The M2 MacBook Air: A Complicated Recommendation

When it comes to recommending a laptop, especially one with a hack in mind, I'm hesitant to speak to thousands of people. The M1 MacBook Air was a great device, but its limitations led me to question the value of certain configurations. Now, with the introduction of the M2 MacBook Air, I find myself in a similar predicament. The OEM recommends a single monitor setup, but many folks have purchased dual-monitor setups for their home offices. My wife uses a dual-monitor setup for her work and schooling, and I feel like it's this weird "Twitter-YouTube bubble" where everybody just gets a single gigantic monitor or an ultra-wide screen.

I consider the ability to use multiple monitors a key feature in a laptop, especially for those who need to multitask. Intel integrated graphics can handle at least two displays, but my tough graphical needs require a more powerful solution. The M2 MacBook Air's inability to handle dual monitors is a deal-breaker for me. I'm not crazy about this; I just think it's an actual purchase decider. When shopping for a new laptop, features like multiple display support should be top of mind.

The updated display on the M2 MacBook Air is one area where I've been pleased. It doesn't have the same wow factor as some of Apple's more expensive MacBooks, but from an upgrade perspective, model to model, I think this is awesome. The extra brightness makes it easier to see in mixed lighting or outside in the sun, which is a great feature for those working from home. I pined for a larger-inch MacBook a few years ago, and I feel like this is really what I was hoping for.

There's a ton of usable screen real estate on the M2 MacBook Air, especially when compared to some of Apple's more compact devices. It's easy to see how this could be mistaken for a tablet, but it's still a laptop that can handle demanding tasks. The notch exists, and while I don't want to focus too much on it, it's become an aspect of the device that some users may find annoying.

The camera on the M2 MacBook Air is another area where Apple has improved slightly. It's not great, but it's better than the M1 model. However, I do consider this a bit late in the game for Apple to be updating their cameras. They should have gotten to this sooner, especially since high-quality cameras are becoming increasingly important for those working from home.

The speakers on the M2 MacBook Air are okay, and they're not as bad as some of Apple's other devices. However, they don't sound as good as the bigger MacBooks. Battery life remains a highlight of the device, with Apple claiming up to 18 hours of usage. I believe this number holds true, even two years after its release.

So, do I recommend the M2 MacBook Air? It depends on your priorities and budget. If you're looking for the cheapest MacBook option, which is why many folks buy the M1 Air, there's a refurbished version available for almost $400 less. However, if you want to start upgrading this laptop to make it more usable, you'll likely need to bump into the refreshed MacBook Pro 14-inch model.

Personally, I'd be willing to make that lead in favor of the 14-inch Pro due to its superior performance and features. The M2 MacBook Air is an awesome laptop, but it's hard for me to give it the same blanket recommendation as the M1 model. If you're considering purchasing this device, I recommend doing your research and weighing your options carefully.

To help with that, check out my favorite accessories for the M2 MacBook Air by clicking here.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: eni've spent the past week using the brand new m2 macbook air as my only computer and team i gotta tell you i have some serious opinions about it first off the version of the macbook that i've been using is this one my cheapest base model that i personally purchased apple let me borrow a macbook air but i've only used that in the unboxing video everything i've actually done with an m2 macbook air has been on this midnight 256 gigabyte model the only exception being the b-roll for this video is on the starlight version because as we'll see there's some things i don't like about this one and let's start there if this is your first time hearing about the m2 macbook air let's quickly cover the specs and ordering options because there is a bit more variety this year as opposed to the m1 macbook air and if you want to skip this you can go to this time stamp the base model version comes in at 11.99 for that money you'll get the eight core m2 processor eight core gpu eight gigabytes of unified memory and a 256 gigabyte solid state drive you can add more memory storage and even add two cores to the gpu all for around a hundred dollars a pop to 200 a pop you can take this all the way up to 24 gigabytes of unified memory and a two terabyte solid state drive on top of that 10 core gpu and that maxed out version will cost 24.99 and that's pretty darn pricey especially when you start considering that you're now in the macbook pro 14 scenario for 23.99 you could get a macbook pro 14 with 10 core m1 pro processor 14 core gpu one terabyte of storage and 16 gigabytes of unified memory there is a bit of size difference between the two machines and here it is this is the macbook pro 14 and yes it is obviously bigger and bulkier but in reality i thought there would be a bigger difference between the two yes the 14 is slightly bigger and you can feel that extra heft if you hold them both at the same time but when do you hold two computers at the same time i mean you're not really going to be able to tell the difference if it's in a backpack and if you have it on a desk why would you care about the weight so you've really got to love the aesthetics of this specific