an Intel 12 gen processor. This is the core i7 processor in here. And in terms of RAM, we've got 16 gigabytes of RAM and, of course, Xe graphics, they are two Thunderbolt four ports on this device on either side. Now the last device, of course, is the AMD laptop. This is the ASUS ZenBook 13 OLED. This comes with a 13.3 inch display coming in at a weight of 2.4 pounds. So it's the lightest here with the Dell being the heaviest at 2.73. This also has, of course, the AMD 6000 series processor with AMD radio and graphics built in. So again, everyone has their own graphics chip built into this. Comes with three USB type C ports, two on the right, one on the left. Keyboard layout is a bit different, more raised. You've got a nice trackpad that also kind of changes into a numpad as well, which is actually cool. Both the Dell and the ASUS both have touchscreen displays. Well, of course, you know, the Apple MacBook does not. Now, in terms of hardware, though, I kind of like all of them. They look pretty nice, but I'm leaning more to the Dell with just that really flush more cool look. Now let's move on to displays. We all have some really nice displays on all three devices. The Dell and the ASUS having OLED displays and the Retina display for your M2 MacBook Air. Now, in terms of screen brightness, I have to give it to the Dell coming up first and then the ASUS second and, of course, the MacBook Air M2 third. It's just not as bright as the other two. And the OLED displays just look more vibrant and more rich altogether. So this is where the Dell takes the winning spot there. ASUS second and the MacBook is third. So when it comes to charging, they all use different types of chargers and charging wattage. The Dell XPS 13 plus uses a 60 watt charger. And you've got a lot of cables with that. While the MacBook Air M2 comes with a 30 watt charger with the 8 gigabyte variant I have here. You can get a 65 watt charger with the higher round models or you can buy that separately from Apple. And there's also like a dual port one, I believe. While the ASUS SEMbook 13 OLED comes with a single port 65 watt charger. Now, those are all nice and dandy, but I say nope, clear that all out because I would go with something that I truly like from our channel sponsor, the ArcStation Pro Gone 652. Now, this is a dual port charger. And I like it because it is a 65 watt charger. Now, they do have a 35 and a 45 watt variant. If you need those for your smartphones, what I like this is because the single port use will give me charging on any of these devices right here, which is great. But the dual port to use will give me charging of 40 watts on the very top port and 25 on the bottom, which means I can go ahead and charge my MacBook Air M2 as well as also my Galaxy S22 Ultra and I am good to go. Retails for $54.99 and they currently have a 25% coupon, which you guys can apply and use. So definitely do that if you want to pick this up because this is a great travel charger. And again, we'll work with any of these devices, especially look, Intel, Apple, AMD works at all. Now, I've got to see that we can actually have one charger for all these devices. But what about battery life for all three? Now, we'll start off with the worst battery life in the set here. And that is with the Dell XPS 13 Plus. I was able to get about 10 hours of battery life, maybe 10.5 with it here, especially if you switch to its ultra performance mode, which we'll get to in a second here. Then following up on the second place is the Asus ZenBook 13 OLED. This gave me about 11 to about 12 hours of battery life. And the MacBook Air M2 won this category with roughly about 15 to 16 hours of battery life. Now, Apple says about 18 to me, that is absolutely fantastic and great. And it shows that this is a war course and you can actually take long trips or work long hours while using this device. Let's talk about benchmarks and how that's important. When I first run my benchmarks for both the Intel powered machine, Dell and AMD powered machine from Asus, I did run them on their balance settings. One thing you do have to do for both devices, you want to go in into the device apps for Dell and Asus. And for Dell, you want to go through ultra performance and you want to go to performance mode for the Asus to actually use the full capabilities and run those benchmarks. So I did run my first benchmark with Cinebench R23 here for single performance. The ZenBook came in at last place with a thousand four hundred and twenty five followed by the Dell XPS 13 plus with a thousand four hundred and thirty two. And the MacBook Air M2 came in at the number one spot of a thousand five hundred and ninety six. Now, in multi-core performance here in last place was the MacBook Air M2 at eight thousand one hundred and fifty four were followed by the ZenBook 13 OLED at nine thousand four hundred and thirteen. And then finally, the Dell XPS 13 plus at ten thousand three hundred and eighty three. Now, this is to be noted that both machines, actually, all machines were actually plugged in just to make everything balanced out, because even though the MacBook Air M2 doesn't need to be plugged in for such benchmarks. Now, seeing that all these devices are competitive when it comes to benchmark, let's look at some real world scenarios. So I decided to use, of course, Adobe Premiere, because I can use it across all devices, including the Mac. And in terms of running times, third place, we have the ASUS ZenBook 13 with five minutes and fifty seconds for a ten minute clip coming up. Second is actually the MacBook Air M2 at four minutes and fifty five seconds. And in first place is the Dell XPS 13 plus at four minutes and ten seconds. Now, here's the big caveat here. Both the Intel and AMD machines had to be on, of course, performance mode, and they both had to be plugged in. While the MacBook Air M2 didn't need to be plugged in, there is no mode change in there. OK, so after that, we decided to do some gaming. And of course, you know, we do a lot of