The New MacBook Air: A Significant Upgrade Over Its Predecessor

I just had the chance to get my hands on the new 2023 MacBook Air, and I must say that it looks better than its predecessor. The screen is still bright, but now it's a whopping 500 nits of brightness, which is a significant upgrade from the previous generation's 400 nits. This means that even in sunny conditions, the display remains clear and easy to read. One of the biggest things I loved about my previous MacBook Air was its ability to sit outside and work without too much strain on the eyes. The new model has improved brightness, which is a welcome change.

The camera is still one of my favorite features of the MacBook Air, and I'm glad that it's been kept as an option. However, with the release of macOS Ventura, Continuity Camera and iPhone will be able to offer better image quality than the built-in camera on the MacBook Air. But hey, it's nice that Apple has made some improvements to the built-in camera, even if it's not quite at the same level as the external option.

The screen is also a bit brighter, which is always a welcome change when working outside in sunny conditions. I took it for a spin on our patio and noticed a difference, especially with bright sunlight streaming in. One of the biggest things that I loved about my previous MacBook Air was its ability to sit outside and work. The new model has improved brightness, which makes it easier to use in these situations.

The audio has also seen some improvements, particularly with the addition of a headphone jack that supports high-impedance headphones. This is great news for those who want to plug in their high-end cans without having to deal with adapters. Apple has also upgraded the speakers on the new MacBook Air, moving from two small speakers to four, which should result in a more immersive audio experience. I was able to listen to some music and notice that the sound was fuller and seemed to have a slightly larger soundstage.

One of the biggest upgrades on this MacBook Air is Apple's M2 processor. The M1 was no slouch, but the M2 takes it to the next level with improved memory bandwidth, increased clock speeds, and overall performance. In Geekbench tests, the M2 scored 1898 in single-core and 8941 in multi-core, a significant improvement over the M1's 1693 and 7105 scores.

The graphics performance has also seen an upgrade, with the M2 scoring 26,123 in GPU tests, compared to the M1's 2284. However, it's worth noting that the entry-level model saw slower SSD performance, with write speeds of 1600 megabytes per second and read speeds of 1158. This is a significant decrease from the previous generation.

Overall, I'm impressed with the new MacBook Air, particularly when compared to its predecessor. The M2 processor brings significant upgrades in terms of performance and power efficiency, making it the best option for most users. With its improved display, audio, and camera capabilities, this is definitely the one to get if you're looking for a top-notch laptop experience.

