Hands-On With the M2 MacBook Air: All Your Questions Answered

[entropys]

Re the midnight blue: I have a HP dragonfly that is similar sized and is also in a dark blue. Finger prints show up as well but you would have to be really picky. It is not a big deal.
Go the starlight if you are worried about it.

 

[Realityck]

If you want to see a great Teardown of the new M2 MacBook Air, which confirms the single SSD chip slow speed issue on the Base Model of the new M2 MacBook Air, watch Max Tech's Teardown here:

At first glance the motherboard reminds me of the M1 24" iMac motherboard only lot smaller but that had two fans one to cool the SoC and the other the CCA. In this M2 MBA variation I would be real curious how that would fare against throttling given the thermal design. Interesting how when you pull off the cover you literally see just batteries and the two double sided speakers.

 

[g13000]

I type this comment using the M2 MBA that is a 512/8gb. I purchased this machine for email, safari, writing, planning...
I have a MB Pro and an iMac that I use for Adobe Creative Suite.

So here is my anxiety...should I have purchased the 16GB version? I know opinions are mixed, but considering my use case. I can't imagine a day when I would want to use this for Lightroom or Photoshop compared to my other machines. I know people talk about new apps being made in the days to come that will eat more and more memory, but alas!

Return and get a 16GB? or...stick with it?!?!
Thanks for your collective wisdom!

 

[Leon Ze Professional]

Not going to lie the color Midnight looks stunningly gorgeous! It's got that stealthier look.

You took the words right out of my mouth. Yes this midnight colour is stunningly gorgeous and stealthily.

Also thanks Macrumors, you pretty much have confirmed my original thoughts that the sweet spot is definitely 16Gb of RAM, 512Gb SSD is the way to go.

🍻

 

[thadoggfather]

I type this comment using the M2 MBA that is a 512/8gb. I purchased this machine for email, safari, writing, planning...
I have a MB Pro and an iMac that I use for Adobe Creative Suite.

So here is my anxiety...should I have purchased the 16GB version? I know opinions are mixed, but considering my use case. I can't imagine a day when I would want to use this for Lightroom or Photoshop compared to my other machines. I know people talk about new apps being made in the days to come that will eat more and more memory, but alas!

Return and get a 16GB? or...stick with it?!?!
Thanks for your collective wisdom!

If you are planning on using another machine for the heavy lifting, 8/512 is more than fine imo.

I wouldn't want to half those ssd speeds personally. I'd stay put but I know some will disagree.

512 is good overhead on storage on the other hand. 256 is quite slim these days. Even with almost nothing on my M1 Air its half full with OS and some random stuff.

I had a 2016 NTB MBP with 256 also, and still have 20gb left after years of use and dual booting but its a tight squeeze. My Win10 partition is down to like 4gb, but only had 40gb to start or something there.

 

[KPOM]

But if you are going to get 512/16gb - why not already go to the MBP?

Many reasons. The MBA is cheaper, significantly lighter and thinner. The entire MBA is the same thickness as the bottom portion of the Pro.

As for the performance, note that the base 14" Pro is only 11% faster than the M2 MBA in multicore speed. Sure, the Pro can sustain that for longer because of the active cooling, but 90%+ of the time it won't be noticeable.

 

[KPOM]

The Starlight surprised me in person. Bet that one will be a bit of a sleeper hit. And wasn't fond of Starlight on iPhones or the watch.

Yes, I saw the Starlight when I picked up my Midnight 16/1TB model today. It looks nice. I think Justine on the Podcast was wrong to say that it looks too much like silver.

 

[thadoggfather]

Yes, I saw the Starlight when I picked up my Midnight 16/1TB model today. It looks nice. I think Justine on the Podcast was wrong to say that it looks too much like silver.

it does look a lot like silver but more warmth, less sterile looking. I see that as a Plus personally but I can see traditional gold fans being off put by it. different strokes.

 

[wbeasley]

so only in stock Air available was a 256G Starlight.
Love the colour, keyboard, screen, notch is nothing too intrusive - you get extra screen space on either side effectively.

Stress tested it overnight with some video upscaling software.
it is running about 5 times faster than my 2017 iMac on the same settings.
Using 96% of GPU to do it.
8Gb memory is swapping a bit but oddly, Firefox sistting doing "nothing" is probably the reason why and I dont need to will kill it and see if that resolves the issue.

All in all, it's great.
Will I keep it or upgrade? a few more days and see what stock is available as an option

upscaling a DVD to FullHD 65 minute movie looks like taking about 15 hours.
doing same task on 2017 iMac for 95 minute movie not complete but taken 5 days roughly... huge difference.

 

[KPOM]

Had a chance to check one out today in Apple store and now cant wait to get this to replace my MBPro '17 which got me through college (undergrad and grad).This Air really does feel like the upgrade to me, fast, very nice screen, it is so light, feels so comfortable when closed in hands to carry, however the finger prints on midnight are very noticeable which is not a big deal to me but just wanted to point that out.

I will be going with 16/1TB. Haven't decided on the color yet. I did want the new Pro initially but glad that I waited.

Starlight seems to be easier to find in stores.

 

[ProfessionalFan]

He's got 10 Safari tabs open and 4 or 5 apps running and everything is running fine. What a time to be alive!

Only cause he isn't exporting a 4K HEVC file in the background. That's where the bottleneck happens and as we all know, 99% of MacBook Air base model users enjoy exporting 4K HEVC files in their day-to-day usage.