gaming on this channel. We looked at two games. Those are, of course, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Fortnite. Now, on Shadow of the Tomb Raider here, we saw that the MacBook Air M2 got about twenty nine and thirty frames a second for medium and high gameplay, which is actually pretty solid. And all games are run at 1080p, by the way, while the Dell XPS 13 did about twenty eight and twenty nine frames per second, while the ASUS did twenty nine frames per second for both medium and high. So there's a slight edge, but it's pretty much the same thing across the board here with the Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Now, when it came to Fortnite, I'll just put it out here this way. I think Fortnite ran the best on the MacBook Air M2, got closer to 60 frames per second when you're playing Fortnite there. While on the ASUS, which came in kind of second, it was high forties to mid to low fifties in terms of the frame rates, while the Intel 12 gen was at high forties and maybe like 50 or 51. So again, clearly, you can see that the MacBook Air M2 did a much better job here at playing Fortnite. So to me, maybe Apple should stop making gaming laptops or gaming devices. Let's talk about some of the other functionalities with these three laptops. They all have USB type C ports, which means, of course, there's more connectivity for you to do here. So we went ahead and connected them to a monitor using USB C ports. And remember both the Intel machine, the Dell XPS 13 Plus and the MacBook Air M2 both support Thunderbolt, while the AMD machine does not support Thunderbolt, but all have USB 3.2 functionality in there. Now all of them were able to connect to this single monitor and this monitor is from our friends at Cooler Master. Definitely check it out. I do like it and we'll have some more coverage of this monitor later on, but it's got really nice speakers there, USB type C connectivity, Displayport HDMI, also 34 inch curved. But what about multi-monitor connectivity? This is something that plagued the M1 and also AMD devices. Do we see improved functionality here with the Ryzen 6000 and the M2? Both devices do not have multi-monitor connectivity with either the AMD or the M2, while the Intel 12 Gen does have multiple monitor capabilities. As you can see here, just using both ports to connect directly to two different USB type C monitors here. Another edge with the Intel machine with this Thunderbolt connectivity is the fact that you can connect it to an eGPU and have some eGPU functionality as well. That is something that really sets it apart so you can actually have it as a dedicated gaming system and also have as a portable laptop something you can't do a M2 or the AMD machine. Now, if you're going to be using your laptops on a day-to-day basis, audio is very important and all of these systems have some really nice audio. Apple has a quad audio system, but instead of me talking a lot, let's take a listen to all three and see which ones sound the best. I think clearly we can see here that the M2 does a much better job with audio, much cleaner sound all the way through, followed by the Dell XPS 13, which is clean but not as loud and the ASUS ZenBook 13 OLED, which was actually on the much lower end in terms of audio. Since we live in the world where Zoom calls are super important, all three devices have webcams. They're all 720p webcams and to me the quality is not that great in terms of the image quality, but let's take a listen and a look at the microphones and the webcams in action. This is a sample from the ASUS ZenBook 13 OLED, showing you the webcam as well as also a sample of the microphone recording and it shoots at 720p. This is a sample of the Dell XPS 13 plus 720p webcam as well as also the microphone off the webcam itself. Day time, so take a look. Now this is a sample of the 720p camera on the MacBook Air M2 and also a sample of the microphone to see how well it sounds and how it looks. So yeah, there it is. Like I said, the all kind are similar in terms of visual quality. I would say the MacBook Air's microphones are a little crisper and sharper but the visual quality is pretty much the same here all around. So as we come to the end of this battle vid, it is quite impressive to see all three devices giving me something that's quite tangible here and when you look at it through and through there isn't a clear winner but there is a device that does have the edge and I think that is the MacBook Air M2. The reason why is that for the other two devices to either do better or actually perform similar in terms of benchmark results or even functionality, they have to be powered on or they have to be charged or they have to be connected to a power source as opposed to the MacBook Air M2 which doesn't need to do any of that whatsoever and also has the longest battery life in here. Now in terms of other aspects of the devices, I do like what the Dell XPS 13 Plus brings to the table with it's OLED display, it's much more coolest leaker look and I also like the work distribution and lightness of the Asus ZenBook 13 OLED and also the performance you get from there. The one thing I'll say is that look, when you're using any of these two Windows devices either the Intel machine, the AMD machine and you have them powered on for some of the performance mode, they do run really loud, the fans tend to kick up quite loud and that's something you have to deal with and you also have to go into settings to put it into a performance mode as opposed to not doing any of that on the MacBook Air M2. So let me know your thoughts guys. Who do you think actually won this battle for it? Do you think it's the MacBook Air M2? Do you think it's the Dell XPS 13 Plus with the Intel 12th gen or the ZenBook 13 OLED from Asus with the AMD Ryzen 6000? I'd love to know your thoughts because I think this is something a battle that's much closer but also has a win over the slight edge. This is Thundy Esane, thank you and always enjoy your entertainment.