Links and deals on the new MacBook Air are available in the description below. Stay tuned for more videos and reviews from AndroidOSU.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enlet's compare the new m2 macbook air against the kind of still current generation m1 macbook air welcome everybody to apple insider it is andrew here and the new m2 macbook air is finally available to own in your hands and in this video i'm going to walk you through all the differences changes and benchmarks between this new model and the prior generation m1 macbook air and there's a lot of stuff to talk about from the whole redesign to the new chip that's on the inside so stick with me let's go ahead and dive into it starting off let's look at the design because apple did redesign the macbook air for the first time in many years gone is the taper that we've had for pretty much the entirety of the macbook air's life and we've now gone to a new flat design that's very much in line with the 14 and 16 inch macbook pros the m1 macbook air came in silver space gray and gold for the m2 model apple has ditched the gold but kept silver and space gray and in place of gold apple introduced starlight as well as midnight we've seen these colors on things like the apple watch and ipads and now apple's bringing them here to the mac as i'd mentioned the new macbook air has ditched the taper from the last generation macbook air the new model has a straight body all the way across the prior model tapered from .41 centimeters all the way up to 1.61 centimeters the new model is roughly 1.3 centimeters all the way across so it's thinner than the thickest part of the prior generation macbook air but the front of it which used to be 0.1 centimeters is now a bit thicker because it has again ditched that taper but it overall feels incredibly thin and small it's kind of weird how you know in some areas it's thinner in some areas it's thicker but it feels overall thinner than the previous version it's also a little bit lighter the new macbook air weighs 1.7 pounds or sorry 2.7 pounds whereas the last generation macbook air weighed in at 2.8 pounds right next to each other it's it's really hard to tell the difference like maybe but it could just be you know a placebo effect that i just think that it's lighter and maybe you know i can or can't tell but hey i'm just happy for any decrease in weight no matter how small apple has made some small adjustments to the ports on the right hand side both the current and last generation models have a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack but the left side of the machines has changed just slightly they still had the two thunderbolt type-c ports but the new macbook air has added magsafe3 comes with a max a3 cable and apple apple even gives you the option for a dual 35 watt power adapter with two usb c ports on it or you can save with a standard 30 watt brick but it's nice to give you options but it gives you one more port on your mac because instead of having to use those usbc ports for charging you can use mag safe for charging and rely on usbc for connecting peripherals if you don't have your maxi cable around you can still always charge up via usbc which is just really handy if i could just interrupt myself for one moment i have to be our sponsor for this video jamf jamf is the de facto standard in apple mobile device management and it's trusted by more than 62 000 businesses schools and hospitals apple's exceptional hardware is only half of the equation how you secure manage and to empower your users with that technology is the other half and jamf makes that happen jamf has the ability to scale to any business whether you've got just a handful of iphones or ipads or tens of thousands of iphones ipads macs or apple tvs jamf can be your solution jamf is ready to scale to any size business whether you've got a handful of ipads or you have tens of thousands of iphones ipads macs and apple tvs jamf can be the solution recently it introduced app installers which is an automated way for it teams to update third-party mac apps when a new version is released jamp automatically sources packages and deploys the new versions ensuring users have the latest features and security patches on a personal note i've actually had the opportunity to sit down with several organizations that have rolled out jamf mdm solutions in their businesses and they have always spoken extremely highly of jam software and credited with making all of their goals a reality you can get started today and start your free trial by following the link that is down in the description or by heading to jamf.com thank you again very much to jamf for sponsoring this video both the m1 and m2 macbook airs could be outfitted with up to two terabytes of storage and they each start off with 256 gigs of storage that's still really small and i wish apple would have started off the base model at 512 gigs but alas both models are starting only at 256. the m1 macbook air started off with 8 gigs of unified memory but you could upgrade it to 16. with the m2 macbook air it still starts off at 8 gigs of unified memory but it is faster and you can outfit it with up to 16 or 24 gigs so you have a definite increase in the amount of memory supported on the m2 macbook air another big change is the screen apple has increased the screen size from 13.3 inches to 13.6 basically they increased it the size of that menu bar giving you additional screen real estate for what you're working on the minibar now sits on either side of a notch that houses the updated 1080p facetime camera i kind of like this it gives you just more screen real estate and i don't mind the notch at all for the screen dimensions it previously was 2560 by 1600 now it's 2560 by 1664. so you're getting 64 additional pixels in that menu bar area on the new macbook air as i said apple also had upgraded the facetime camera going from 720p to 1080p it definitely makes a difference here are some side-by-side photos between the two it also helps that apple has improved the isp in the m2 processor so overall image just looks better than it did on the last generation macbook air but if it's up to me i would still prefer using continuity camera and my iphone on mac os ventura when that actually ships that's still going to give you much better image quality than anything that's baked into the bezel of your mac but hey it's nice that it's upgraded for when you do have to use that built-in camera the screen's also a bit brighter too i took it outside on our patio and it's a super sunny day today and i did notice a difference one of the biggest things that i loved doing with my macbook air when i had gotten like the original one was sitting outside and working whether it was for work work or college anything like that so any additional brightness was helpful just dealing with the sun and everything like that so yeah it's going from 400 nits to 500 nits