macbook air to want to get one and frankly so that i don't leave this as just implied the aesthetics are amazing and that's actually the first thing that i've liked in the past week of use i absolutely love how this laptop looks and feels to use i can't remember a laptop of this size that has felt more i don't know how to say but substantial in recent memory i've used razer blade 13s and 14s dell xps other apple laptops and a whole host of random dell latitudes for my day job this computer is awesome to use i don't know that i would say that it's been fun to use because who has fun at work but physically speaking there is almost nothing that i dislike this looks strikingly like a mini version of those latest m1 pros 14 and 16s it's a darn tiny thing that fits in roughly the same spaces as a 12.9 inch ipad pro and to have a full laptop in that kind of a spot with this kind of capabilities that's really crazy to think about i believe apple's done a fantastic job in redesigning the air to meet their current design standard this seamlessly fits into the look of the new iphone ipads and macs but lovefest aside when it comes to the finish and design there is something that i don't like i really don't like the midnight finish i love how it looks but because of how to track fingerprint smudges it's kinda meh it's not razer blade bad i think those razer laptops are the standard not in a good way for how bad a piece of technology can go from looking great to downright messy just from picking it up but the midnight finish is bad enough to notice and easily the worst i've ever seen on an apple computer i mean look at it right here we only just barely touched this thing and you can already see the fingerprints all over this it's so bad that i'll probably return this specific laptop to get a starlight version again side note the macbook air apple is letting me borrow is that color and i think it looks fantastic and look right now hold on we gotta gotta wipe this off i brought a microfiber cloth with me because i knew we'd have to clean this off in use and i'm sad here because i really wanted to like the darker more pro looking body but even on the best days i have oily skin and if something shows fingerprints i will be leaving my mark and i don't want that in a laptop the next thing that i've liked has been the power the m2 is absolutely an upgrade over the m1 in a lot of ways number one being it's straight up better in single and multi-core performance while having the same number and array of cores and that's pretty impressive stuff being able to go from an already impressive score to even better but there are other improvements that make the m2 way better for me personally that i've really liked the media encoder that's been borrowed from those higher end m1 pro processors lets the m2 macbook air punch way above its weight class in the video editing department yes i know not everybody is a content creator but i gary know two things project management and creating youtube videos and i've had enough computer processing power for project management for like 20 years now a video oriented around me doing project management work would just be me sitting at a desk on teams for eight hours a day that's boring seriously this and the m2 macbook pro 13 are easily able to handle even the worst kinds of video codecs that i use on a near-daily basis and there really isn't anything else in the market that can do what this can do at this size and price point i've said this before but for the video files and codecs that i use on the everyday dad and in other projects these bring my very expensive windows pc to a halt i'm pointing to it through that wall right there my 5950x and 3080 ti build cannot run these files as seamlessly as this 1200 laptop i'm sorry but i continue to be impressed by that because of that encoder you don't even really tax the system at all when in use you never really have to worry about the thermal issues when editing or most importantly when rendering for gaming i don't really play too many games but what i do play has been fine for example i mainly play wow classic and an assortment of roguelike indie games all of which were handled perfectly well by the m2 and honestly they were handled perfectly fine by the m1 as well the laptop did get hot during my wow gaming session but were really starting to cross into the not intended use case for a computer that only has a passive cooling system if gaming is your priority i would say don't get a mac but if you insist i would say get a mac with a fan will the computer thermally throttle over the last week i've seen like a thousand youtube videos talking about this in my experience yes and no it's actually a weird scenario when running cinebench which if you don't know is a test that can max out the cpu for the duration of its multi-core test when you do this you can watch the score go lower each pass with significant score differences between the different 10 minute sessions however when having the system's thermal log up there is no notification of a thermal issue which is really weird i used to see those thermal issue notifications quite often during throttling on the older intel macbooks so it's clear the system is slowing down as the computer warms up but is it doing it before actually hitting some kind of a thermal cap that triggers a response to keep from technically thermally throttling to protect the insides i don't know i'm not an engineer from apple's soc team what i can say definitively though is if you run very strenuous benchmarks back to back the system will score lower over time are you somebody that runs extensive benchmarks as your day job okay that's probably important to you for the rest of us the good news is that in all of my regular use