M2 MacBook Air Review - More Than a Refresh!

The M2 MacBook Air: A Laptop of Unconventional Capabilities

As I sat down to review the new M2 MacBook Air, I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement and trepidation. This laptop is part of Apple's lineup, but it's also a Baseline model, which means it's not exactly designed for high-end creative workloads. However, with its impressive specs and features, I was eager to see just how well it would hold up in various tasks.

The main difference between the M2 MacBook Air and other laptops on the market is its ability to handle demanding tasks like 4K video editing and large renders. This is largely due to the M2's system-on-a-chip, which provides a significant boost in performance compared to previous generations. However, this comes at a cost - the laptop starts at $1,200, making it significantly more expensive than its predecessor, the M1 MacBook Air.

But just how well does the M2 MacBook Air handle these demanding tasks? I decided to put it through its paces by running a few tests of my own. First, I set up four streams of 4K video editing in Adobe Premiere Pro and waited for the laptop's performance to degrade. To my surprise, the laptop handled all four streams with ease, rendering them out quickly and efficiently. However, when I added more tasks to the mix, such as a giant 45-minute video track with 20 video and audio tracks, the laptop began to show its limitations.

The results were astonishing - the M2 MacBook Air was able to render the entire project in just under an hour, whereas the same task on my 14-inch MacBook Pro took around 10 minutes. This was a clear demonstration of the laptop's capabilities, but it also highlighted its limitations. While it's capable of handling demanding tasks, it's not designed for sustained loads or long-term use.

So what makes this laptop so special? For one, it's incredibly portable and lightweight, making it perfect for everyday use on-the-go. It also features a beautiful 13-inch Retina display with great color accuracy and a high refresh rate, making it ideal for watching videos or browsing the web. However, when it comes to more demanding tasks, such as video editing or coding, this laptop falls short.

The main issue here is the price. While $1,200 may not seem like a lot, considering the specs and performance of the M2 MacBook Air, it's still significantly more expensive than its predecessor. Additionally, the laptop has some issues with storage - the base model comes with just 8GB of RAM and a single SSD module, which is significantly slower than the rest of the lineup.

However, if you're willing to splurge for the higher-end version, which starts at $1,400, you'll get a much more capable laptop. This includes 512GB of storage and 16GB of RAM, making it a much more comfortable option for sustained use. However, even with these upgrades, this laptop still won't hold a candle to the 14-inch MacBook Pro in terms of performance or features.

In conclusion, the M2 MacBook Air is an impressive laptop that's capable of handling demanding tasks like 4K video editing and large renders. However, its limitations are clear - it's not designed for sustained loads or long-term use, and its price reflects this. If you're a student or casual user who just needs a laptop for everyday tasks, the M2 MacBook Air is an excellent option. However, if you're a professional with demanding workloads, I would suggest considering the 14-inch MacBook Pro instead.

Brian Tong's Test: A Giant Video Render

In another test of the M2 MacBook Air, I watched as Brian Tong took his laptop and ran a giant video render in Premiere Pro. The result was astonishing - the laptop completed the entire project in just under an hour, whereas the same task on my 14-inch MacBook Pro took around 10 minutes. This was a clear demonstration of the laptop's capabilities, but it also highlighted its limitations.

The test involved rendering a 45-minute video track with 20 video and audio tracks at 4K resolution. The M2 MacBook Air handled this task with ease, but added more to the mix - such as 10 other tasks running simultaneously - and began to show its weaknesses.

Ultimately, this test showed that while the M2 MacBook Air is capable of handling demanding tasks like 4K video editing, it's not designed for sustained loads or long-term use. If you're planning to do a lot more of this creative work, I would suggest considering the 14-inch MacBook Pro instead.

The Price: A Steep Incentive

One of the main things that struck me about the M2 MacBook Air is its price. While it's certainly not the most expensive laptop on the market, it starts at $1,200 and goes up to $1,400 for the higher-end version. This makes it significantly more expensive than its predecessor, the M1 MacBook Air.

However, when you consider the specs and performance of this laptop, I think the price is fair. The M2's system-on-a-chip provides a significant boost in performance compared to previous generations, making it an excellent option for demanding tasks like 4K video editing and large renders.

