MacBook Air M2 Review - Before you buy…

hang on is that the same color as my shirt almost color matching with my macbook there hey guys i'm tom of techchap and this is the brand spanking new macbook air m2 i've had this for a little over a week now and i've got some thoughts as you might expect although there were a few things that kind of struck me when i first got this unboxed and started using it firstly i love how we get this color matched magsafe cable which goes with my shirt i mean my laptop very classy second this new midnight color is gorgeous but also an absolute fingerprint and smudge magnet either bring a microfiber cloth with you or perhaps go for starlight instead thirdly where did the macbook air logo go is this one of the upgrades and finally and possibly a little bit more seriously if you've already got a macbook air m1 this will feel very very familiar it's much more of a refinement than a revolution like we saw going from the intel to m1 macbook air in 2020 now if you have been living under a rock for the last month or so let me give you a quick recap of this and first if i move my little plants out the way let's also bring in the macbook air m1 because while this is an incredible laptop in its own right you can't consider that without also considering this it's its predecessor and also competitor so if you're happy to pay the extra 200 or 250 pounds over the m1 air then you can bag yourself one of these with the new m2 chip faster memory a slightly bigger and brighter screen a 1080p facetime camera a new quad speaker setup with support for apple's spatial audio the function row on the top of the keyboard is now full size the touchpad is a tiny bit bigger we now get magsafe charging a slightly longer battery life a couple of new colors and quite a substantial redesign it's a touch thinner and lighter overall but apple's done away with the air's classic tapered look and so instead the m2 air now more closely resembles the macbook pro 14. it is still a fanless design though which means it's completely silent so there are some genuinely nice upgrades here and i reckon this probably is the ultimate thin and light laptop but this is also the most expensive macbook air ever at 1250 pounds there are student discounts but it does beg the question has it become too expensive and is as i say the macbook air m1 still the better option well to be fair i think when you take into account the windows competition and also the quality of the laptop you're getting for this kind of money it's not unreasonable but i just think it's that pesky m1 air that starts at 999 that's really throwing a bit of a spanner in the works and on the other side if you go for the more expensive 10 core gpu option or you start adding more ram or more storage which honestly i don't think i'd really recommend because then you're getting very close to macbook pro 14 territory which gets you that 120 hertz pro motion screen it's mini led it supports hdr so it gets a lot brighter you get way more ports and the m1 pro is still significantly more powerful but let's put pricing to one side for a second and focus on some of the upgrades and a key one is this webcam so this is being shot on the new 1080p webcam on the macbook air m2 and this is what you're getting on the current m1 air with its 720p webcam now it's a pretty significant difference particularly in lower light i noticed there's a lot less noise and of course being high resolution it is sharper and more detailed just looking at the screens really my face looks weirdly yellow and very soft on the air of m1 versus a much more clear and slightly more natural looking m2 however with the oncoming mac os ventura software and if you pair it with an iphone running ios 16 you can use new continuity cameras you can basically use your iphone as a really high quality webcam on top of your mac it's a bit fussy but if you are taking regular important video calls you can just strap your phone to your macbook air and one instead perhaps and save some money let's talk about design because while the new macbook air may not look as futuristic as something like this the dell xps 13 plus do let me know if you'd like to see a full versus video with these two by the way but i would still take the macbook notch and all simply because of that keyboard that touch pad and that webcam which are pretty much the best you can get right now so the m2 air is now a uniform 11.3 mil thick and also tips the scales at 1.24 kilograms which actually makes it 50 grams lighter than the m1 air so this is a great size for students for taking it to the office or just moving around the house with you as you pretend to work from home as usual it is made from a single unibody piece of aluminium or aluminum for my american friends but the most important question is what color would you go for and between the two new ones starlight or midnight i reckon i made the right choice here with midnight although as you can see it is very bluish uh when it hits the light it's not like a matte black completely it's like a nice sort of slate gray blue to it very nice although as you can see very smudgy as well the only minor compromise with this design is the fact that we get this chunky notch that juts out from the top of the screen although it does mean we get that top-notch i'll stop but mac os does utilize the screen space it pushes everything up so we get the mini bar up here now so that 13.6 inch screen is a little bit bigger than 13.3 on the m1 air and also when you're watching movies and tv it's blacked out anyway by the letterboxing although unlike the inky blacks on the mini led macbook pro screens the physically black notch does stand out from the darkish grey letterboxing of that lcd screen and to be fair a 60 hertz lcd non-touch screen for 1250 pounds in 2022 is starting to feel a little bit old hat now but the combination of the slightly bigger screen thanks to the thinner bezels and the extra space we get around the notch the slightly increased brightness also the fact that this supports now one billion colors so in theory we should see a smoother gradation between different colors on screen although i've been watching some stuff side by side it's kind of hard to tell but a professional may be able to tell so it is still a very good screen it's color accurate it gets quite bright i think the resolution which works out to be roughly quad hd is a really good balance for sharpness and battery life at the screen size but i do think when you consider the windows competition and the fact that you can get an asus vivo book with an oled screen for like 450 pounds now high refresh mini led oled options i do kind of wish we'd seen a bigger upgrade for the display we do also get the same two thunderbolt usb 4 ports but now the 3.5 mil jack supports high impedance headphones one for the audio files there and of course we now get magsafe which obviously frees up one of your usb ports from charging the downside is we are still limited to one external display on the macbook air if you do want a multi-monitor setup then you'll have to go for a pro 14 or 16 although you could always output to one monitor and sidecar with your ipad i've also got this guy