situations and even in my video editing tasks the cpu never even came close to hitting the cap you have to try to make this thing throttle to get it to actually throttle and while we're on the controversy train here's something that i neither like nor dislike but if i don't mention it i'll get called a shill but because i'm not threatening to throw my laptop in the garbage can right now i'm gonna get called a shill anyway but the ssd situation in the m1 macbooks at the cheapest 256 gigabyte model you had two 128 chips providing that 256 gigabytes of storage on the m2 model apple has included a single 256 gigabyte chip for whatever reason apparently this will lead to about a 40 slower read and write speed between the generations i say apparently because personally when i run the test between my m1 air and my m2 air there really isn't a difference however i am willing to accept that my m1 air might have a problem because there have been other folks the internet that have seen this happen but personally i can't recreate this no matter how hard i try what i'm not gonna say is that you won't notice a difference i can't even get the difference to show up so i'm not gonna talk down to you and tell you not to worry if ssd speed is your number one priority you should at least look at the 512 gigabyte model i say i neither like or dislike this because for me personally it hasn't been an issue at all even on my more expensive macs that have way faster solid state drives i do everything in my professional life from an external server that external server has literally half the read and write speeds of the internal ssds on the m2 macbook air no joke half and it's never held me back the reason the cheapest macbook air is going to feel sluggish with a lot of things open is because of that eight gigabytes of unified memory mac os even at the best of times takes up about four gigabytes of active memory while typing the script for this video i checked my memory usage and just from having google docs and the mac os email client open i'm running at six gigabytes i'm even willing to say sure maybe the swap memory will be slightly slower because of the slower solids i drive hey video editing gary here and i want to i want to highlight this point because it's really important nobody really knows how the swap memory works yes we know that swap memory is essentially virtual memory and it uses your storage system as kind of a fake active memory like computers have been doing that forever but we don't know technically how apple does it because if you try to find a white paper or some other kind of technical documentation at least in my research i can't find it so anybody that says they know exactly how swap memory works and how a slower ssd would affect that i mean a lot of that is just guesswork if you are at apple and you know this stuff please let me know in the comments below i would love to get the white paper for how swap memory works okay i gotta i gotta get back to editing this you you get back to watching it but using swap memory is not how the system wants to work that's not how any computer wants to work they want to use the unified memory or ram or whatever their active memory is called so if you are somebody that needs a ton of tabs open or a ton of programs open at once you shouldn't be getting eight gigabytes of unified memory or eight gigabytes of ram on any computer that's not an m2 problem that's a computer problem swap memory is a band-aid to keep your computer operating smoothly if you the user bought too little for your intended purposes it's the icing on a cake it's not the whole cake okay back to things that aren't middle gray another thing that i've really liked has been the keyboard i noticed on twitter that this had been getting flack for other sets of reasons but i found the keyboard to be pretty darn good i like that they increased the size of the actual keyboard so you get a full size escape key and full size function keys this time around i've typed several scripts from the laptop's keyboard including this one and while i am kind of a mechanical keyboard snap at my work desk for a laptop keyboard i think these feel great to type with something that i don't think gets brought up enough in apple laptop videos is these keyboards might not be the snappiest i mean it's not like they have holy panda switches in them or anything but they are incredibly easy to get into a typing rhythm and i find that to be the most important aspect of any keyboard even if i love my fancy keycaps and the clack of a good tactile switch if it's sluggish or awkward to type and get going i just won't use that big mechanical keyboard i was worried about the uniformity of the body of the laptop compared to the previous air's wedge shape but because of how thin this laptop is i haven't had a single problem with the edges i absolutely dislike typing on my macbook pro 16 for long periods of time because the edge of the laptop really just digs into my forearms but in a few several hour typing sessions on the m2 air i haven't even gotten a single mark this is very comfortable to type with okay let's get into something that i don't dislike but i actively hate this computer has thunderbolt 3 where the pro computers the 14s and the 16s all have thunderbolt 4. when it comes to transfer speeds of both data and power you won't notice much of a difference and i hate this because it means the m2 standard much like the m1 standard will only export out to a single display i've been complaining about this for two years now since the original m1s came out and i get a ton of pushback for this but in real usable scenarios again let's put on my project manager hat most offices that i've been to have a dual screen setup yes i know there are