Has anyone gotten the M2 MBA to Throttle and Lag? Doing What?

[GooseInTheCaboose]

I’m curious about the performance limitations of the new M2 Air.

Have any of you gotten it to throttle to the point of having significant UI lag?

What Sorts of things did you do to get that kind of lag? General multitasking? (Lots of tabs and documents?) Video exports?

When can lag be fixed with upgraded RAM and when do you need a Pro?

 

[bbates123]

111 views so far and no replies I think says something, especially with this crowd. Lag can always be fixed with more ram and more ssd but the vast majority of Air uses don't need it. If you're doing sustained heavy workloads like video editing longer than 5 minutes the Air probably isn't for you. If you're doing general multitasking you'll be fine. I have an Air M2 and I love it.

 

[ian87w]

The laptop was just released, and many are probably still waiting for theirs to arrive.

There are two types of issues that I have observed watching the various YouTubers.

First one, it’s thermal throttling. I’m not all surprised by this. Even the iPhone throttles, but nobody cared too much about that. The M2 would start throttling within 5 minutes of continuous max cores utilization. In reality, you won’t see this when doing regular tasks. Most tasks don’t fire up all the cores at max all at once continuously. This would only be an issue if you use the laptop for rendering long high res videos, or gaming, things that would require all the cores at max all the time. But even then, at various power level after throttling, it would still perform better than the M1 under similar stress. So thermal throttling shouldn’t be a concern imo.

Second, it’s the SSD fiasco. Note that this will only affect 256GB models. This one is more apparent, especially if you only have 8GB of RAM as you will hit the bottleneck once the system requires swap file. And it won’t take much. Maxtech has shown significant slowdowns and lag just by having Lightroom and a browser with multiple tabs open. We already observed high swap utilizations on 8GB RAM with the M1. This one, I would be concerned, especially for a $1200 laptop. Solution is easy, just get models with 512GB storage or higher. Don’t buy the 256GB model.

 

[happyslayer]

I've got the base model and to test this, I opened just about every app on it simultaneously with 20 tabs each in Chrome and Safari so Activity Monitor showed that I was using 7.28GB RAM with 1.8GB Swap. The heat stayed in the low to mid 40's C (measured with TG Pro indoors in a 76 deg F office) with no throttling and every app I switched to felt snappy with no delays in typing in Word 365, Scrivener 3, Mail, Calendar or Gmail in Chrome. Honestly, all this worry and concern over the "slow" 1500 MBs single 256GB SSD is overblown. Yes it's quite a bit slower than the previous M1 Air or the current 14" Pro (almost half the speed) but it's still not really slow. 1500 MBs is very speedy, especially when dealing with average file sizes. If you are going to be moving large, multi GB files around often, or rendering large videos, or playing demanding 3D games, maybe get the Pro. But for everyday apps, it's totally fine. I can honestly say I am very happy with my purchase.

 

[1BadManVan]

I've got the base model and to test this, I opened just about every app on it simultaneously with 20 tabs each in Chrome and Safari so Activity Monitor showed that I was using 7.28GB RAM with 1.8GB Swap. The heat stayed in the low to mid 40's C (measured with TG Pro indoors in a 76 deg F office) with no throttling and every app I switched to felt snappy with no delays in typing in Word 365, Scrivener 3, Mail, Calendar or Gmail in Chrome. Honestly, all this worry and concern over the "slow" 1500 MBs single 256GB SSD is overblown. Yes it's quite a bit slower than the previous M1 Air or the current 14" Pro (almost half the speed) but it's still not really slow. 1500 MBs is very speedy, especially when dealing with average file sizes. If you are going to be moving large, multi GB files around often, or rendering large videos, or playing demanding 3D games, maybe get the Pro. But for everyday apps, it's totally fine. I can honestly say I am very happy with my purchase.

Well the YouTubers definitely got some great clicks over it all lol. but I feel it was way overblown. I never would buy any laptop with 256gb to begin with, so I got my 1tb/16gb model on order. But glad to hear you’re having great luck with the base model. I figured it wasn’t as bad as they make it out to be