Apple NEVER Learns. - M2 Macbook Review

Apple never learns they released yet another  laptop with no freaking cooler in it touch it   and you'll burn yourself do any real work on it  you'll probably burn your whole house down at   least that's how the internet reacted when Apple's  redesigned M2 MacBook Air hit the scene but here's   a question for you any situations will you find  yourself in where the heat is a real problem and   for that matter would a similarly priced PC in  the same form factor even perform any better   did Apple get away with this seemingly obvious  design faux pas and if they did do we need to   change the way that we think about laptop cooling  we set out to answer all of those questions and we   set out to tell you about our sponsor simplemdm  simple MDM is a ridiculously simple Apple device   management for it enrolling your company's Apple  devices and keeping them up to date doesn't have   to be frustrating try it free for 30 days  on unlimited devices at simplemdm.com Linus there's been a lot made of Apple's cooling  solution for the M2 MacBook Air or more   accurately their lack of one instead of something  anything more substantial Apple decided to   basically attach a thin metal heat spreader like  you'd find on a stick of ram to the SOC in an   attempt to soak up some heat temporarily before  transferring it to the chassis which takes on   the role of a heatsink they could have gone with  a finned radiator a fan even a thicker piece of   metal orb some combination of the three but no  they settled on some bits of paper thin stamped   sheet aluminum none of which would actually be  a problem if the soc stayed nice and cool except   it doesn't and like for all electronic devices  this is absolutely a bad thing and while the M1   airs performance did suffer due to poor thermals  it wasn't quite to the same degree pun intended   and this is why your typical uses for an  entry-level MacBook things like content   consumption web browsing photo editing or maybe  even light video editing they all have one big   thing in common they are bursty in nature and  they're unlikely to put the soc under any kind of   sustained load what that means is as long as you  have enough thermal Mass to absorb your momentary   heat spikes you can count on Long idle periods to  dissipate it at your leisure well the M1 MacBook   Air managed to strike this balance pretty well  performing at or near its full capability without   overheating the chassis unless you were to fire  up something like cinebench blender or a 3D game   unfortunately that is not the case this  time around at least on the surface   Apple has tuned the m2's thermal controls to  maintain that same 50 degree surface temperature   Target as last time which is required by law but  almost immediately after being hit by any sort of   load the M2 SOC itself hits a whopping 99 degrees  Celsius because even the pathetic cooler in the   M1 MacBook Air has substantially more thermal  mass than this time around I'm frankly pretty   disappointed now Apple's response to this would  be pretty obvious well these are silent machines   they're not four Pros get a MacBook Pro if you  want to actually put a load on your computer   but frankly that's not a perfect solution either  because until they refresh the M2 MacBook Pro you   are going to be stuck with either a super toasty  chip or the old touch bar design with worse IO   on the bright side the M2 air gets magsafe to  go with your Thunderbolt 4 ports and an overall   design that's reminiscent of the 14-inch MacBook  Pro it is thicker than the thinnest point of the   previous gen airs wedge but the new flattened  design is thinner overall and from our point of   view feels a lot nicer to hold in the lap and  that Meg safe charging port is capable of fast   charging up to 65 Watts if you pick up either  the full GPU model or you pay an extra 20 bucks   over base you also have the option by the way of  choosing a 35 watt dual type-c charger instead   if that better fits your needs and from using it  we can legit see how it could be super handy to   have for travel compared to the single port fast  charger the only major difference between the air   configurations that directly impacts performance  is the storage previous gen M1 MacBook airs 256   gig variation used twin 128 gig chips to achieve  that capacity that divides the workload between   those two chips and makes it much less likely that  a read or a write will stall while waiting for   another to finish the M2 airs 256 gig variation  meanwhile makes use of a single 256 gigabyte chip   that means that the nand flash will be in a weight  State more often and you can think of this kind of   like running single versus dual Channel memory in  practice this means that the lowest capacity model   gets roughly half the performance of the other  storage tiers that make use of multiple chips   although you guys might not expect this I kind  of feel like I have to cut Apple some slack here   most people are not going to notice the difference  between 1.5 and 3 gigabytes per second and outside   of synthetic storage benchmarks the CPU is often  going to end up being the bottleneck at either of   those speeds there are situations where that might  not be the case though like video editing prores   raw footage but they also aren't as likely to come  up on the air compared to a MacBook Pro the part   of that is the way that the Air's performance Gets  kneecapped By Its lack of cooling which is another   problem that Apple created I'll show you what  I mean though starting with gaming because it's   always kind of funny to me when people complain  about gaming performance on a machine that was   clearly engineered for browsing Facebook in  order to make this a fair test given the cooling   solution we're running each of these twice to  warm up and then finally taking our results from   a third run and well yeah the cooling Solution  on the M2 MacBook Pro is good for a whopping   35 increase in fps in every test except for Total  War Warhammer 3's battle Benchmark where the lead   shrinks to just 30 percent In fairness to