hacks to get additional displays but i can't i can't make a recommendation to thousands of people with a hack in mind especially when i've seen things that the hacks can cause problems with computers so if the oem says one monitor i'm gonna say one monitor most of the folks that i know during and some still are working from home they purchased two monitor setups for their home offices to be more like our work offices my wife today uses a dual monitor setup for her work and for her schooling i feel like it's this weird twitter youtube bubble where everybody just gets a single gigantic monitor or an ultra wide and they think that that's the representative use sure apple doesn't market the m2 macbook air as a quote-unquote pro laptop but why are you buying this if not for work plus there are windows laptops that cost half as much that do at least dual displays out intel integrated graphics can handle at least two displays but this computer that easily handles my tough graphical needs can't do it i consider that to be an actual purchase decider right there no matter how many folks comment or tweet at me to tell me that i'm crazy look i know i'm crazy but i'm not crazy about this the next major thing that i've liked has been the updated display it doesn't have the same kind of wow factors we're used to from the legit mind-boggling displays on those bigger and more expensive macbooks but from an upgrade perspective model to model i think this is awesome when i pined for a larger inch macbook a few years ago i think this is really what i was hoping for there is a ton of usable screen real estate especially for a computer that could easily be mistaken for a tablet also that extra brightness makes it so much easier to see in mixed lighting or outside in the sun and that's really nice because that was a pretty big thing that i did not like from the 400 nit panel that the m1 macbook air has sure the notch exists but i feel like we don't have to mention that this time around because everybody is so angry about the ssds nobody had the time to make a click bait notch video to rile everybody up so hey silver linings and rain clouds right the camera is also something that i neither liked nor disliked it just needed to be updated i do consider apple kind of late to the game here by only now starting to update these and this one's fine but it's not even that great either and it shouldn't take until 2022 to get an updated camera in here they start you got to start focusing more on these because it is important for folks working from home the speakers they're okay maybe they are better than the m1 but i'm not really an audiophile they sound perfectly good to me but they definitely don't sound as good as the bigger macbooks battery life has also continued to be great 18 hours apple says and i believe them all of the greatness we talked about earlier with power and usability you get all of that for 18 hours without being plugged into the wall i'm still impressed by that number two years later if you aren't i don't know what else to tell you that's like the single thing that makes the new m1 computer just so valuable is you don't even really need to think about the battery life anymore all right all that aside do i recommend the m2 macbook air i don't know like i said earlier i feel like this sits in a weird spot in the apple lineup if you are looking for the cheapest macbook which is why folks generally buy the macbook air apple still sells the m1 air for almost 400 less if you buy refurbished that's not peanuts or a small amount of money that's like one third less the cost for functionally almost the same thing i think from a real practical noticeable difference you are paying for the screen the media encoder and i guess magsafe charging is that worth 400 to you maybe but if you do want to start upgrading this thing to make it more usable you're again going to bump into that refurbished or even brand new macbook pro 14 which is absolutely superior in every way minus size and battery life but will you actually notice the size difference in use and will you notice a one hour battery life difference again maybe but there are so many benefits for the 14 inch personally i would be willing to make that lead i don't want to take anything away from the m2 macbook air this is an awesome laptop and i've had a ton of fun using it and i will continue using it over the coming months but it's just kind of hard to give it the same blanket recommendation that i gave the m1 macbook air and if you like this video hit that subscribe button then click here to see all of my favorite accessories for the m2 macbook air click click click click click click thanks for watchingi've spent the past week using the brand new m2 macbook air as my only computer and team i gotta tell you i have some serious opinions about it first off the version of the macbook that i've been using is this one my cheapest base model that i personally purchased apple let me borrow a macbook air but i've only used that in the unboxing video everything i've actually done with an m2 macbook air has been on this midnight 256 gigabyte model the only exception being the b-roll for this video is on the starlight version because as we'll see there's some things i don't like about this one and let's start there if this is your first time hearing about the m2 macbook air let's quickly cover the specs and ordering options because there is a bit more variety this year as opposed to the m1 macbook air and if you want to skip this you can go to this time stamp the base model version comes in at 11.99 for that money you'll get the eight core m2 processor eight core gpu eight gigabytes of unified memory and a 256 gigabyte solid state drive you can add more memory storage and even add two