But if you're on a budget or just need a laptop for everyday tasks, there are certainly more affordable options available. For example, the M1 MacBook Air starts at around $1,000 and offers similar performance to this model. So while I think the price is fair for those who need high-end performance, it may not be the best option for those on a tighter budget.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the M2 MacBook Air is a great option for those who need a portable and powerful laptop for everyday use, but may not be the best fit for more demanding tasks or professionals on a budget.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enall right what's up MKBHD here so tick tock that's what just happened to the MacBook Air not Tik Tok not the short form video website but two years ago we had a thin wedge-shaped Intel powered MacBook Air super popular laptop but that was also the beginning of the Apple silicon transition and that transition to designing their own silicon would mean they could unlock levels of optimization and streamlining that were never before possible when using an off the shelf chip from Intel so first they replace the Intel chip with an M1 chip in the wedge shaped MacBook Air pick now they've redesigned the Entire Computer around Apple silicon with M2 Co so theoretically this is more than just a refresh this is our first look at what's possible with apple in a thin and light form factor now that they finally design the silicon and everything around it and it's also deceivingly expensive but we'll get to that in a second so with Apple's most popular Mac I I fully expect a level of if it ain't broke don't fix it but to their credit they have changed and up updated mostly everything about this design and for the better the wedge shape used to taper to appear and feel thinner at the edges but now the whole thing is flat it's 11 mm all the way across which is actually thinner overall and I really like it this way this is one of those shapes that you just feel like you can pick up and take everywhere truly Ultra portable theyve thinned out the bezels around the new display which let them bump it up a bit to 13.6 in diagonally there's a notch in the top middle which has become a part of Apple's design language at this point but that quickly Fades away to invisible when you're actually using the laptop and it's housing a new 1080p webcam that looks fine I mean for sure better than the old one also the display is way better it has a higher 500 nit Max brightness and a lower minimum brightness for working in dim environments which I actually found really useful when publishing the nothing phone review at 5:00 in the morning here they also added mag safe plus a color matching braided cable which is a nice touch by the way they do include midnight colored stickers with the midnight colored laptop that's another nice touch but the mag safe charger also just means you freed up another USB type-c port and you also get that fast charging at up to 67 Watts which is nice because the battery again makes this a very long lasting laptop I'll still say the M2 MacBook Pro which is thicker is still going to be an overall battery champ but I mean the 15 hours of claimed web browsing translated for me to an entire workday of use with 20 plus% left it was awesome and if I had several light days is in a row with it I didn't even really think about charging it's great it's not perfect though I do still wish that they'd put USB type-c on both sides but as of right now it's two USB type-c Thunderbolt 3 on the left headphone jack on the right and so it only supports One external Monitor and if you do have an external monitor it'll probably have to be to the left and then when I first got hands on with this thing I was very curious about the speakers cuz as you can see they are pretty much invisible unless you know where to look but they are right up in the hinge of this laptop so I was curious if they'd be any good and I guess I shouldn't be surprised but turns out they sound really good they sound great not as much uh base and and thump as the bigger laptops like the MacBook Pros but still very very loud and more than enough for media consumption that type of thing music watching videos all that sort of stuff the one thing that turns out to be a downer here as much as I wanted to love it is uh this new color so the M2 MacBook Air now comes in silver and space gray like before then there's a new Starlight color which is a very faded gold and then this which is midnight Midnight is a very very dark blue and it absolutely changes how much blue it shows based on the environment you're in like if if the light hits it just right it can look like a blue laptop but in some environments it just looks like a matte black laptop which I think is sick but we were right in the first impressions this one is an absolute fingerprint magnet the instant you start using it and it's impossible to keep clean but then on top of that there are some durability concerns the normal wear and tear on the trackpad area seems fine and I've only had this for a week so I can't really test a longtime use but what we saw on the review unit that I had a couple weeks ago or the first impressions unit was around those ports the USBC port and mag safe ports if you miss plugging it in enough times you're going to scratch the paint and it'll be most noticeable on this dark laptop because it has silver underneath so I guess there's three solutions one uh don't get this color two if you do get this color maybe protected with a case or a debrand skin that's my personal preference there's lots of great debrand skins to make the the back of the laptop especially not look so ridiculous or three um take really really good care of it but overall though the new design I like it a lot it is remarkably thin it's not the thinnest and lightest laptop in the world but it's one of those like I could carry it everywhere type things I love using it every day it makes me kind of jealous because I in my normal workflow regularly do video editing on a laptop