MacBook Air M2 Review – Before you buy…

Threat Level Midnight

Wait, it’s the same color as my shirt….nearly matches the color of my macbook hey guys this is the brand new macbook air m2.

I’ve had it for over a week now, and as you might expect, I have some ideas.

Although when I first unboxed it and started using it, a few things stood out to me.

First off, I love how we got this color-matched MagSafe cable.

It matches my shirt, I mean my laptop is very classy.

Second, this new Midnight color is beautiful, but is also an absolute fingerprint and smudge magnet, either carrying a microfiber cloth with you or going for starlight.

Third, where did the macbook air logo go, this is one of the upgrades.

Lastly, if you already own the macbook air m1, maybe take it a little more seriously, it feels very familiar and it’s more of an improvement than the revolution we’ve seen in 2020 from intel to the m1 macbook air.

Now if you’ve been living under a rock for the last month or so let me do a quick recap, first of all, if I remove my little plants let’s also bring the macbook air m1 because although this is an incredible machine, it’s a laptop in its own right, you can’t think of it as its predecessor and competitor without taking that into consideration.

What’s New

if you’re happy to pay the extra 200 or 250 pounds over the m1 air.

You can pack one of these with the new m2 chip, Faster memory, a Larger and brighter screen, a 1080p facetime camera, and a New quad speaker setup that supports Apple’s spatial audio. We now have a slightly longer life MagSafe rechargeable battery, some new colors, and considerable redesign.

It’s thinner and lighter overall, but Apple has done away with the air’s classic tapered look, so the m2 air is now closer to the macbook pro 14. It’s still a fanless design, but that means it’s completely silent.

So here are some really nice upgrades and I think this might be the ultimate thin and light laptop, but it’s also the most expensive £1250 macbook air m2 ever. As I said, the macbook air m1 is still the better choice.

To be fair, I don’t think it’s unreasonable when you consider the Windows competition and the quality of a laptop you get for that kind of money, but I think the nasty m1 air from 999 is excellent Oops, if you go for the more expensive ten core GPU option, or you start adding more memory or more storage, I honestly don’t think I would recommend because then you’ll get very close to macbook pro 14 territory, which is you give a 120-hertz pro sports screen it is mini led it supports her, so it gets brighter you get more ports, and the m1 pro is still more powerful.

1080p Webcam

Let’s put the pricing aside for now and focus on some upgrades. The key is this webcam, which was shot on the new 1080p webcam on the macbook air m2. You get this on the current m1 with 720p Air of the webcam now. It’s a very noticeable difference, especially in low light. I noticed a lot less noise, and of course, the high resolution it’s much sharper and more detailed. Just looking at the screen in my face. It seems weird, yellow, and very soft in the air of the m1 compared to the clearer and more natural m2, but with the upcoming mac os Ventura software, if you pair it with an iPhone running ios 16, you can use the new continuous cam you can use your iPhone as a webcam on top of a high-quality mac it’s a bit of a hassle, but if you’re going to make essential video regularly calls you can strap your phone to a macbook air and use a, which saves you some money.

Design & Display

Let’s talk about the design because while the new macbook air might not look futuristic like this, the DELL XPS 13 plus. Let me know if you want to drop by and check out the full video of both, but I’ll take it anyway, macbook notch.

It’s all because that keyboard, touchpad, and webcam are the best you can get right now.

So the m2 air is now a uniform 11.3 mil thick and weighs in at 1.24kg. It’s 50 grams lighter than the m1 air, so it’s a great size for students to take to the office or just around the house. Walking around is with you when you pretend to work from home.

As usual for my American friends, it is made of a piece of aluminum or aluminum, but the big question is what color will you choose, between the two new starlights or Midnight I think I am in Midnight made the right choice, although as you can see it’s blue, uh, when it hits the light, it’s not at all like a matte black, it’s like a lovely slate grey blue, beautiful, although you can also see very dirty.

The only small compromise with this design is that we get this chunky notch that protrudes from the top of the screen.

But mac os does take advantage of screen real estate. It pushes everything up, so we’re putting the mini here now so that the 13.6-inch screen is a bit bigger than the 13.3 in the m1 air, and when you watch movies and tv, It will also be black anyway, although not the same as the jet black on the mini led macbook pro screen, the physical black notch does stand out from the dark grey letterbox of that LCD screen, to be fair, the 2022 1250 lb 60 Hertz LCD non-touch screen is starting to feel a bit old now.

The combination of the slightly larger screen has increased somewhat brightness thanks to the thinner bezels and the extra space we get around the bangs, and it now supports a billion colors, so in theory, we should see smoother between colors on the screen I’ve been looking at something side-by-side, it’s hard to tell, but a pro might say

So it’s still an excellent screen. It’s color accurate, it gets bright, and I think the roughly quad HD resolution is an outstanding balance of clarity and battery life for the screen size.

But I think a high refresh mini-led OLED option when considering the windows competition, and you can now buy an Asus Vivo book with an OLED screen for 450 lbs. I do hope we see a bigger upgrade show.

Ports & Charging

We also get the same two Thunderbolt USB 4 ports, but now the 3.5 mil jack supports high impedance headphones, one of which is for audio files, and of course, we now get MagSafe, which saves one of your USB ports from charging.

The downside is if you do want a multi-monitor setup, we’re still limited to one external monitor on the macbook air. Then, you’ll have to choose the pro 14 or 16, although you can always use the iPad to output to one monitor and sidecar.