the M2  MacBook Air however even with its awful cooling   the competing Dell XPS 13 doesn't Beat It by a  significant margin in any of those tests oh but if   you want something that does beat the competition  you can check out our screwdriver on lttstore.com   it's now independently tested and verified moving  on to cinebench the M2 air loses about a thousand   points in its score over a 10 minute run compared  to a single run giving you some idea of how   your performance might degrade under heavy load  meanwhile the M2 Pro retains basically the same   score geekbench being a shorter Benchmark shows  basically no difference between the M2 MacBooks   so thanks for that but that doesn't mean it's an  entirely useless Benchmark because interestingly   we can see the difference in GPU performance  between the M1 and the M2 base models and it's   roughly in line with the additional memory  bandwidth provided by the M2 SOC of course   unless you work at our Testing Lab you probably  don't spend all day running benchmarks so let's   take a look at real world workloads starting with  an Adobe Lightroom export and wow not only is the   M2 air faster than the M1 air it's actually rough  roughly in line with the pro class machines with   active cooling the M2 also picks up a significant  winning compressor thanks to the addition of pro   resin coating engines on the base model SOC that's  over 475 percent faster than the M1 CPU fallback   h.264 isn't significantly different however  indicating that that encoder is more or less   identical between the socs and Final Cut Pro can  use up to three of these prores streams on the M2   air MacBooks which is more than the M1 air could  handle and one less than the pro pretty impressive   if you're a da Vinci resolve user well you're  going to want to get a ram upgrade regardless   of the rest of the performance numbers if you're  using an air or a pro because 8 gigs isn't nearly   enough with 24 gigs the air managed a respectable  40 minute export with the pro running about eight   and a half minutes faster than that so overall  the base model M2 air is roughly 35 percent   faster than its M1 counterpart and the higher end  M2 air is roughly 21 slower than the M2 Pro though   the biggest outliers are mostly in gaming which I  think for many Mac users is not terribly important   if we look purely at productivity then it's  within nine percent which is frankly extremely   impressive considering the Monstrous difference in  cooling capacity the main difference for this as   we pointed out before is that most of these real  world use cases just aren't going to be continuous   loads that will throttle the heck out of the chip  I mean even DaVinci Resolve ends up being more of   a stop and go affair in terms of CPU usage it's  not stop and go float plane though check out our   recent exclusive where we try out some Norwegian  hockey Pulver while we run our battery life tests   for our battery tests we calibrated each laptop to  roughly the same output as 50 brightness on the M2   air and we let them rip on a YouTube video the  first to follow was the XPS 13 with the M2 air   falling second though at nearly double the battery  life difference in battery life between the M1 and   the M2 MacBook airs seems to be primarily due  to the larger brighter display as we've seen   other outlets report worse battery life at lower  brightness as well but that's not to say that the   soc makes no difference the M2 MacBook Pro ended  up with a result over an hour and a half worse   than the M1 pro model and those share the same  display which seems to suggest the M2 SOC can   draw more power than its predecessor assuming that  adequate Cooling and power budgets are allotted to   it overall still excellent battery life for both  but you are giving up a bit of run time for the   extra performance of the M2 SOC all of which is  to say that it very much depends on what you do   with your laptop to determine whether the cooling  design flaw is a fundamental one that kills your   experience or is merely a minor annoyance and  you wish they just put a little fan in it it   seems like in most real world workloads it's  just not going to suffer that much and at a   starting price of twelve hundred dollars for the  air it's likely that a lot of folks are in fact   going to use it as a glorified Chromebook as for  the 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro I am having a hard time   seeing the benefit considering how close the air  comes most of the time yes when specked in a way I   would consider appropriate it's the same price as  the air for better performance but at that point   you're only 300 out from a similarly spec 14-inch  MacBook Pro making that the more attractive   Prospect for now in my humble opinion for your  extra money you're getting a much faster CPU and   GPU a larger 120 hertz liquid Retina xdr Display  an additional Thunderbolt 4 port and dedicated   HDMI and SD card readers I'm not about to pass  judgment if you don't care about any of those   things but for my money that is more than worth it  regardless of your priorities I certainly wouldn't   suggest going with the cheapest M2 13-inch MacBook  Pro if you care that little about RAM and storage   you would do just as well with the cheaper air and  it would be Slimmer and Silent we're going to have   all of those linked down below that gives the M2  MacBook Air my vote between the M2 Max currently   on the market and if you want to get real work  done well you can either Spritz compressed air   on whenever you fire up something intensive or  save up a little more and wait for the 14-inch M2   Pro you won't have to wait for our sponsor though  privacy privacy is a free service that gives you   control over who can charge you and how much they  can charge by using virtual 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way

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 2,672,913

Keywords: Macbook, air, apple, laptop, cooling, air m2, m2, macos, macaddress, apple air

Id: w6GTf6ATlho

Length: 13min 0sec (780 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 28 2022