cores to the gpu all for around a hundred dollars a pop to 200 a pop you can take this all the way up to 24 gigabytes of unified memory and a two terabyte solid state drive on top of that 10 core gpu and that maxed out version will cost 24.99 and that's pretty darn pricey especially when you start considering that you're now in the macbook pro 14 scenario for 23.99 you could get a macbook pro 14 with 10 core m1 pro processor 14 core gpu one terabyte of storage and 16 gigabytes of unified memory there is a bit of size difference between the two machines and here it is this is the macbook pro 14 and yes it is obviously bigger and bulkier but in reality i thought there would be a bigger difference between the two yes the 14 is slightly bigger and you can feel that extra heft if you hold them both at the same time but when do you hold two computers at the same time i mean you're not really going to be able to tell the difference if it's in a backpack and if you have it on a desk why would you care about the weight so you've really got to love the aesthetics of this specific macbook air to want to get one and frankly so that i don't leave this as just implied the aesthetics are amazing and that's actually the first thing that i've liked in the past week of use i absolutely love how this laptop looks and feels to use i can't remember a laptop of this size that has felt more i don't know how to say but substantial in recent memory i've used razer blade 13s and 14s dell xps other apple laptops and a whole host of random dell latitudes for my day job this computer is awesome to use i don't know that i would say that it's been fun to use because who has fun at work but physically speaking there is almost nothing that i dislike this looks strikingly like a mini version of those latest m1 pros 14 and 16s it's a darn tiny thing that fits in roughly the same spaces as a 12.9 inch ipad pro and to have a full laptop in that kind of a spot with this kind of capabilities that's really crazy to think about i believe apple's done a fantastic job in redesigning the air to meet their current design standard this seamlessly fits into the look of the new iphone ipads and macs but lovefest aside when it comes to the finish and design there is something that i don't like i really don't like the midnight finish i love how it looks but because of how to track fingerprint smudges it's kinda meh it's not razer blade bad i think those razer laptops are the standard not in a good way for how bad a piece of technology can go from looking great to downright messy just from picking it up but the midnight finish is bad enough to notice and easily the worst i've ever seen on an apple computer i mean look at it right here we only just barely touched this thing and you can already see the fingerprints all over this it's so bad that i'll probably return this specific laptop to get a starlight version again side note the macbook air apple is letting me borrow is that color and i think it looks fantastic and look right now hold on we gotta gotta wipe this off i brought a microfiber cloth with me because i knew we'd have to clean this off in use and i'm sad here because i really wanted to like the darker more pro looking body but even on the best days i have oily skin and if something shows fingerprints i will be leaving my mark and i don't want that in a laptop the next thing that i've liked has been the power the m2 is absolutely an upgrade over the m1 in a lot of ways number one being it's straight up better in single and multi-core performance while having the same number and array of cores and that's pretty impressive stuff being able to go from an already impressive score to even better but there are other improvements that make the m2 way better for me personally that i've really liked the media encoder that's been borrowed from those higher end m1 pro processors lets the m2 macbook air punch way above its weight class in the video editing department yes i know not everybody is a content creator but i gary know two things project management and creating youtube videos and i've had enough computer processing power for project management for like 20 years now a video oriented around me doing project management work would just be me sitting at a desk on teams for eight hours a day that's boring seriously this and the m2 macbook pro 13 are easily able to handle even the worst kinds of video codecs that i use on a near-daily basis and there really isn't anything else in the market that can do what this can do at this size and price point i've said this before but for the video files and codecs that i use on the everyday dad and in other projects these bring my very expensive windows pc to a halt i'm pointing to it through that wall right there my 5950x and 3080 ti build cannot run these files as seamlessly as this 1200 laptop i'm sorry but i continue to be impressed by that because of that encoder you don't even really tax the system at all when in use you never really have to worry about the thermal issues when editing or most importantly when rendering for gaming i don't really play too many games but what i do play has been fine for example i mainly play wow classic and an assortment of roguelike indie games all of which were handled perfectly well by the m2 and honestly they were handled perfectly fine by the m1 as well the laptop did get hot during my wow gaming session but were really starting to cross into the not intended use case for a computer that only has a passive cooling system if gaming is your priority i would say don't get a mac but if you insist i would say get a mac with a fan will the computer thermally throttle over the last week i've seen like a thousand youtube videos talking about this in my experience yes and no