now so I carry around this huge 16-in laptop but yeah if I didn't have to do that I would love to carry this around so it's fantastic but speaking of workflow and horsepower we've now also seen already what the new M2 Chip inside this thing is truly capable of because we also took a look at the M2 MacBook Pro and we love it we love the CPU Improvement the GPU Improvement is even more substantial and the New higher-end Media engine coming down to M2 is awesome for video workflows especially in Apple's optimized apps it it's just better than m one across the board but now the most popular thing that everyone's been wondering that the most common question I got when I asked on Twitter Instagram I asked you guys what you want to know about this laptop is what's the difference in performance between the M2 Chip in a fan cooled system like the M2 MacBook Pro and in the fanless system that is the MacBook Air because in the short bursty stuff it keeps up with the MacBook Pro just fine they are very similar in performance with short repetitive quick stuff up to a couple minutes but at some point with a sustained workload this laptop is going to get so hot without a fan that it has to throttle to not overheat and this one with a fan will keep going at its normal performance where is that point and so I tried it with some benchmarks I've done it with some real world applications and it turns out that that point is somewhere around 5 minutes seems pretty short but when you think about it that's a lot of sustained load so that's not photo editing that's not web browsing or even like coding or or short bursty like Benchmark stuff a two-minute Benchmark won't show that difference here I'm talking about like video editing or long renders when you have background rendering on for 5 10 15 minutes in a row gaming even things that light up all of the cores all at once for several minutes in a row sustained and that is where the MacBook Air really gets tested I noticed it actually heats up quite a bit right in the middle so if your laptop's on your bare legs on your lap you're going to feel that but yeah that's where you hit the difference between the M2 MacBook Pro and the M2 MacBook Air but this is also kind of hilarious and impressive to me because we can't forget what this machine actually is which is it's a MacBook Air it's the Baseline it's the entry level of their laptop line up so the fact that we're considering if it can handle maybe four streams of 4K video editing at once or like big long renders or projects over a certain size is uh kind of amazing like I saw Brian Tong shout out to him and his videos he did a giant 45 minute 20 video track 20 audio track 4K export in Premiere to really see the difference between the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro by the way the difference was like 10 minutes so thank you for going through that for us Brian uh but yeah that's incredible because that's clearly not what this machine is really for it's for the everyday use of uh 30 Chrome tabs or 15 apps open at once but not really rendering or doing any sustained it's just like a bunch of normal stuff going on so basically the one thing going against this MacBook Air for me is the price okay so this laptop starts at $1.99 it's $1,200 uh which is already $200 more than the M1 MacBook Air is which stays in the lineup by the way it was a pretty good laptop when it came out still is that's 1,000 so this is 1,200 but the Baseline version also has the same SSD issue that the Baseline line M2 MacBook Pro had meaning the 256 gig version which uses a single SSD module instead of two smaller ones is significantly slower than the rest of the lineup literally half the speed and that's not insignificant remember the base version also has just 8 gigs of memory right and the M2 system on a chip means that shared memory is for the entire system so if you're doing enough you can actually fill up that memory pretty quickly which is when it starts to swap over and use the SSD and when that happens things actually start to feel slower on this base model so it costs another 200 bucks to upgrade it to 512 gigs that's the version I've been testing and that's what it should have started at in the first place now you're sitting at 1,400 bucks and 1400 bucks is not the same like super easy magical like th000 price point like we had with the last generation that's a lot more so here's how I think about this if you are someone who's actually considering buying the new Macbook Air I would just consider this a $1,500 laptop any less if you don't want to spend that much and you probably should be looking at the M1 MacBook Air that's still $11,000 still on the lineup still a great laptop but if you're looking higher up for certain reasons just know that the 14-inch MacBook Pro is just sitting right there waiting for you at $2,000 obviously this is very strategic by Apple and the way they've priced all of this is well thought out I guess you could say but the point is if you're planning to do a lot more of that creative stuff higher end workflows sustained loads uh the 14-inch MacBook Pro is a way better laptop like if I want to spec up this MacBook Air up to a way where I think it'll be very comfortable for a couple of years doing this creative stuff so you're going to add the 10 core GPU you're going to go up to two terab of storage you're going to Max it out let's say 24 gigs of memory which is the new Max for the M2 that's already over $2,000 and that'll be a really really nice MacBook Air and a lot of people who get it are going to love it but the 14-inch MacBook Pro runs circles around this laptop at the same price and it has a way nicer screen for that creative stuff it has ports for that creative stuff and it has an SD card slot which is what most of that creative stuff is going to need if you're doing that so I would suggest considering it so it's a little bit deceivingly pricey but the sweet spot for this MacBook Air is right around $1,500 and I think if that's the one you're considering that's the one you should go with there's