M2 MacBook Air Review after 1 Month – Forget the DRAMA..
when apple went out on stage and announced the brand new m2 macbook air back in june i had no idea just how much drama and controversy would be stirred up over the next month and it’s no doubt made reviewing this laptop properly a heck of a lot more difficult so in this one month review i’m gonna forget that drama ever happened and take a fresh look at the m2 macbook air no longer comparing its faults to other macbooks like the previous m1 model or the 14 inch macbook pro and i’ll instead focus on the laptop
itself and what i’ve learned about it and enjoyed over the past month so let’s get started even though it’s already been one month since this new m2 macbook air has been in our office i’m still blown away every time i pick it up because it’s just so incredibly thin and light especially if you have the display open and you’re holding the bottom portion seriously what apple achieved in terms of design is absolutely incredible being thinner than the previous macbook air especially on the hinge side and the next point that really stands out to me is
the incredible display with the new modern design with those thin bezels all the way around no longer making it feel like you’re holding an old device and the
top has grown on me and to my surprise i actually prefer the notch look because it makes it stand out from the laptop crowd now i know you’re gonna call me crazy for even mentioning that but the notch has subconsciously just disappeared when using it day to day i don’t even realize it’s there kind of like how everyone can technically see their nose at all times but your mind just blocks it out for you it’s kind of the same effect on the m2 macbook air especially since it only takes up the space that’s used by
the menu bar and disappears completely when in full screen mode and of course the biggest benefit of all from that notch is the 1080p webcam that not only matches the higher end 14 and 16 inch macbook pros but it looks slightly better because of the updated image signal processor and other optimizations i also like how apple is so confident in their branding an image that they don’t even need this laptop to say macbook air anywhere on the device not even on the bottom it’s so iconic that you can’t mistake it for any other laptop because
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love the mac safe 3 charging feature especially since it supports fast charging and it comes with a little indicator light so you know if the battery is full even from across the room it’s literally the best way to charge a laptop ever invented requiring only one hand to attach or detach compared to previous usbc only macbooks which you have to hold down with your other hand to plug in the cable and the other obvious benefit is that both of the thunderbolt ports are now freed up and available for accessories at any time instead of being
used up by the charging cable like before so in terms of design portability and functionality the m2 macbook air is a huge step up but what about the actual performance and reliability well for regular users who spend most of their time doing common things like browsing the web the m2 macbook air is literally the best laptop in the business because of its very high single core performance as well as all the software optimizations it achieves the highest speedometer web browsing benchmark score we’ve ever seen on any computer which means that you won’t find any other
laptop that’ll feel as snappy as this one while browsing the web and doing basic stuff like using apps and watching media content now while i am a bit disappointed in the speaker quality because of apple’s choice to relocate the speaker grills to the inside of the hinge leading to a sound stage that isn’t as wide as before they still beat out pretty much every other laptop out there and there is no doubt that after one month i’m still upset at apple for removing one of the nand chips on the base m2 macbook air compared to
the previous model leading to slower file transfer speeds and worse virtual memory swap performance but if you’re a common user that’s only going to be doing large file transfers and heavy multitasking with productivity apps every once in a while it probably won’t be a big deal for you but what if you were thinking of buying the base empty macbook air instead of a higher end macbook pro to get some productivity work done while multitasking like most people do with browsing the web you likely will run into slower performance than expected which the previous base m1
model didn’t have an issue with at all now there is an easy fix to this problem and that is to upgrade this storage to at least 512 gigs which comes with two nand chips but that also means that this now becomes a 1400 laptop in order to unlock excellent multitasking performance and that’s kind of upsetting because the m1 model was known to offer killer performance at the base 1 000 price and you’re simply not getting that value anymore with the new m2 macbook air but if we assume you’re a more common user that doesn’t do
productivity work all the time you’re likely going to be just fine unless you like to open dozens of web browsing tabs without closing them and even though we experienced some really heavy thermal throttling of performance due to the inadequate fanless cooling system it was only a serious issue when doing very heavy work which most common people likely won’t be doing that much of and the nice thing is that we were able to fix those issues with a thermal pad mod which we showed off in a video for only 15 dollars greatly improving the performance and
we even took it a step further by adding a laptop cooling stand which took those gains much further getting rid of the heat soaking so if you’re interested in doing that yourself we’ll leave those links down below but for the average user you likely won’t experience the overheating and in that case the completely fanless design is awesome for never having to hear fan noise again as well as keeping the internals dust free for many years and as for performance without multitasking even the base model was faster in terms of the most common 4k hevc video
editing compared to the 14-inch macbook pro because it comes with new encoders and decoders which take the load off of the cpu so it’s a great sweet spot for that type of work as well as shorter programming and photo editing tasks and as far as the battery life the m2 macbook air is great even better than the m1 model and because the m2 chip now comes with four efficiency cores that are faster than before you can now get an absolutely insane 15 hours of battery life while using low power mode without sacrificing snappy performance so
you can leave it on all the time if you’d like to so with that said if you look at the m2 macbook air from a more common average user perspective it’s an absolutely killer laptop especially to the windows competition with my biggest gripe being the increased price while getting downgraded ssd performance but if you can look past that i would definitely recommend the m2 air especially for those who care more about getting a modern and fresh macbook for years to come compared to saving a few hundred dollars and getting the older m1 macbook air design
which you can find for as little as 850 bucks on amazon and if you disagree with my take on all of this let me know down in the comment section below but if you enjoyed this one month review of the m2 macbook air click the circle button to subscribe for more videos like this one thanks for watching and we’ll see you in the next video
