*NEW* M2 15in MacBook Air – It's finally here! Unboxing and Review
– Hey guys, it’s Justine and today, I have something very special. This past WWDC, I think was probably the biggest one that they’ve ever had, they packed so much into it. And inside of this box, we have the brand new 15 inch MacBook Air and I could not be more excited. And I definitely did not expect to be unboxing something this soon after the event. So, let’s get into it. (upbeat music) That’s right, our darling baby, 13 inch MacBook Air, now has a big brother or sister. The 15 inch MacBook Air comes stock with the
M2 chip, an upgraded speaker system, 18 hour battery life, while retaining the silent fanless system of its smaller counterpart. (box ripping) I got the starlight one. It’s always a mystery of what color are you gonna get for your review version. Now, in the 13 inch for the previous one, I got the new midnight color, and this is the starlight. I did get to see all four colors at WWDC. And not gonna lie, the starlight is absolutely beautiful. I kind of wish that the MacBook Pros came in this color, because I 100% would’ve definitely got the
starlight MacBook Pro. (tape peeling) Oh, I’m so excited. This is really the only 15 inch MacBook in the entire Apple ecosystem right now, because they’ve got
gonna turn on automatically. (Justine gasps) (electronic bell rings) Beautiful. That sound, that is music to my ears. Oh, you’re so beautiful. It’s so weird looking at it, because I’m so used to the MacBook Pros where they have speakers either on the side or here on the top, but it’s just a very seamless design. Having gone from the 16 inch, then to the 14, and now to the 15, this is a perfect size. I mean, I remember when we had the 15 inch MacBooks and we were like, “Oh, we need to have bigger.” And then we
got the 16 and then we’re like, “Oh, I want… It’s too big. “Now, I need a 14.” What? Wow, it looks so good. Let’s see what else is in the box. I mean, I know what else is in the box. There’s gonna be a MagSafe adapter, and there’s two options now, you can get the dual USB-C charger or a 70 watt charger. I was fully expecting to see the larger one. So that was a genuine shock that this is what we have. Look, it’s a little baby. It’s so small. This might be one of my
favorite accessories of all time. This dual charger, I have several of these, this is incredible. And I like that they give you the option to either choose between this or a larger fast charge option, which if this was me getting this for myself, I would probably get the fast charge. But this is super small, portable, compact. Love it. And then it also comes with a color matched starlight MagSafe cable. Look at her, she’s beautiful. It’s not white. It is a very light starlight. I mean, this is pretty great that this is the charger. Like look
how small this is. You’re not gonna be getting the super fast charge, but this is still pretty awesome. Bigger computer, smaller charger. Let’s look at the stickers. We have to. They’re starlight. Oh, they’ve got like a new paper backing now. Those are nice. So here they are both next to each other. Now just like the 13 inch, this new 15 inch comes in four colors, a silver, space gray, midnight, and the starlight. Now the one that I have here, again, is the beautiful starlight color. And this has 16 gigs of memory with a one terabyte
hard drive. And when I was editing off of this 13 inch for this review, this one only had 512. And if there’s anything that I can definitely recommend if you’re gonna upgrade is you might wanna get a little bit more storage. Yes, you can always use an external drive, but if you are a video editor and you can go to the one terabyte, highly recommend. Now obviously, the biggest upgrade with this new MacBook Air is the larger display. It’s 15.3 inches from corner to corner. And even though the black borders and notch are technically the
same thickness as the 13 inch, they seem so much smaller now, because of that larger screen size. And while it is a half pound heavier than the 13 inch version, it’s pretty much the exact same height coming in at 0.45 inches. The first thing that I noticed when I picked this up is it was heavier than a 13 inch, but this feels very similar to my 14 inch MacBook Pro. So this is kind of falling somewhere in the middle there, but it definitely doesn’t feel as light as the 13 inch. So if you are looking
for something super light and even more portable, then maybe the 13 inch might be for you. But this extra screen real estate and the enhanced speakers, like there are so many upgrades to this. And the fact that there isn’t a 15 inch MacBook in the lineup, the 16 inch might be too big, but this is just a perfect fit right in the middle between all of them. Now, this 15 inch MacBook actually shares a lot of the same specs as the 13 inch. It has the M2 chip with an eight core CPU, a 10 core
GPU, and up to 24 gigs of unified memory. And you can spec it out with two terabytes of storage. Now they both support the same media codecs including ProRes and ProRes RAW. They do have the same 1080p FaceTime HD camera and a three microphone array. The other thing that’s pretty interesting is they have the same exact battery life. You can get up to 18 hours on both of them. Now you might be thinking, “Now wait a minute, isn’t this a bigger device? Shouldn’t it have a bigger battery?” But the thing is this 15 inch does
actually have a larger capacity battery, but because of the larger display, it’s using more energy so that extra battery life kind of gets canceled out. Another factor that could be contributing to the extra energy usage is the upgraded speakers. The 15 inch MacBook Air now has a six speaker sound system with force-canceling woofers. And obviously it supports Dolby Atmos with spatial audio. ‘Cause I’m definitely excited to test that out and compare it to the 13 inch. (upbeat music) So I just sat down at the park to do a little editing and this was my first
test. Now obviously I’ve used the 13 inch MacBook Air. Now using the 15, I kind of forgot how fast it is, because I’ve just been using my MacBook Pro for so long now and I’m beyond impressed. I just dropped in all of those 4K clips that we just shot of the unboxing and it was so incredibly smooth. I’m editing in a multi-cam timeline right now and I’m quickly switching back and forth between these clips and I’m even running in better quality and there hasn’t been a stutter yet. Am I switching to a MacBook Air now?