it's the new 35 watt dual charger so rather than one usbc on the back you've got two so you can plug in your ipad and your macbook and it supports dynamic charging so it will charge them both equally until one's complete and it'll switch over and although this is 35 watts it will charge the air at the same rate as the standard 30 watt charger that you get bundled this is normally a 30 pound optional extra unless you go for a slightly higher spec model in which case this or the 67 watt fast charger is free which will actually top this up from zero to 15 about half an hour i think i'd probably go for that over the flexibility of the extra usbc port but it's nice to have the option i was gonna say that was very very impressive what you did back there i was gonna say that was very very impressive what you did back there the m2 air also gets an upgraded quad speaker setup and while they do sound good and are certainly among the better speaker systems you can get on a laptop this size i was a little bit disappointed it wasn't a particularly noticeable improvement over the m1 air you can hear a touch more bass and also there's a little bit more clarity at higher volumes but really there's not much in it and both the airs are blown away by the macbook pro 14. so the speakers are a tiny bit better and we've got the new high impedance through a half mil headphone jack but i think the biggest upgrade for audio is the fact that this now supports apple's spatial sound so if you pair it with a pair of airpods or recent apple or even beats earphones and you're watching a video or movie or even a facetime call that supports it you can essentially get dolby atmos spatial sound so it sounds a lot more immersive okay so far so good but let's talk about the headline upgrade that new m2 chip i think it's fair to say that that transition from intel to apple's own silicon with the m1 a couple of years ago was probably the biggest leap forward we saw for laptops in the last 10 years or so the jump up 2 m2 however is nowhere near as significant but we're still looking at a roughly 20 to 30 boost over the n1 which is a nice little optic and also with the addition of the media engine which until now was reserved only for the m1 pro and the m1 max if you are video editing this will have a big impact on that performance as well but outside of that and shaving a few minutes off an export or a render there's nothing the m2 air can do that the m1 air can't and if you are concerned about performance and perhaps you're looking at going for more powerful 10 core gpu or up to 24 gigs of unified memory if those performance sort of questions are worrying around in your brain again this is not the one for you get the m1 pro in the 14 of the 16. so here are a few of my benchmark results and actually we're looking at only between sort of seven and 18 boost uh in these two tests to be fair though traditional benchmarks don't really paint the full picture of the faster neural processing the extra media engine the higher bandwidth unified memory all that apple stuff and so bringing in the premiere pro puget test the m2 scored 35 higher and in my 5 minute 4k h264 export test the m2 shaved off over two and a half minutes making it around 30 faster and then in lightroom with my photo export test it was over 30 quicker even shadow of the tomb raider was a playable 42 fps so regular games if i can call them that definitely play better on the m2 but you're still limited by what's available on mac so really your best bets for gaming are to dive into the apple arcade or streaming with geforce now or xbox just pair a controller make sure you've got a fast internet connection and away you go day to day with app loading times desktop use you know normal stuff there's nothing really between them but if you push it harder in more demanding apps you will see a small but noticeable benefit with the m2 and also so far at least i haven't experienced the out of memory pop-up that has come up a couple of times for me on the m1 in the past so i reckon you're good to stick with the eight gigs so this really is an incredibly powerful laptop for its size and of course being fanless it doesn't make a noise at all although i did find it got quite warm underneath when i was rendering or gaming but but the real surprise for me was that despite the bigger screen despite that extra 25 increase in performance i also got a longer battery with this even apple says they should be about the same between the m1 and m2 airs and according to them only the m2 pro 13 can last a couple extra hours well i can tell you that 5 hours of youtube on the m2 air in safari and at 50 brightness used 35 of the battery which means a whopping 15 hours should be achievable but i can also tell you that in my slightly more realistic rundown test of youtube premiere file cut lightroom websites google docs apple tv facetime the m1 air lasted 8 hours and 50 and the m2 air lasted 10 hours 15. in fact the m2 still had 10 of his battery left when the m1 died you can get an extra about an hour on the m2 over the m1 so while the m2 is still based on the same five nanometer architecture clearly those efficiency gains the uh faster unified memory it all comes together and we're getting well a faster longer-lasting laptop that's also brighter with a slightly bigger screen as well not too shabby okay so let's wrap this up and as i said at the beginning if you do already own an m1 air you do not need to buy this however if you are after a new thin and light laptop for emails netflix a bit of work and you just want yourself a slightly nicer air experience then yeah get yourself the new macbook air m2 you're not gonna be disappointed it is a fantastic laptop but personally i wouldn't bother paying extra for more ram more storage or the higher call gpu i know i keep coming back to this but then the 14 inch pro makes more sense sorry what's that what about the new pro 13 with the m2 uh for a hundred quid more you can get the macbook pro 13 m2 but it's the old design it still has a touch bar it's got the rubbish webcam i wouldn't really recommend it in its favor it does have a fan so you're going to get slightly better sustained performance and also apple stage should have a little bit of a longer battery life but this already lasts basically forever anyway so outside of a very nice group of people who really want the old style macbook with a touch bar and definitely have to have a fan no one should really consider the 13 inch m2 but what about you though if you are thinking about upgrading do you have your heart set on the new m2 or you're going to save a few quid with the m1 or pay a bit more for the 14 or none of the above let me know in the comments below and also again apologies for a somewhat slightly sweaty and haunty time because i'm still pretty unwell with covid but nothing will stop me making videos nothing so if you did enjoy this then a cheeky little like and subscribe would be very much appreciated and i'll catch you next time right here on the tech chat

Channel: The Tech Chap

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Id: gZbFTSnb954

Length: 13min 53sec (833 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 14 2022