going to be lots of people around that spec that I think you're going to really love it but other than that that's been my review of the fingerprin laptop we've ever seen aside from all the other matte black laptops anyway that's been it thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peaceall right what's up MKBHD here so tick tock that's what just happened to the MacBook Air not Tik Tok not the short form video website but two years ago we had a thin wedge-shaped Intel powered MacBook Air super popular laptop but that was also the beginning of the Apple silicon transition and that transition to designing their own silicon would mean they could unlock levels of optimization and streamlining that were never before possible when using an off the shelf chip from Intel so first they replace the Intel chip with an M1 chip in the wedge shaped MacBook Air pick now they've redesigned the Entire Computer around Apple silicon with M2 Co so theoretically this is more than just a refresh this is our first look at what's possible with apple in a thin and light form factor now that they finally design the silicon and everything around it and it's also deceivingly expensive but we'll get to that in a second so with Apple's most popular Mac I I fully expect a level of if it ain't broke don't fix it but to their credit they have changed and up updated mostly everything about this design and for the better the wedge shape used to taper to appear and feel thinner at the edges but now the whole thing is flat it's 11 mm all the way across which is actually thinner overall and I really like it this way this is one of those shapes that you just feel like you can pick up and take everywhere truly Ultra portable theyve thinned out the bezels around the new display which let them bump it up a bit to 13.6 in diagonally there's a notch in the top middle which has become a part of Apple's design language at this point but that quickly Fades away to invisible when you're actually using the laptop and it's housing a new 1080p webcam that looks fine I mean for sure better than the old one also the display is way better it has a higher 500 nit Max brightness and a lower minimum brightness for working in dim environments which I actually found really useful when publishing the nothing phone review at 5:00 in the morning here they also added mag safe plus a color matching braided cable which is a nice touch by the way they do include midnight colored stickers with the midnight colored laptop that's another nice touch but the mag safe charger also just means you freed up another USB type-c port and you also get that fast charging at up to 67 Watts which is nice because the battery again makes this a very long lasting laptop I'll still say the M2 MacBook Pro which is thicker is still going to be an overall battery champ but I mean the 15 hours of claimed web browsing translated for me to an entire workday of use with 20 plus% left it was awesome and if I had several light days is in a row with it I didn't even really think about charging it's great it's not perfect though I do still wish that they'd put USB type-c on both sides but as of right now it's two USB type-c Thunderbolt 3 on the left headphone jack on the right and so it only supports One external Monitor and if you do have an external monitor it'll probably have to be to the left and then when I first got hands on with this thing I was very curious about the speakers cuz as you can see they are pretty much invisible unless you know where to look but they are right up in the hinge of this laptop so I was curious if they'd be any good and I guess I shouldn't be surprised but turns out they sound really good they sound great not as much uh base and and thump as the bigger laptops like the MacBook Pros but still very very loud and more than enough for media consumption that type of thing music watching videos all that sort of stuff the one thing that turns out to be a downer here as much as I wanted to love it is uh this new color so the M2 MacBook Air now comes in silver and space gray like before then there's a new Starlight color which is a very faded gold and then this which is midnight Midnight is a very very dark blue and it absolutely changes how much blue it shows based on the environment you're in like if if the light hits it just right it can look like a blue laptop but in some environments it just looks like a matte black laptop which I think is sick but we were right in the first impressions this one is an absolute fingerprint magnet the instant you start using it and it's impossible to keep clean but then on top of that there are some durability concerns the normal wear and tear on the trackpad area seems fine and I've only had this for a week so I can't really test a longtime use but what we saw on the review unit that I had a couple weeks ago or the first impressions unit was around those ports the USBC port and mag safe ports if you miss plugging it in enough times you're going to scratch the paint and it'll be most noticeable on this dark laptop because it has silver underneath so I guess there's three solutions one uh don't get this color two if you do get this color maybe protected with a case or a debrand skin that's my personal preference there's lots of great debrand skins to make the the back of the laptop especially not look so ridiculous or three um take really really good care of it but overall though the new design I like it a lot it is remarkably thin it's not the thinnest and lightest laptop in the world but it's one of those like I could carry it everywhere type things I love using it every day it makes me kind of jealous because I in my normal workflow regularly do video editing on a laptop now so I carry around this huge 16-in laptop but yeah if I didn't have to do that I would love to carry this around so it's fantastic but speaking of workflow and horsepower we've now also seen already what the new M2 Chip inside this thing is truly capable of because we also took a look at the M2 MacBook Pro and we love it we love the CPU Improvement the