it's actually a weird scenario when running cinebench which if you don't know is a test that can max out the cpu for the duration of its multi-core test when you do this you can watch the score go lower each pass with significant score differences between the different 10 minute sessions however when having the system's thermal log up there is no notification of a thermal issue which is really weird i used to see those thermal issue notifications quite often during throttling on the older intel macbooks so it's clear the system is slowing down as the computer warms up but is it doing it before actually hitting some kind of a thermal cap that triggers a response to keep from technically thermally throttling to protect the insides i don't know i'm not an engineer from apple's soc team what i can say definitively though is if you run very strenuous benchmarks back to back the system will score lower over time are you somebody that runs extensive benchmarks as your day job okay that's probably important to you for the rest of us the good news is that in all of my regular use situations and even in my video editing tasks the cpu never even came close to hitting the cap you have to try to make this thing throttle to get it to actually throttle and while we're on the controversy train here's something that i neither like nor dislike but if i don't mention it i'll get called a shill but because i'm not threatening to throw my laptop in the garbage can right now i'm gonna get called a shill anyway but the ssd situation in the m1 macbooks at the cheapest 256 gigabyte model you had two 128 chips providing that 256 gigabytes of storage on the m2 model apple has included a single 256 gigabyte chip for whatever reason apparently this will lead to about a 40 slower read and write speed between the generations i say apparently because personally when i run the test between my m1 air and my m2 air there really isn't a difference however i am willing to accept that my m1 air might have a problem because there have been other folks the internet that have seen this happen but personally i can't recreate this no matter how hard i try what i'm not gonna say is that you won't notice a difference i can't even get the difference to show up so i'm not gonna talk down to you and tell you not to worry if ssd speed is your number one priority you should at least look at the 512 gigabyte model i say i neither like or dislike this because for me personally it hasn't been an issue at all even on my more expensive macs that have way faster solid state drives i do everything in my professional life from an external server that external server has literally half the read and write speeds of the internal ssds on the m2 macbook air no joke half and it's never held me back the reason the cheapest macbook air is going to feel sluggish with a lot of things open is because of that eight gigabytes of unified memory mac os even at the best of times takes up about four gigabytes of active memory while typing the script for this video i checked my memory usage and just from having google docs and the mac os email client open i'm running at six gigabytes i'm even willing to say sure maybe the swap memory will be slightly slower because of the slower solids i drive hey video editing gary here and i want to i want to highlight this point because it's really important nobody really knows how the swap memory works yes we know that swap memory is essentially virtual memory and it uses your storage system as kind of a fake active memory like computers have been doing that forever but we don't know technically how apple does it because if you try to find a white paper or some other kind of technical documentation at least in my research i can't find it so anybody that says they know exactly how swap memory works and how a slower ssd would affect that i mean a lot of that is just guesswork if you are at apple and you know this stuff please let me know in the comments below i would love to get the white paper for how swap memory works okay i gotta i gotta get back to editing this you you get back to watching it but using swap memory is not how the system wants to work that's not how any computer wants to work they want to use the unified memory or ram or whatever their active memory is called so if you are somebody that needs a ton of tabs open or a ton of programs open at once you shouldn't be getting eight gigabytes of unified memory or eight gigabytes of ram on any computer that's not an m2 problem that's a computer problem swap memory is a band-aid to keep your computer operating smoothly if you the user bought too little for your intended purposes it's the icing on a cake it's not the whole cake okay back to things that aren't middle gray another thing that i've really liked has been the keyboard i noticed on twitter that this had been getting flack for other sets of reasons but i found the keyboard to be pretty darn good i like that they increased the size of the actual keyboard so you get a full size escape key and full size function keys this time around i've typed several scripts from the laptop's keyboard including this one and while i am kind of a mechanical keyboard snap at my work desk for a laptop keyboard i think these feel great to type with something that i don't think gets brought up enough in apple laptop videos is these keyboards might not be the snappiest i mean it's not like they have holy panda switches in them or anything but they are incredibly easy to get into a typing rhythm and i find that to be the most important aspect of any keyboard even if i love my fancy keycaps and the clack of a good tactile switch if it's sluggish or awkward to type and get going i just won't use that big mechanical keyboard i was worried about