Video ID: lMRPfxJ8fmA
YouTube URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMRPfxJ8fmA
Added At: 13-06-25 21:16:35
Processed: No
Sentiment: Positive
Categories: Education, Tech
Tags: MacBook Air, Laptop Sleeve, Samsung T7 Shield, USB-C Hub, External Monitor, Portability, Protection, Productivity
Summary
The creator, Ben, shares his experience with the new MacBook Air. He discusses upgrading the storage with a Samsung T7 Shield, using a laptop sleeve for portability and protection, and setting up a USB-C hub to connect to an external monitor.
Transcript
the day has finally come ever since I was a little kid I always wanted a Macbook watching people walk the hallways with that little Apple logo outside their laptop was a huge flex and something I just never got to be a part of until now and man ises this thing not disappoint I went with the MacBook M3 air with 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage it's Sleek as hell was a breeze to set up the connection to all of my previous Apple devices was Flawless and I feel like a little kid on Christmas using this thing the problem is I completely overlooked the accessories that I need to get my money's worth out of this thing so without further Ado let's get this thing set up and get some accessories in [Music] here if you're new here welcome my name is Ben I make videos about tech that I find cool and interesting and something I really find cool and interesting the MacBook Air now I mentioned I went with the 512 GB version and yeah that ain't going to be enough so first things first I'm going to need to upgrade some storage this is the Samsung t7 Shield as far as speed goes it's 1,000 megabytes per second read R speed which isn't slow by any means it should be plenty fast for moving video files around if you're looking for something super quick the best option would probably be an m.2 in an external exclosure the benefits this has over something like that for me is portability and reliability something like that has a little bit more moving parts and just things that can go wrong this is up to 3 m drop proof so if I knock it off the table I won't be super worried IP 65 water and dust resistant so unless I completely drop it in the water or lose it in the sand at the beach I should be pretty good there and it's really small and light especially compared to something like the Lacy rugged hard drive that I have here now they offer a 1 2 and 4 TB option now Amazon's going to tell you that this normally would cost $285 but if you look at the price history you can see it hasn't been that price for more than a day recently in the past 3 months it seems like it's generally been sitting around 180 but obviously pick whatever you think you're going to benefit from the most but now that got the storage problem solved I realized that I wanted to take this thing to the coffee shop today and I had no way to get it there I mean obviously I'm going to take it in my backpack but you know how that goes you slide it in and out of your backpack a million times maybe the zipper rubs against it you throw your keys in there not realizing and now that beautiful midnight black color wig it's all scratched up so I picked up a sleeve that'll be here tomorrow going to get this hard drive set up in the meantime and we'll talk more then this is the bear with me here ho yixi laptop sleeve now what makes this really cool compared to just a regular old sleeve is it actually has this foldable design on the top of it which actually allows you to prop the MacBook up when you're using it I've seen a lot of people using those metal stands before just to kind of elevate the screen a little bit and put the keyboard at an angle and this does exactly that killing two birds with one stone it's super slim so I don't have to worry about it taking up any more space in my bag than the Macbook will itself has a little bit of extra padding on the corners not really sure how much that's really going to help if I were to drop this but again the point is really just to protect it from scratches I'm not looking for like an Otter Box for MacBooks and it's only $20 compared to some of the more popular name brand options out there that's a pretty solid price and probably my favorite feature overall this little mouse pad that pops off the side so you don't have to worry about getting your mouse feet dirty or damaging a table wherever you're working which brings me into my next thing which I guess isn't necessarily a necessity but I couldn't live without this thing the Logitech mxm 3s now I've talked about this bad boy a lot lately so I won't spend too much time on it but there's a few features that I haven't got to talk about in the past because they're Mac specific first of which being the gesture control so just like how on a Mac trackpad you can swipe left or right to move between Windows you don't lose that functionality with this mouse you can press and hold where the little thumb rest is there's actually a button inside of there and that kind of activates those gesture controls so then you can swipe the mouse just as if you were swiping your fingers on the trackpad second feature that makes this mouse stand out to me compared to other mice out there is the ability to have all these customization options within the software for the mouse if you're unaware scrolling on a Mac versus a window are backwards and to me as somebody who's been on Windows my whole life that just feels more natural however I still want to keep the more natural scrolling on the trackpad for the Mac so instead I went into logy options plus and just switched the scroll direction for the mouse only so now my mouse responds like it normally would on a Windows machine but my trackpad still responds like an Apple product now one last thing I want want to mention about these mice is they do sell a Mac specific version which only works on Mac but the standard regular edition will work on both Windows and Mac so I don't see why there's any need to lock yourself out of any Windows operating systems in the future by going with the Mac edition I would however only pick up black or gray because the white is impossible to clean so I took what I've got so far outside for a little spin started editing this video and everything worked pretty well the sleeve definitely p picked up dirt pretty easily so I would stay away from putting this on any surfaces that are too dirty otherwise you're just going to have to clean it off a lot and the external hard drive performed perfect I kept all my Clips on there while I was actually editing this video moving files over was a breeze but with it being early November the Sun starts to set pretty quick and it starts to get cold very fast so it was time to move inside and that's when I realized I have no way to connect this to my monitor this is is the anchor 555 it's a $50 USB C Hub so kind of in that middle range of pricing what made it stand out to me over some of the other options is you get 4k 60 HZ via HDMI a lot of the cheaper ones will be 4K 30 and you can see here it's really choppy and just not ideal it has a 10 GB per second USBC Port which again some of those cheaper options you'll usually only get 5 GB per second so a little bit of added speed here two 10 GB per second usba ports couple SD card readers and an ethernet port but one thing I do want to talk about because if you're new to this you should be aware of it is scaling on Macs is a little bit different from what You' get from a Windows PC you can see under the display settings the different sizes of scaling here and the different resolutions underneath from what I understand those resolutions don't actually affect the image quality when you're watching like a YouTube video or looking at pictures on the screen they just affect the resolution of the UI making it smaller or bigger so I have mindset to 38x 1692 that's just the size that feels right to me on this 42 in TV but the point of me showing you this scaling is just super weird on Max so just be aware of that when you're shopping around for an external display now speaking of displays I don't plan on using this open and using the screen as a second display on the MacBook I just plan on keeping it closed using it in clamshell mode but that means I'm going to need to find a way to store it while it's in use I just grabbed a $13 Mount from Amazon to mount it under my desk I slapped a USBC Hub under there with some Velcro so now when I come inside I can just slide it into the little Mount plug in the USBC Hub the mag safe charger and we're good to go but I think that pretty much covers all the essentials we got everything we need for working on the go everything we need for a nice setup at home I guess the only things I might have left out is you would probably want to buy a portable charger just in case wherever you're working doesn't have an outlet available I use this one from a company called Volta it's like 240 WS has a really big battery so I can charge my laptop like four times before that thing dies and a solid USBC Thunderbolt cable probably wouldn't be a bad idea either just because you can charge via the Thunderbolt Port so like personally when I take the this thing off the dock and I head out for the day I don't even bring my Mac safe charger with me I just make sure I have a USBC Cable in my bag along with that portable charger and I know that I'll be charged up throughout the rest of the day otherwise huge thanks to you guys for stopping by if you made it this far I really appreciate it like I said this is my first ever Mac this is my first laptop in a very long time in general so if I missed anything or you have any really helpful tips of your own drop them down in the comments below otherwise appreciate you guys for stopping by and I'll see you in the next one peace [Music]