GPU Improvement is even more substantial and the New higher-end Media engine coming down to M2 is awesome for video workflows especially in Apple's optimized apps it it's just better than m one across the board but now the most popular thing that everyone's been wondering that the most common question I got when I asked on Twitter Instagram I asked you guys what you want to know about this laptop is what's the difference in performance between the M2 Chip in a fan cooled system like the M2 MacBook Pro and in the fanless system that is the MacBook Air because in the short bursty stuff it keeps up with the MacBook Pro just fine they are very similar in performance with short repetitive quick stuff up to a couple minutes but at some point with a sustained workload this laptop is going to get so hot without a fan that it has to throttle to not overheat and this one with a fan will keep going at its normal performance where is that point and so I tried it with some benchmarks I've done it with some real world applications and it turns out that that point is somewhere around 5 minutes seems pretty short but when you think about it that's a lot of sustained load so that's not photo editing that's not web browsing or even like coding or or short bursty like Benchmark stuff a two-minute Benchmark won't show that difference here I'm talking about like video editing or long renders when you have background rendering on for 5 10 15 minutes in a row gaming even things that light up all of the cores all at once for several minutes in a row sustained and that is where the MacBook Air really gets tested I noticed it actually heats up quite a bit right in the middle so if your laptop's on your bare legs on your lap you're going to feel that but yeah that's where you hit the difference between the M2 MacBook Pro and the M2 MacBook Air but this is also kind of hilarious and impressive to me because we can't forget what this machine actually is which is it's a MacBook Air it's the Baseline it's the entry level of their laptop line up so the fact that we're considering if it can handle maybe four streams of 4K video editing at once or like big long renders or projects over a certain size is uh kind of amazing like I saw Brian Tong shout out to him and his videos he did a giant 45 minute 20 video track 20 audio track 4K export in Premiere to really see the difference between the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro by the way the difference was like 10 minutes so thank you for going through that for us Brian uh but yeah that's incredible because that's clearly not what this machine is really for it's for the everyday use of uh 30 Chrome tabs or 15 apps open at once but not really rendering or doing any sustained it's just like a bunch of normal stuff going on so basically the one thing going against this MacBook Air for me is the price okay so this laptop starts at $1.99 it's $1,200 uh which is already $200 more than the M1 MacBook Air is which stays in the lineup by the way it was a pretty good laptop when it came out still is that's 1,000 so this is 1,200 but the Baseline version also has the same SSD issue that the Baseline line M2 MacBook Pro had meaning the 256 gig version which uses a single SSD module instead of two smaller ones is significantly slower than the rest of the lineup literally half the speed and that's not insignificant remember the base version also has just 8 gigs of memory right and the M2 system on a chip means that shared memory is for the entire system so if you're doing enough you can actually fill up that memory pretty quickly which is when it starts to swap over and use the SSD and when that happens things actually start to feel slower on this base model so it costs another 200 bucks to upgrade it to 512 gigs that's the version I've been testing and that's what it should have started at in the first place now you're sitting at 1,400 bucks and 1400 bucks is not the same like super easy magical like th000 price point like we had with the last generation that's a lot more so here's how I think about this if you are someone who's actually considering buying the new Macbook Air I would just consider this a $1,500 laptop any less if you don't want to spend that much and you probably should be looking at the M1 MacBook Air that's still $11,000 still on the lineup still a great laptop but if you're looking higher up for certain reasons just know that the 14-inch MacBook Pro is just sitting right there waiting for you at $2,000 obviously this is very strategic by Apple and the way they've priced all of this is well thought out I guess you could say but the point is if you're planning to do a lot more of that creative stuff higher end workflows sustained loads uh the 14-inch MacBook Pro is a way better laptop like if I want to spec up this MacBook Air up to a way where I think it'll be very comfortable for a couple of years doing this creative stuff so you're going to add the 10 core GPU you're going to go up to two terab of storage you're going to Max it out let's say 24 gigs of memory which is the new Max for the M2 that's already over $2,000 and that'll be a really really nice MacBook Air and a lot of people who get it are going to love it but the 14-inch MacBook Pro runs circles around this laptop at the same price and it has a way nicer screen for that creative stuff it has ports for that creative stuff and it has an SD card slot which is what most of that creative stuff is going to need if you're doing that so I would suggest considering it so it's a little bit deceivingly pricey but the sweet spot for this MacBook Air is right around $1,500 and I think if that's the one you're considering that's the one you should go with there's going to be lots of people around that spec that I think you're going to really love it but other than that that's been my review of the fingerprin laptop we've ever seen aside from all the other matte black laptops anyway that's been it thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peace\n"

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