 

[flofixer]

I know there were even black laptops by Apple in the past, but personally, I can’t help but feel like the midnight version looks a little “generic windows laptop”. It’s not a bad looking piece of tech, of course. For me as a fairly recent Windows-to-Mac switcher it just feels too familiar, I guess.

That impression might be exacerbated by my hope that we’d get a properly colorful MBA like the old iBooks and my disappointment that we didn’t, though.

If they released multiple colorful options it might give the computer the appearance of a toy rather than a seriously powerful computer

 

[diego.caraballo]

Lot of people asking what spec they should get.
My advice: stop thinking about “future-proofing” you purchase. It doesn’t longer work that way.
In 2 years Apple will be launching an OLED Macbook Air and you will want to have that.

Don’t overpay for specs that you are not using. Lot of people here on MR buy an iPhone with 1TB of storage to use only 100GB or buy the latest “topped” MB Pro to sold it in the marketplace a few months later.

Look at your current Mac. In  > About this Mac > Storage you can see how much disk space are you using. Unless you are planning changing your job or doing something completely new with your machine you actual usage wouldn’t change much in the future.

And RAM, people are worried for the disk swapping eroding the lifetime of the storage…again you will use this machine for a couple of years. Even if you choose to not upgrade in 5 years your disk lifetime will be more than enough.

How RAM you current machine has? Again, unless you are doing new things, you RAM usage wouldn’t change. And if you are coming from an Intel processor the speed improvement will be fantastic, so any speed loss due to not enough RAM will be more than compensate.

 

[mikethemartian]

He's got 10 Safari tabs open and 4 or 5 apps running and everything is running fine. What a time to be alive!

This is the first computer he has owned that is able to do that? Not a very high bar.

 

[dj458]

After watching the new MacBook Air m2 in store, I still glad I bought the 14 MacBook Pro with $200 discount in 4th of July! 16gb & 512gb M2 Air=$1699! 16gb $512 gb M1. Pro =$1799($200off)! $100 for supper good display (same as $3500 Pro XDR display), better speakers, super fast M1 Pro, faster ssd, better keyboard and so on! You tell me if the $100 difference is worth the hype?

 

[Dealmans]

better keyboard

not sure about that, those with both saying the air 2 is better to type on

 

[eifelbube]

But if you are going to get 512/16gb - why not already go to the MBP?

Are you referring to the 14/16 inch M1 MBP?

 

[SouthPalito]

Thinner, lighter, better battery life, less expensive, and (supposedly) better keyboard.

At least, that's why I'm getting a MBA rather than a MBP.

I would only consider an MBA if the work was mostly web based / office suite kind of tasks or video encoding in any of the harwdware built in decoders

I was going to get an MBA back in feb, but I bit the bullet and got an MBP. I'm glad I did. The current work im doing, processing a large database (1 tb) locally spawning multiple threads and using all ram available, saturates the system completely for hours and the M1 pro runs at 90C, throttling with fans running at 3.5K rpm. This same work in an fanless MBA would bring it to its knees.

 

[Apple_Robert]

I type this comment using the M2 MBA that is a 512/8gb. I purchased this machine for email, safari, writing, planning...
I have a MB Pro and an iMac that I use for Adobe Creative Suite.

So here is my anxiety...should I have purchased the 16GB version? I know opinions are mixed, but considering my use case. I can't imagine a day when I would want to use this for Lightroom or Photoshop compared to my other machines. I know people talk about new apps being made in the days to come that will eat more and more memory, but alas!

Return and get a 16GB? or...stick with it?!?!
Thanks for your collective wisdom!

8GB will be more than adequate. No need to overbuy especially when you already have machines that are heavy lifters.

 

[dj458]

not sure about that, those with both saying the air 2 is better to type on

Those people are those people they don’t typing, they pointing(use one finger typing)! And they would say Air is better! People use two hands actually typing will like pro keyboard

 

[Apple_Robert]

Those people are those people they don’t typing, they pointing(use one finger typing)! And they would say Air is better! People use two hands actually typing will like pro keyboard

The M2 MBA is very nice to type on. It is my understanding that the new M2 has the same keyboard as the M1 MacBook pros. Not sure what you are talking about.

 

[bmot]

Thinner, lighter, better battery life, less expensive, and (supposedly) better keyboard.

At least, that's why I'm getting a MBA rather than a MBP.

Thinner, hotter and auto clocked down because fanless, smaller and inferior screen, less connectors, same price (in many countries). The why is a valid point.

 

[Lounge vibes 05]

But if you are going to get 512/16gb - why not already go to the MBP?

Because the MacBook Air is thinner, lighter, and quieter.
Also, much like the 14 inch MacBook Pro, It will undoubtedly be discounted by other retailers within a matter of months.
Sure a full-price mba and a discounted 14 are only 200 or so dollars apart but wait until the air gets discounts. It’s going to look much more appealing come the holiday season.
It’ll be more like a $400 difference

 

[SouthPalito]

I type this comment using the M2 MBA that is a 512/8gb. I purchased this machine for email, safari, writing, planning...
I have a MB Pro and an iMac that I use for Adobe Creative Suite.

So here is my anxiety...should I have purchased the 16GB version? I know opinions are mixed, but considering my use case. I can't imagine a day when I would want to use this for Lightroom or Photoshop compared to my other machines. I know people talk about new apps being made in the days to come that will eat more and more memory, but alas!

Return and get a 16GB? or...stick with it?!?!
Thanks for your collective wisdom!

For that purpose, the MBA is perfect.

 

[sideshowuniqueuser]

Not going to lie the color Midnight looks stunningly gorgeous! It's got that stealthier look.

Spacier Grey?