and you can tell the difference but if you're inside it's not a huge difference either way unless you're trying to crank the brightness up in a really super bright office for some reason both screens are perfectly bright and i didn't really have any complaints with the last generation macbook air if we look at audio real quick apple did upgrade the headphone jack so it's still a standard headphone jack but now it supports high impedance headphones so high-end headphones on the other hand apple improved the speakers of the machine the m1 macbook air only had two speakers inside so a single set of stereo left and right speakers the new one bakes two so two on the left and two on the right so overall listening to audio for at least a little bit here it sounds more full sounds just a little bit larger sound stage i don't know if it's much louder than the previous one but it sounds a little bit more full and i think the 3d spatial audio effects are more precise with four speakers to manipulate instead of just two it's able to get a little bit more accurate with that spatial audio 3d dolby atmos effect but it's still not as good as listening on my headphones or with a like legit dolby atmos setup the big thing to talk about is apple's m2 processor the new m2 processor upgrades many ways over the m1 now i already did a detailed video on the m1 versus the m2 so if you want all the specifics go check out that but the biggest benefits that i want to mention here is we have improvements in how much memory bandwidth there is it's going from a 7 or 8 core gpu to an 8 or 10 core gpu and even though it's still only an 8 core chip apple has increased the clock speed of those cores so it just generally feels a little snappier than the last one the m1 was no slouch and i never had issues just opening apps and using it and i don't really notice a difference in any day-to-day tasks with the m2 it still seems pretty much just as fast though i'm going to continue to do further testing over the next several days and weeks to see how much it impacts it with sustained performance especially compared to the m2 13-inch macbook pro so stay tuned for some additional benchmarking but if we look at the benchmarks that we got now in the cpu test of geekbench the m1 scored a 1693 for the single core and 71.95 for the multi-core our m2 processor which again is still just eight cores scored in 1898 and an 8941. you can see the speed improvement on the higher frequency m2 when we go to graphics the m1 scored a 2284 for its eight core gpu the higher end one and the m2 scored a 26 123 still an 8 core gpu but clearly higher performance when we go to disk speeds the m1 was getting write speeds around 2689 and the read speeds were 24 84 but the m2 we're definitely seeing slower numbers only 1600 megabytes per second in write speed and 1158 in read speeds so a big decrease in the ssd performance at least on the entry level units so that pretty much covers it there are quite a few improvements on this macbook air and honestly this is the one to get like i'll talk about more in the full review but the new m2 macbook air is the one that most people out there should be buying i love the new redesign i love the power of the m2 and i love the other improvements that apple has added here let me know what you guys think down below in the comments or on twitter at android underscore osu if you'd like to grab the new macbook air we have some links and deals already rounded up in the description down below otherwise stay tuned i got a lot more videos coming your way youlet's compare the new m2 macbook air against the kind of still current generation m1 macbook air welcome everybody to apple insider it is andrew here and the new m2 macbook air is finally available to own in your hands and in this video i'm going to walk you through all the differences changes and benchmarks between this new model and the prior generation m1 macbook air and there's a lot of stuff to talk about from the whole redesign to the new chip that's on the inside so stick with me let's go ahead and dive into it starting off let's look at the design because apple did redesign the macbook air for the first time in many years gone is the taper that we've had for pretty much the entirety of the macbook air's life and we've now gone to a new flat design that's very much in line with the 14 and 16 inch macbook pros the m1 macbook air came in silver space gray and gold for the m2 model apple has ditched the gold but kept silver and space gray and in place of gold apple introduced starlight as well as midnight we've seen these colors on things like the apple watch and ipads and now apple's bringing them here to the mac as i'd mentioned the new macbook air has ditched the taper from the last generation macbook air the new model has a straight body all the way across the prior model tapered from .41 centimeters all the way up to 1.61 centimeters the new model is roughly 1.3 centimeters all the way across so it's thinner than the thickest part of the prior generation macbook air but the front of it which used to be 0.1 centimeters is now a bit thicker because it has again ditched that taper but it overall feels incredibly thin and small it's kind of weird how you know in some areas it's thinner in some areas it's thicker but it feels overall thinner than the previous version it's also a little bit lighter the new macbook air weighs 1.7 pounds or sorry 2.7 pounds whereas the last generation macbook air weighed in at 2.8 pounds right next to each other it's it's really hard to tell the difference like maybe but it could just be you know a placebo effect that i just think that it's lighter and maybe you know i can or can't tell but hey i'm just happy for any decrease in weight no matter how small apple has made some small adjustments to the ports on the right hand side both the current and last generation models have a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack but the left side of the machines has changed just slightly they still had the two thunderbolt type-c ports but the new macbook air has added magsafe3 comes with a max a3 cable and apple apple even gives you the option for a dual 35 watt power adapter with two usb c ports on it or you can save with a standard 30 watt brick but it's nice to give you options but it gives you one more port on your mac because instead of having to use those usbc ports for charging you can use mag safe for charging and rely on usbc for connecting peripherals if you don't have your maxi cable around you can still always charge up via usbc which is just really handy if i could just interrupt myself for one moment i have to be our sponsor for this video jamf jamf is the de facto standard in apple mobile device management and it's trusted by more than 62 000 businesses schools and hospitals apple's exceptional hardware is only half of the equation how you secure manage and to empower your users with