15" MacBook Air M2 Review: The Obvious Thing!

foreign MacBook Air review this laptop thankfully is exactly what you think it is it's a MacBook Air but bigger this is the Tesla Model y of laptops you see the Tesla Model 3 was the most important model for Tesla they had other more expensive flagships but this was the entry level attainable version for the masses and it quickly became their most recommended and best-selling car and it's the way that most people got into Tesla and formed their first Tesla experience but sneakily bigger cars are actually more popular and in America especially people can't help but want a version that's a little bigger a little higher off the ground so they did the obvious thing and made Tesla Model y it's built on the same platform as a model 3 but a little bigger and a little higher off the ground and pretty much instantly has rocketed up to the top of the lineup to the point where it's now the most popular new car on planet Earth see the MacBook Air was the most important Mac for Apple I mean they had other expensive flagships but this was the most entry-level attainable model for the masses and it quickly became their most recommended and best-selling Mac as the first first way most people got into the mac and formed their first Mac OS experiences but sneakily bigger screens are actually the most popular and in America especially people can't help but want a version with a little bit of a bigger screen so they did the obvious thing and made the 15-inch MacBook Air it's built on the same platform as the 14-inch MacBook Air but a little bit bigger screen and I predict it'll pretty much instantly rock it to the top of the lineup to the point where it is the most popular 50-inch laptop and the most popular Mac on planet Earth we kind of already know what the M2 MacBook Air is if you haven't already seen it I'll link the review right with the like button that covers it my only real question is going into the review of the bigger one were one is there any real benefit to the bigger screen how much better is it really and two are there any other benefits to getting a bigger laptop so I think the whole bigger screen thing is pretty clear there are literally millions of people who today go into stores and ask for a 15-inch laptop and when they did Apple would have to bring people over to the 16-inch MacBook Pro as their cheapest option which starts at twenty five hundred dollars so now they have this now is there a dramatically more information that can fit on the screen not really is it a dramatically better quality display than the smaller one nah it mostly just feels bigger uh bigger videos bigger movies bigger texts bigger Windows just just a little more room for everything to be a little bit bigger and you only pay for that really with a little bit of extra size as far as the laptop goes this thing is still 11 and a half millimeters thin and weighs 3.3 pounds it's super slim it's a quarter of a millimeter thicker and half a pound heavier than the smaller MacBook Air which I kind of mentioned this earlier but I forgot that basically already has 14 inch diagonal screens with its thinner bezels so you can really just measure out 1.3 extra inches diagonally to get to the proper 15.3 inch laptop size still it has decently thin bezels not the thinnest in the world still has the notch cut out for face ID I mean sorry no face ID it has just a webcam and a microphone it still just as Touch ID on the keyboard and nothing else about the display itself really has changed it's the same Tech the same pixel density the same brightness 500 nits 60 hertz it's fine the screen is fine it's just bigger so all right now that the whole footprint of the laptop is also bigger what more can you get out of that uh first of all sneaky slightly bigger track pad so the keyboard is the same size but actually the trackpad does get a little bit bigger which is nice kind of matches the larger display and also there is more room inside for speakers so Apple's added not bigger speakers but just actually a second set of force canceling woofers which would theoretically make the sound a little punchier maybe add some bass and I I can say it is louder it does get louder overall and have a bit more bass than the smaller MacBook Air but it's not like game changing I'm impressed that they can get loud without distorting but they are not close to the maybe unfair 16 inch MacBook Pro speakers but just to give you an idea of the context also some people have noted it looks kind of weird to have like no speaker grilles the left and right of the keyboard but the speakers are still in the same place as they were in the smaller one up in the hinge of the MacBook Air and then there's also more room inside for bigger battery and my experience actually lines up pretty well with what Apple said which is look it's the same chipset very similar laptop bigger screen and bigger battery sort of cancel each other out and you end up with roughly the same battery life as a smaller machine it has to say it's quite good full workday of battery life pretty much guaranteed multiple light days in a row no problem so then the last thing I wanted to test is actually is there a difference in performance between the small M2 MacBook Air and the big one since theoretically there is just a little more room inside for a little extra thermal Headroom like there's no way it's significant but these are very different size laptops and the old one when it was torn apart didn't have a heat sink so maybe there's room for a little passive heatsink in this one they're both fanless but I had to check it so in single core bursty performance I never expect to see any difference and I really didn't I ran off back-to-back geekbench 6 benchmarks small drop off after the first one for each but no noticeable difference but then I ran back to back 10 minute cinebench multi-core benchmarks which kind of just run continuously to test some more reliable sustained workloads and there was a slightly bigger dip on the smaller M2 air and so potentially yes over time this may add up to a bit more thermal throttling but my conclusion is you can see the numbers on paper but this difference is unlikely to be noticeable like I said they're both running the M2 Chip and most behavior on laptops like this is so bursty and short that they perform basically identically but if you do happen to get into those long multi-minit sustained workloads in a row like we're exporting a video editing a video gaming even then maybe you'd notice a little bit more out of this bigger one over time but you'll notice the bigger difference on the 14-inch MacBook Pro which is just a little bit above this one in price so if you know you're going to be doing workloads like that then you probably are looking at a Pro laptop but matter of fact let's just talk about what I think is the biggest X Factor with this laptop the biggest hurdle between this and being the Tesla Model y of laptops is the price so this Baseline version this little Starlight one which kind of almost matches this a little bit a little sand color starts at 12.99 and that is the base version which you you can't upgrade these laptops over time so you tend to want to get as much as you can out of the initial purchase this base version only has eight gigs of shared memory and 256 gigs of storage that can actually pretty quickly become a 1700 laptop with just a few clicks to upgrade those things and that's a that's pricey so there's a lot of Windows laptops that you can get at that price that will probably do one specific thing better than this one whether it's the XPS 15 with a nicer display or the Rog zephyrus which is going to be better for gaming and has more ports you can get flipping and folding laptops that spin over backwards and gaming laptops even but none of them will be quite the package that this this is which is a really thin and light daily 15 inch screen laptop like this is kind of just the ultimate Baseline for most people's activities so to have all those things sort of well-rounded into one the thinness and lightness the nice display the great battery life the impressive performance from the M2 that's what makes this the MacBook Air it's got the A1 build quality it's got the color matching braided magsafe cable which also connects to the 35 watt charging brick with dual USBC ports which you could actually swap out for a slightly larger 70 watt brick with a single port for faster charging that's a free swap on Apple site and of course you can't forget the ecosystem stuff the messages the FaceTime Etc all the stuff that plugs into Apple's World despite its potentially premium price people will pounce on this popular pick thanks for watching catch you guys the next one peace [Music]

Channel: Marques Brownlee

Views: 3,705,880

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Id: 1TCuf_Qcfv8

Length: 8min 11sec (491 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 12 2023