M2 MacBook Air – 3 Months Later! Honest Long-Term Review
the M2 MacBook Air has been around for three months now and I was using it daily all that time and I loved it I hated it and after three months I can make a final conclusion in this video I will share my thoughts on the M2 MacBook Air after three months of use did my opinion change over time should you buy it who is it for is it a waste of money stick around to find out to make everything more interesting I will mix together good and bad things I found let’s start with the body
build quality materials Etc to describe all that I will use only one word exceptional the aluminum body is cold and smooth seams are almost non-existent every little element has its place and fits there perfectly and don’t get me started on the thinness of it the body is so thin that I almost can’t feel it but enough with the price ergonomically I have a few questions first the wet shape in the previous air was better for typing since the edge wasn’t hurting the hands that much now the edge is erased noticeably above the surface which makes
long wrong typing sessions kind of uncomfortable but if you reposition your hands slightly I guess this issue can be dealt with the second issue is much smaller somehow the
space gray and ports are not yet scratched but some people online have complained about this color and midnight their pores are really badly scratched but I guess this comes down to how careful you are with your devices let’s cover this screen now surely after 14 inch MacBook Pro I’m extremely picky in terms of this place but let me tell you this screen is phenomenal especially when compared to the previous hair the bezels are Slimmer all round and the notch freshens the design quite a bit it is also bigger and brighter too when working Outdoors that
extra 100 Nets are noticeable plus it now supports P3 white color gamut which results in gorgeous colors but there’s always a butt but I would really like the blacks to be blacker when watching movies those dark gray borders are just too visible I would also appreciate a slightly higher refresh rate 60 hertz would be good enough for non-pro laptops but apple b Apple we won’t see that for quite some time in entry level max if you’re planning on simple photo editing this screen will be enough but if you’re planning on Pro level color grading you
should save some money and buy a 14 inch pro which has mini LED higher brightness and higher refresh rate here is another thing for you the speakers this part is probably the hardest one to cover for me since I use airpods most of the time but when the internal speakers of the MacBook were firing I experienced no problems whatsoever ever my ears didn’t bleed at all everything was great maybe those speakers aren’t the loudest ones or the best sounding ones but man the laptop is a little over one centimeter thick what were you expecting for
such a small enclosure the sound quality is more than satisfactory the only issue I have is the speaker placement I really prefer front-facing speakers on previous Max and M2 air they are situated where events were in previous models this placement makes sound less directed you don’t feel surrounded by sound as much but again headphones to help mitigate these minor inconveniences the keyboard I really enjoy typing on it plus visually I think it looks so much better with gray aluminum underlay than Pro laptops with black underlay keys are more visually pronounced more visible the clickiness is
spot on the key travel is also great the backlight works fine and accurately again using this keyboard is almost always a pure joy almost always because I do find some aspects of it unsatisfying the first one being the backlight works great and all but too much light slips under the keys so in dark environments it looks like an old machine Max with problematic butterfly keyboards didn’t have that issue the second caveat for me is the row of function keys I just don’t find it all that useful dedicated mission control key Spotlight search key and Siri
where dictation key are simply useless I would prefer them to be switched with for example keyboard backlight controls camera on off button or something like that Apple’s experts really know better than me what people need but hey that’s my video before we talk performance I feel like covering Port selection is needed there are two ways of looking at it a general perspective and the Creator’s perspective for a regular person two USBC ports will be enough there are numerous dongles available so picking up something nice won’t be a problem however for anyone who’s trying to do
more these two ports would be a bottleneck I personally find it inconvenient to use a dongle go just to connect an external monitor I think at an HDMI an SD card reader won’t cost much but everyone will appreciate it Apple hear us we need more ports one thing that certainly was never enough is disk space 256 gig SSD is too small for comfortable file management I had to monitor weekly whether my disk was full or not deleting apps relocating files uploading documents to the cloud yuck don’t like that plus doing all that manually reads some
residual files which isn’t really good all that useless stuff just keeps piling up slowing the laptop down if you’re going to buy the same base model MacBook Air my suggested solution will be helpful I used clean my Mac X to Monitor and clean my storage Drive temperature monitoring protecting from malware uninstalling apps Etc now I don’t have to worry about overloading my SSD or pushing it too hard real time monitoring with such Baseline machines proper performance monitoring ring is a must the creators of cleanmymacx are kindly sponsored in this video and with the code Winer
10 you can purchase the app at 10 discount okay okay you’re starving for drama done performance it is as you well know I have a base model with 8 gigs of unified memory 256 gig SSD and 8 core GPU now you’re probably wondering how can this underpowered piece of tech be useful well it’s good you’ve waited because I do have something to say about the performance it’s adequate maybe even surprising sometimes nothing more nothing less you really can’t expect much from an entry level passively cooling MacBook but for twelve hundred dollars you want to get
some of that horsepower I can’t say that it really delivers that performance let me explain when you are performing small short tasks everything is smooth and responsive but sometimes even easy tasks can work unreliably for example my most common problem is website reloads it seems like that SSD really slow things down I regularly use Google Docs and those tabs are memory hungry real Ram eaters even in Safari but even with swap they can glitch out sometimes turn white for no reason stop responding or just reload the second you’re not looking at it that’s frustrating it
really is it’s not a deal breaker I have only noticed this issue with Google Docs but each year the websites become more and more demanding so what can we expect in a few years I leave that without an answer also I’ve noticed that even native apps work with slowdowns for instance Pages an apple made text editor gives me beach balls almost every time I try to change fonts strange right bizarre even in the light of all I said already discussing video editing sounds unnecessary but this laptop did surprise me in this regard everything is smooth
and responsive and Final Cut just like on Pro Models the only difference you will notice is substantially longer export time even with Hardware encoding engine video rendering takes much longer but I can’t blame Apple for that this laptop isn’t designed with video editing in mind so let’s give it a little break okay this is not a laptop for heavy users if you are into professional editing you shouldn’t even consider this laptop better pick up a 14-inch Pro there are a lot of discounts on Amazon or just buy Apple’s refurbished one it seems like two things
are left on the agenda battery life and Camera the camera is the easiest one to cover it’s great for Zoom meetings Face Time and occasional video calls is perfect microphones do their job reliably without failing the camera isn’t as good as on the best Windows laptops but let’s not forget that 99 of all laptops still have 480 or 720p webcams now let’s move on to battery life I have only one word here wow just wow the battery life is simply amazing I almost forgot what charging is with this laptop 10 hours of movies easy full
day of browse using piece of cake and it only gets better as soon as you turn on low power mode 10 hours become 14 a day a day and a half believe me battery life will not disappoint you the only thing that bugs me is the battery held after three months my health is down to 99 at only 39 charges it seems strange to me because previous laptops have maintained 100 help after 100 Cycles or more bear that in mind so what is my overall impression of this laptop is it worth the money after three
months my opinion hasn’t changed a bit in some areas it’s phenomenal and in others pretty average for twelve hundred dollars I was expecting slightly more but I can’t call it a waste of money I don’t regret buying it and if you can pick it up at a lower price than Apple charges do it but try to opt for models with 16 gigs of RAM I can easily see teachers or students using this laptop without issues just casual people if you are aiming at somewhat professional tasks better pay extra for a 14 inch pro but please
never buy the M2 13-inch Pro and what do you think of this laptop do we feel the same you and I leave your impressions and reviews in the comments subscribe to the channel like this video and see you in the next one