I have this guy, too, and it’s the new 35-watt dual charger, so you have two instead of one USB-C on the back to plug your iPad and your MacBook.

It supports dynamic charging, so it will charge them equally until one is done, and it will switch, and while this is 35 watts, it will charge the air at the same rate as your bundled standard 30-watt charger, which is usually 30 extra pounds optional unless you go for a higher spec model in which case this or the 67-watt fast charger is free, actually, after about half an hour it will go from zero to 15 I think I might opt for the extra USB-C port for flexibility, but glad to have that option.

The M2 air also gets an upgraded quad speaker setup, and while they sound good and are certainly one of the better speaker systems you can get on a laptop of this size, I’m a little disappointed that it’s no better than you. The m1 air has a particularly noticeable improvement to hear more bass and clarity at higher volumes, but not much, and both are blown away by the macbook pro 14.

So the speakers are a little bit better. We got new high impedance through the half mil headphone jack, but I think the most significant upgrade to the audio is that it now supports Apple’s spatial sound, so if you’re pairing it with a pair of AirPods or a recent apple, or even beat headphones if you’re watching a video or a movie, or even a facetime call that supports it, you get Dolby Atmos spatial sound, so it sounds more immersive.

M1 vs M2

Let’s talk about the headline upgrade of the new m2 chip. I think it’s fair to say that the shift from Intel to Apple’s m1 chip a few years ago was probably the most significant leap we’ve seen in laptops in the last ten years or so.

the jump up 2 m2 however is nowhere near as significant.

we’re still looking at a roughly 20 to 30 boost over the m1 which is a nice little optic

I also added a media engine, which has only been reserved for m1 pro and m1 max if you do video editing, which also significantly impacts performance.

But other than that, reduce export or render time by a few minutes. There is nothing the m2 air can do that the m1 air can’t, and if you’re concerned about performance, maybe you’re considering buying a more powerful 10-core GPU or one with up to 24 gigs of Unified memory. If these performance issues are problematic in your brain again, this is not the one you get the m1 pro in 14 out of 16.

So here are some of my benchmark results. We only saw an improvement of between 7 and 18 in both tests. However, traditional benchmarks don’t paint the complete picture of faster neural processing media engines High Bandwidth Unified Memory All Apple Stuff.

Introducing the Premiere Pro Puget test, the m2 scored 35 higher, and in my 5-minute 4k h264 export test, the m2 shaved two and a half minutes faster, making it about 30 faster.

For lightroom, with my photo export test, it was over 30 fps faster than the shadow of the tomb raider. It even played at 42 fps, so if I can call them regular games, they definitely play better on m2, but you’re still limited by what’s available on the mac, so really your best bet.

For gaming, it is now possible to use GeForce or Xbox to dive into an apple arcade or stream, pair the controller, make sure you have a fast internet connection, and stay away from you.

Daily use application load time desktop use, you know standard stuff there is nothing really between them, but if you push it more challenging in more demanding apps, you will see a small but obvious benefit of m2, and I haven’t had the past at least so far I’ve had a few out of memory popups on the m1, so I think you’re better off sticking to eight gigs.

M2 is a powerful laptop for its size, and of course, being fanless, it doesn’t make a noise at all, although I did not find it got pretty warm underneath when I was rendering or gaming. The real surprise for me was that despite the bigger screen despite that extra 25 increase in performance

Battery

I also got longer batteries. Even apple says they should be about the same between m1 and m2 air. According to them, only m2 pro 13 can last a few hours.

Well, I can tell you that 5 hours of youtube on safari’s m2 air uses 35 batteries at 50 brightness which means 15 hours should be possible.

But I can also tell you that in my slightly more realistic rundown test of the youtube, premiere file cut, lightroom site, google docs, apple tv facetime. The m1 air lasted 8 hours 50, and the m2 air lasted 10 hours 15 hours.

When m1 dies, m2 has ten batteries left. You can spend about an hour more on the m2 than the m1, so while the m2 is still based on the same 5nm architecture, obviously those efficiency improvements uh faster-unified memory and all of this comes together, and we’re getting more and more. Well, more quickly – durable laptops are brighter, have a slightly larger screen, and aren’t too shabby.

Wrap up

Okay, so let’s wrap this up, and as I said at the beginning, if you do already own an m1 air, you do not need to buy this.

But if you want a new thin and light laptop for emailing Netflix and a better air experience for yourself, buy the new macbook air m2. You won’t be disappointed. It is an excellent laptop.

But personally, I wouldn’t pay extra for more ram or a higher calling GPU, I know I’ll keep doing it, but the 14″ pro makes more sense.

What about the new pro 13 with the m2? Uh, for a hundred quid more, you can get the macbook pro 13 m2 but it’s the old design it still has a touch bar, and it’s got the rubbish webcam. I wouldn’t really recommend it in its favor. It has a fan, so you’ll get a slightly better-sustained performance. Also, the apple stage should have a little bit longer battery life, but this already lasts forever, anyway.

So outside of a lovely bunch of people who want an old macbook with a touch bar and have to have a fan, no one should consider a 13″ m2, but if you’re considering an upgrade, what about you? Your heart is on the new m2, or you’re going to save a few pounds with the m1, or pay a little more for the 14, or none of the above.

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Title: MacBook Air M2 Review – Before you buy…