I don’t know, maybe. So I’ve been editing on the MacBook Air 15 inch and my conclusion is this unfortunately doesn’t feel like a MacBook Air because it is so powerful and just the display is so vibrant. The Pro and Air category has now, I feel, like kind of merging together. The only thing that sets this apart from the Pros, I feel like, is the fact that it doesn’t have the speakers on the front and it’s so thin. Obviously, you are gonna be getting more power with the Pros, but for pretty much my everyday simple editing,
and when I say simple, I’m editing with 4K and 8K footage and it still is handling it like a pro. It’s making me so confused on what to even recommend to people anymore because this is so impressive. I just can’t even. So the first thing I wanna show you is my timeline that I’ve been working on with this video. This is all 4K. This is actually a multi-cam timeline so I can cruise in here. We’ve got both of our frames there. This makes it super fun and easy when I’m editing. I can just go through
and select if I want my first angle or my second angle. Look at that, everything super smooth. It’s running so great. Now another thing that I have is I’ve got a bunch of 8K ProRes footage. So I just kinda wanna throw this to an 8K timeline and see how it performs. So all of these clips are 8K ProRes. Let’s just toss it into this timeline, see how it runs. I mean, zero stuttering, it’s running perfectly smooth. Wow. All right, well I’m shook. Like does this mean that I could get away with working on just a
MacBook Air? I definitely would have to completely spec out the solid state drive, because I don’t think I could survive with one terabyte. Like I already filled it up and I’ve barely got all of the footage for this entire project on here. Two 8K clips stacked on top of each other. Let’s throw another one. See how that looks. I mean, it’s running. It’s running great. Smooth, no stuttering, nothing. Hmm, okay, looking good to me. So now I wanna test out something else. How about a little bit of Lightroom? Okay, so here’s some photos from a
shoot that I did for my pink iJustine cables, which by the way, if you haven’t got one already, you need to, you’re missing out. So I’m gonna find one of those photos. I mean, I’m scrolling through here and these are just loading in so fast, like basically just like nothing. I mean, this is not even flinching at editing any of this. It’s just working super smooth. This makes me so excited for the future. I mean, I know I’m living in the now, but the fact that this is so powerful and so small and thin, like
what’s next? What is next? I don’t know. Okay, and I’m gonna copy that to the next one. I mean, that’s just definitely not like a super great edit, like I’m not proud of that. So don’t think, “Wow, Justine, is that your editing skills?” No, it’s not great. But I did wanna show you how quickly you can just copy and paste that on other images and it’s working almost instantly. Okay, well we did that. Now what about gaming? Got a couple of games here. Not gonna play NBA 2K23, because I am not good at it at
all. How about Hot Lava? And the cool thing is I can sync up a controller to this. You can connect an Xbox controller, a PlayStation controller, or even an Nintendo Switch. So we’re gonna connect an Xbox controller and it automatically pops up here super quick. There it is. Time to game. Here we go. Let’s go. This game is actually really fun. (energetic music) Oh my gosh. Okay, here. We’re in, we’re in, we’re in! Oh, my body is burning. Oh, this makes me so nervous. Oh man, okay. Here we go. We got this. No, well, we
almost didn’t. Okay, so this is running pretty great. I think we get the point. Of course it’s gonna run awesome. Another thing is how quick and responsive things open up. Let’s just pop open a little Pixelmator Pro. I’m new to this app, but I just started using it when I saw that Apple does a bunch of demos with this. So I’m gonna browse for a file and I’m gonna show you guys how quickly you can remove things from photos. So you can do one of two things, you can select it with the selection tool and
then you can go over here to the repair and you can click repair selection. And it instantly just removed that rock. This is also pretty cool, because you can just use the brush tool and you can just brush over something and it’s gone. How about this? Rock? Freaking gone. Gone. Gone, gone, gone. Like, this is so impressive. I need to start using this more. Watching content is also pretty awesome with these new six speakers. So you really do get that Dolby Atmos feel, like it’s surround sound. – What defines you? – What defines you? (somber
music) – The speakers are really good. – I asked first. – There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for my daughter. – Ooh. Like this is coming from… – Mrs. Michaels? Mr. Michaels asked me – You don’t even see – to give this to you. – any speakers. – It’s just like it’s magic. It’s like, “Where are you even coming from?” They sound really good. So this does have a 1080p webcam. And obviously, these devices are gonna be used a lot for conference calls. So let’s test it out, shall we? It’s so crazy to see how far
we’ve come, because I used to use the iSight camera on my first MacBook. That’s what I was shooting my YouTube videos on. So the fact that this is what we have now, like I can just hit import and I can actually use this FaceTime camera right here in Final Cut and it’s so fast. Look at this, this looks so good. Okay, I’m gonna import I just hit import. Okay, let’s test this out. Hi, I don’t wanna move this, because this camera back here right here is focusing on you. So let’s see how this looks and
let’s see how it sounds. Let’s bring that in and see how it sounds. Hi, I don’t wanna move this, because this camera back here is focusing on you. It looks so good. So let’s see how this looks and let’s see how it sounds. That is not a flattering angle. Wow, okay, so I’m definitely super impressed. And like I said at the beginning, this doesn’t feel like an Air, it feels so much closer to a Pro that it also makes me wonder like what are you gonna do in the Pros to make them even better? All
I know is I feel like any Mac that you get at this point with any of these silicon chips, you’re going to be so happy. Well, thank you guys so much for watching. I hope you guys enjoyed this video. I would love to hear from you in the comments below if you guys have any questions about any of the new Apple devices, WWDC announcements, I would love to hear them and hopefully I can answer them for you. I’m gonna go finish editing the video that you just watched. Bye.