that technology is the other half and jamf makes that happen jamf has the ability to scale to any business whether you've got just a handful of iphones or ipads or tens of thousands of iphones ipads macs or apple tvs jamf can be your solution jamf is ready to scale to any size business whether you've got a handful of ipads or you have tens of thousands of iphones ipads macs and apple tvs jamf can be the solution recently it introduced app installers which is an automated way for it teams to update third-party mac apps when a new version is released jamp automatically sources packages and deploys the new versions ensuring users have the latest features and security patches on a personal note i've actually had the opportunity to sit down with several organizations that have rolled out jamf mdm solutions in their businesses and they have always spoken extremely highly of jam software and credited with making all of their goals a reality you can get started today and start your free trial by following the link that is down in the description or by heading to jamf.com thank you again very much to jamf for sponsoring this video both the m1 and m2 macbook airs could be outfitted with up to two terabytes of storage and they each start off with 256 gigs of storage that's still really small and i wish apple would have started off the base model at 512 gigs but alas both models are starting only at 256. the m1 macbook air started off with 8 gigs of unified memory but you could upgrade it to 16. with the m2 macbook air it still starts off at 8 gigs of unified memory but it is faster and you can outfit it with up to 16 or 24 gigs so you have a definite increase in the amount of memory supported on the m2 macbook air another big change is the screen apple has increased the screen size from 13.3 inches to 13.6 basically they increased it the size of that menu bar giving you additional screen real estate for what you're working on the minibar now sits on either side of a notch that houses the updated 1080p facetime camera i kind of like this it gives you just more screen real estate and i don't mind the notch at all for the screen dimensions it previously was 2560 by 1600 now it's 2560 by 1664. so you're getting 64 additional pixels in that menu bar area on the new macbook air as i said apple also had upgraded the facetime camera going from 720p to 1080p it definitely makes a difference here are some side-by-side photos between the two it also helps that apple has improved the isp in the m2 processor so overall image just looks better than it did on the last generation macbook air but if it's up to me i would still prefer using continuity camera and my iphone on mac os ventura when that actually ships that's still going to give you much better image quality than anything that's baked into the bezel of your mac but hey it's nice that it's upgraded for when you do have to use that built-in camera the screen's also a bit brighter too i took it outside on our patio and it's a super sunny day today and i did notice a difference one of the biggest things that i loved doing with my macbook air when i had gotten like the original one was sitting outside and working whether it was for work work or college anything like that so any additional brightness was helpful just dealing with the sun and everything like that so yeah it's going from 400 nits to 500 nits and you can tell the difference but if you're inside it's not a huge difference either way unless you're trying to crank the brightness up in a really super bright office for some reason both screens are perfectly bright and i didn't really have any complaints with the last generation macbook air if we look at audio real quick apple did upgrade the headphone jack so it's still a standard headphone jack but now it supports high impedance headphones so high-end headphones on the other hand apple improved the speakers of the machine the m1 macbook air only had two speakers inside so a single set of stereo left and right speakers the new one bakes two so two on the left and two on the right so overall listening to audio for at least a little bit here it sounds more full sounds just a little bit larger sound stage i don't know if it's much louder than the previous one but it sounds a little bit more full and i think the 3d spatial audio effects are more precise with four speakers to manipulate instead of just two it's able to get a little bit more accurate with that spatial audio 3d dolby atmos effect but it's still not as good as listening on my headphones or with a like legit dolby atmos setup the big thing to talk about is apple's m2 processor the new m2 processor upgrades many ways over the m1 now i already did a detailed video on the m1 versus the m2 so if you want all the specifics go check out that but the biggest benefits that i want to mention here is we have improvements in how much memory bandwidth there is it's going from a 7 or 8 core gpu to an 8 or 10 core gpu and even though it's still only an 8 core chip apple has increased the clock speed of those cores so it just generally feels a little snappier than the last one the m1 was no slouch and i never had issues just opening apps and using it and i don't really notice a difference in any day-to-day tasks with the m2 it still seems pretty much just as fast though i'm going to continue to do further testing over the next several days and weeks to see how much it impacts it with sustained performance especially compared to the m2 13-inch macbook pro so stay tuned for some additional benchmarking but if we look at the benchmarks that we got now in the cpu test of geekbench the m1 scored a 1693 for the single core and 71.95 for the multi-core our m2 processor which again is still just eight cores scored in 1898 and an 8941. you can see the speed improvement on the higher frequency m2 when we go to graphics the m1 scored a 2284 for its eight core gpu the higher end one and the m2 scored a 26 123 still an 8 core gpu but clearly higher performance when we go to disk speeds the m1 was getting write speeds around 2689 and the read speeds were 24 84 but the m2 we're definitely seeing slower numbers only 1600 megabytes per second in write speed and 1158 in read speeds so a big decrease in the ssd performance at least on the entry level units so that pretty much covers it there are quite a few improvements on this macbook air and honestly this is the one to get like i'll talk about more in the full review but the new m2 macbook air is the one that most people out there should be buying i love the new redesign i love the power of the m2 and i love the other improvements that apple has added here let me know what you guys think down below in the comments or on twitter at android underscore osu if you'd like to grab the new macbook air we have some links and deals already rounded up in the description down below otherwise stay tuned i got a lot more videos coming your way you\n"