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M2 MacBook Air Reviews: 'Apple's Near-Perfect Mac'

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The new MacBook Air with the M2 chip launches this Friday. Ahead of time, the first reviews of the new MacBook Air have been shared by some media outlets and YouTube channels, providing a closer look at the redesigned notebook and its capabilities.

MacBook-Air-M2-Customer-1.jpeg

Key features of the new MacBook Air include Apple's latest M2 chip, a new design with flatter edges, a slightly larger 13.6-inch display with a notch, MagSafe charging, an upgraded 1080p camera, and new Starlight and Midnight color options alongside Silver and Space Gray. The notebook is also equipped with two Thunderbolt 3 ports and a 3.5mm headphone jack with support for high-impedance headphones.

Pricing for the new MacBook Air starts at $1,199. The notebook is available with up to 24GB of unified memory and up to a 2TB SSD.

Overall Impressions

Engadget's Devindra Hardawar said the new MacBook Air is "Apple's near-perfect Mac":
The Air is impressively thin and light, but it also has a bigger and better screen, a great set of speakers and a nifty MagSafe power adapter. And thanks to Apple's M2 chip, it's also far speedier than the last model, a computer I called "stunningly fast" just a year-and-a-half ago. Once again, Apple has set a new standard for ultraportables.
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The Verge's Dan Seifert said the new MacBook Air is "a success on virtually every level," but he said that customers looking to upgrade from an older notebook should still consider the previous MacBook Air with the M1 chip, which starts at $999:
The new MacBook Air is a success on virtually every level. It's got a better screen, thinner and lighter design, better speakers, a much-improved webcam, an excellent keyboard and trackpad, more convenient charging, and excellent build quality.

But that success comes at a cost, literally, and the performance advancements over the M1 model aren't as stark as the design and feature improvements are. The M2 Air is a better choice for the vast majority of people over the 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro model, even though the Pro has slightly better performance and longer battery life.
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Faster Performance With M2 Chip

Jason Snell shared a variety of benchmarks for the new MacBook Air in his review at Six Colors. In line with Apple's advertising, Geekbench 5 results show that the M2 chip delivers up to around 18% faster multi-core performance compared to the M1 model, while single-core performance is up to 11% faster.

Six-Colors-M2-MacBook-Air-Benchmarks.jpg

Thinner and Lighter Design

The new MacBook Air does away with the notebook's iconic wedge-shaped design in favor of a flatter design. The Verge's Dan Seifert said he is "a fan of this new design," which he described as "remarkably thin" and "extremely portable":
Yet it's remarkably thin — just a smidge over 11 millimeters — and that thinness is immediately noticeable when you open the lid and start typing on it. It's also noticed whenever you slot it into a bag or carry it around. The older MacBook Air's tapered shape had less visual weight and may look thinner, but the new model is indeed slimmer than its predecessor.

It's also slightly lighter, at 2.7 pounds vs. the older model's 2.8. That's not a huge difference, and the Air is far from the lightest computer you can buy, but it does make it extremely portable and easy to tote around wherever I need it.
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Slower SSD in Base Model

In a statement issued to The Verge, an Apple spokesperson confirmed that the base 256GB model of the new MacBook Air has a single NAND chip, which will result in slower SSD speeds in benchmark testing. Apple said real-world performance of the new MacBook Air is "even faster," but the statement does not explicitly refer to SSD speeds:
Thanks to the performance increases of M2, the new MacBook Air and the 13-inch MacBook Pro are incredibly fast, even compared to Mac laptops with the powerful M1 chip. These new systems use a new higher density NAND that delivers 256GB storage using a single chip. While benchmarks of the 256GB SSD may show a difference compared to the previous generation, the performance of these M2 based systems for real world activities are even faster.
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Last month, it was discovered that the 256GB model of the 13-inch MacBook Pro with the M2 chip has up to 50% slower SSD read speeds and up to 30% slower SSD write speeds compared to the equivalent previous-generation model in benchmarks.

The dilemma arises from the fact that Apple switched to using a single 256GB flash storage chip instead of two 128GB chips in the base models of the new MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro. Configurations equipped with 512GB of storage or more are equipped with multiple NAND chips, allowing for faster speeds in parallel.

If the fastest SSD speeds are important to your workflow, we recommend configuring the new MacBook Air with at least 512GB of storage.

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Article Link: M2 MacBook Air Reviews: 'Apple's Near-Perfect Mac'
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/review/m2-macbook-air/
Last edited:
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eilavid said:
longer sustained performance. the m2 without a fan will have to clock down eventually
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True, but I think 90% of those users should buy the 14 or 16" anyway. Especially with 16gb ram and 512gb+ storage the price difference isn't that huge. Seems like a very small niche, people who have quite a heavy workload that can't be done on the Air, but still can't afford the 14".
 
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I'm just here for the, "just stick with previous gen" comments. :)
Whatever area Apple skimps or stumbles on or changes it has suddenly becomes the most import reason why you buy a computer, now.

SSD speed > CPU performance and all other improvements.
Butterfly Keyboard > CPU performance and all other improvements.
Notch > CPU performance and all other improvements.
Corner roundness > CPU performance and all other improvements
 
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eilavid said:
longer sustained performance. the m2 without a fan will have to clock down eventually
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Eventually is a lot longer than you think, unless you're doing something really intensive.

I would regularly play WoW on my old M1 MBA at medium settings, and it would not throttle down at all (or frankly feel more than warm to the touch).

Now if I cranked the settings, yeah, I could get it to throttle, but at any settings that's a pretty heavy app.
 
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I do find the Starlight color of the M2 Air very nice, but not yellow enough for me.

Plus, I don't need another excuse to NOT sit at my desk and use my M1 iMac. Though if someday Apple released a 12" machine...
 
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antiprotest said:
Except for the absurd price, slower SSD, ugly huge notch, no FaceID, and several other things that people have mentioned, it's pretty good. I'm sure many people will be satisfied with it.
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Just going to address

ugly huge notch
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Really, you don't even notice it after about five minutes. It just becomes a part of the menu bar.
 
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bierdybard said:
Eventually is a lot longer than you think, unless you're doing something really intensive.

I would regularly play WoW on my old M1 MBA at medium settings, and it would not throttle down at all (or frankly feel more than warm to the touch).

Now if I cranked the settings, yeah, I could get it to throttle, but at any settings that's a pretty heavy app.
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It's amazing what you can do when you put your mind to it. I played retail WoW heavily on my 2015 MBA base model to an external monitor (4GB of ram). Yeah, graphics settings weren't high but I had playable FPS and did that for years, lol. H-Pally!

More on topic: These M chips are amazing and agreed, even when I'm doing everything I can, I never hear the fans on my M1 MBP.
 
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IamTimCook said:
I'm just here for the, "just stick with previous gen" comments. :)
Whatever area Apple skimps or stumbles on or changes it has suddenly becomes the most import reason why you buy a computer, now.

SSD speed > CPU performance and all other improvements.
Butterfly Keyboard > CPU performance and all other improvements.
Notch > CPU performance and all other improvements.
Corner roundness > CPU performance and all other improvements
Click to expand...
There is no reality on the face of the planet where the butterfly keyboard was ever or will be ever worth it. It was and still is the worst design Apple has ever released given the massive volume of them. I'm in IT and I have taken these things to Apple to get their free 4 year warrenty replacement on a BI-WEEKLY basis. It's insane. (No hate, seeing the butterfly keyboard just gets me kinda triggered)
 
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