So is the general consensus that there’s little reason to get the 10 core?
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Are you satisfied with your m2 air?
- Thread starter erkanasu
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Absolutely love mine, and feel like my long nightmare of trying to figure out what my next 5-6 year computer is has come to an end.
It’s not a bad deal, either… you get the 3% Apple Cash upfront, too.
Nice price as long as you don’t care about the performance gains of the M2 and 24 GB. No the M1 doesn’t have the same performance. You might not care about the increase and that’s fine but the M2 is higher performing.
Seems to be the general consensus onlne. I deliberately order the base 8-core and upgraded just the RAM/SSD as it made it $100 cheaper than going for the 10-core. From what I've heard it's only ~20% faster but that difference drops away in sustained tasks when the laptop heats up as the 10 core throttles more.
I don't think there is any known benift yet of having 24 vs 16. can you proove there is?
how are you benifting in the real world from the performance?
From what I have read, the M2 is noticeably snappier on the web, for one thing, even in comparison to the M1 Pro and M1 Max. I don't have any M1 Macs (just an M1 iPad Pro), but I can attest that my M2 Air is astoundingly fast.
If you don’t need an extra 8 GB of RAM then there is no benefit. If you do need an extra 8 GB of RAM then 24 GB is better than swapping to SSD.
No benefit for me yet. But I plan on changing my everyday work to take advantage of the extra RAM. The faster CPU is negligible but nice to have I guess.
right now based on the benchmarks I've seen there is no real world impact from jumping for 16 to 24 for 99.9% of the population, hence it's a waste of money.
To see the advantage of 24 GB compared to 16 GB in a benchmark those benchmarks have to hit the sweetspot: Using more than 16 GB of RAM but not more than 24 GB.
I went for the 24 GB model because I very often use more than 16 GB of memory while doing photo editing in Lightroom. I had problems doing that on my 8 GB M1 Air so I went to max this time. There might not be a big advantage for now, but I plan to keep that machine for a while as my main driver so to be future proof(er) I think it makes sense.
The comparison I did not expect to find! I am thinking of making this upgrade but still got the SSD decision to make. If they were equal, it would easily be 256GB I have zero need for more space.
I had the 2020 M1 Pro with 8/256 and I now have the m2 air 16/256 because I like yourself do not really need more space. Honest answer is I notice zero difference in speed I think the entire thing is overblown unless you’re constantly exporting huge projects but people that are doing that likely also need more ssd space to begin with. Just upgrade the ram as I shocked myself when I finally opened activity monitor on my pro and was constantly using 3gb of swap so I did get 16 this time.
Do you actually have less than 256GB of data? Or are you storing it somewhere else?
I am using 155GB of SSD on my current MBP and considering the M2. I think that 16/256 would be tight for my use case unless I can find a workable storage alternative.
Other configs I'm considering are 8/512 (most likely), 16/512, 16/1T.
Same. I was holding out for this one to replace my 2016 MBP TB. So glad I did.
I could not be happier. Everything is so much snappier, webpages load instantly, battery life is amazing, it plays 4K like it's nothing and its COOL. My MBP would get uncomfortably hot just sitting there. The increased portability makes me use it more outside my external 4K monitor setup. Which BTW it runs much better than the MBP.
If I must complain about something it would be that the sound quality isn't great, its kinda thin, but thats fine.
I got the 10 core, 16GB RAM, 2TB. Space grey. Will serve me well for 5-6 years.
Your usage case sounds similar to mine. Okay, still at the purchasing decision stage but your configuration is the one I would go for. Thank you for an honest take!
Midnight m2 Air (8/16/512) showed up a few days ago. First time using Mac OS so there have been some growing pains, but it is all gravy now after installing home-brew and getting all my markdown and latex (mactex) software installed and configured. AlDente for setting charging limits; BetterSnapTool for non-maximized window management; AdGuard for ads, which I might buy a lifetime copy of if I can't find something similar to ublock origin.
I also remapped modifiers to work similar to both windows and happy hacking keyboard layout: control and caps lock are command. Command is now control. The last two annoyances are not having Create New Text Document in the context (right-click) menu and Home/End not going to beginning or end of lines. Command+left/right works well enough for the latter.
Apple Silicon is insane. Using this laptop is like having battery life, heat, and cpu speed cheat codes enabled all the time. So unfair hardware like this is currently out of reach for most pc companies. Completely satisfied with the purchase. I wear the fingerprints like a badge of honor / signature for my own personal midnight mba.
I also remapped modifiers to work similar to both windows and happy hacking keyboard layout: control and caps lock are command. Command is now control. The last two annoyances are not having Create New Text Document in the context (right-click) menu and Home/End not going to beginning or end of lines. Command+left/right works well enough for the latter.
Apple Silicon is insane. Using this laptop is like having battery life, heat, and cpu speed cheat codes enabled all the time. So unfair hardware like this is currently out of reach for most pc companies. Completely satisfied with the purchase. I wear the fingerprints like a badge of honor / signature for my own personal midnight mba.
The vast majority I put in iCloud or onedrive. There’s just some random downloads, apps and optimized photos on the hard drive. I have about half used.
Glad to hear your experience so far is quite positive!
I've been a Mac user for 13 years and a Windows one for 30. I agree that the absence of Home/End keys is a bit of an annoyance. I also miss having a dedicated right-delete key.
Even though I've gone back and forth between Windows during the day (work) and Macs in the evenings/weekends (personal time), I've never found it necessary to swap the Command/Control keys in Mac OS. Command-C, V, X and Z are ingrained just as well in my brain as their Windows counterparts. Muscle memory really is amazing. I'd encourage you to at least consider adjusting to Command and Control in their "native" locations, if for no other reason than when you see a keyboard shortcut in a manual or pull-down menu, you won't have to tell yourself, "Well, it says Command, but I need to hit Control." But of course if you find it too difficult to adjust, that's entirely understandable, and it's great that the keys can be re-mapped.
Enjoy your new machine!
Dedicated right-delete is also missed!
The whole Control/Command situation doesn't bother me at all on the mba keyboard itself. I actually like having Command so close to the space bar because I can use my thumbs instead of pinkies. Where it hits me hard is my mechanical keyboards I have attached to my mba when docked. I map Caps Lock to Control on long press (still Caps on tap). If I didn't swap Command and Control then I'd have to re-flash my keyboard(s), which are also connected to a Windows PC via a usb switch. Instead of going through the hassle it is nice to adjust modifiers in mac os. It is especially nice that I can easily re-map caps lock to Command as well, making the mba keyboard consistent with all my other boards.