the uniformity of the body of the laptop compared to the previous air's wedge shape but because of how thin this laptop is i haven't had a single problem with the edges i absolutely dislike typing on my macbook pro 16 for long periods of time because the edge of the laptop really just digs into my forearms but in a few several hour typing sessions on the m2 air i haven't even gotten a single mark this is very comfortable to type with okay let's get into something that i don't dislike but i actively hate this computer has thunderbolt 3 where the pro computers the 14s and the 16s all have thunderbolt 4. when it comes to transfer speeds of both data and power you won't notice much of a difference and i hate this because it means the m2 standard much like the m1 standard will only export out to a single display i've been complaining about this for two years now since the original m1s came out and i get a ton of pushback for this but in real usable scenarios again let's put on my project manager hat most offices that i've been to have a dual screen setup yes i know there are hacks to get additional displays but i can't i can't make a recommendation to thousands of people with a hack in mind especially when i've seen things that the hacks can cause problems with computers so if the oem says one monitor i'm gonna say one monitor most of the folks that i know during and some still are working from home they purchased two monitor setups for their home offices to be more like our work offices my wife today uses a dual monitor setup for her work and for her schooling i feel like it's this weird twitter youtube bubble where everybody just gets a single gigantic monitor or an ultra wide and they think that that's the representative use sure apple doesn't market the m2 macbook air as a quote-unquote pro laptop but why are you buying this if not for work plus there are windows laptops that cost half as much that do at least dual displays out intel integrated graphics can handle at least two displays but this computer that easily handles my tough graphical needs can't do it i consider that to be an actual purchase decider right there no matter how many folks comment or tweet at me to tell me that i'm crazy look i know i'm crazy but i'm not crazy about this the next major thing that i've liked has been the updated display it doesn't have the same kind of wow factors we're used to from the legit mind-boggling displays on those bigger and more expensive macbooks but from an upgrade perspective model to model i think this is awesome when i pined for a larger inch macbook a few years ago i think this is really what i was hoping for there is a ton of usable screen real estate especially for a computer that could easily be mistaken for a tablet also that extra brightness makes it so much easier to see in mixed lighting or outside in the sun and that's really nice because that was a pretty big thing that i did not like from the 400 nit panel that the m1 macbook air has sure the notch exists but i feel like we don't have to mention that this time around because everybody is so angry about the ssds nobody had the time to make a click bait notch video to rile everybody up so hey silver linings and rain clouds right the camera is also something that i neither liked nor disliked it just needed to be updated i do consider apple kind of late to the game here by only now starting to update these and this one's fine but it's not even that great either and it shouldn't take until 2022 to get an updated camera in here they start you got to start focusing more on these because it is important for folks working from home the speakers they're okay maybe they are better than the m1 but i'm not really an audiophile they sound perfectly good to me but they definitely don't sound as good as the bigger macbooks battery life has also continued to be great 18 hours apple says and i believe them all of the greatness we talked about earlier with power and usability you get all of that for 18 hours without being plugged into the wall i'm still impressed by that number two years later if you aren't i don't know what else to tell you that's like the single thing that makes the new m1 computer just so valuable is you don't even really need to think about the battery life anymore all right all that aside do i recommend the m2 macbook air i don't know like i said earlier i feel like this sits in a weird spot in the apple lineup if you are looking for the cheapest macbook which is why folks generally buy the macbook air apple still sells the m1 air for almost 400 less if you buy refurbished that's not peanuts or a small amount of money that's like one third less the cost for functionally almost the same thing i think from a real practical noticeable difference you are paying for the screen the media encoder and i guess magsafe charging is that worth 400 to you maybe but if you do want to start upgrading this thing to make it more usable you're again going to bump into that refurbished or even brand new macbook pro 14 which is absolutely superior in every way minus size and battery life but will you actually notice the size difference in use and will you notice a one hour battery life difference again maybe but there are so many benefits for the 14 inch personally i would be willing to make that lead i don't want to take anything away from the m2 macbook air this is an awesome laptop and i've had a ton of fun using it and i will continue using it over the coming months but it's just kind of hard to give it the same blanket recommendation that i gave the m1 macbook air and if you like this video hit that subscribe button then click here to see all of my favorite accessories for the m2 macbook air click click click click click click thanks for watching\n"