The new MacBook Air with the M2 chip launches this Friday. Earlier, some media and YouTube channels have shared the first reviews of the new MacBook Air, offering a closer look at the redesigned notebook and its capabilities.
Key features of the new MacBook Air include Apple’s latest M2 chip, a new design with flatter edges, a slightly larger 13.6-inch screen with a notch, MagSafe charging, an improved 1080p camera and new Starlight and Midnight color options along with Silver and Space. Gray. The laptop is also equipped with two Thunderbolt 3 ports and a 3.5mm headphone jack with high impedance headphone stand.
The price of the new MacBook Air starts at $ 1,199. The laptop is available with up to 24 GB of unified memory and an SSD of up to 2 TB.
General impressions
Engadget’s Devindra Hardawar said the new MacBook Air is “Apple’s almost perfect Mac”:
The Air is impressively thin and light, but it also has a bigger and better screen, a large set of speakers and a MagSafe power adapter. And thanks to Apple’s M2 chip, it’s also much faster than the latest model, a computer I called “incredibly fast” just a year and a half ago. Once again, Apple has set a new standard for ultraportables.
Dan Seifert of The Verge said the new MacBook Air is “a hit on virtually every level,” but said customers who want to upgrade from an older laptop should still consider the previous MacBook Air with the M1 chip, which starts at $ 999:
The new MacBook Air is a hit on virtually every level. It has a better screen, a thinner and lighter design, better speakers, a much improved webcam, an excellent keyboard and trackpad, a more comfortable load and excellent build quality.
But that success comes at a cost, literally, and the performance advances over the M1 model aren’t as blunt as the design and feature enhancements. The M2 Air is a better choice for the vast majority of people compared to the 13-inch MacBook Pro model M2, although the Pro has slightly better performance and a longer battery life.
Faster performance with the M2 chip
Jason Snell shared a variety of benchmarks for the new MacBook Air in his review of Six Colors. According to Apple advertising, the results of Geekbench 5 show that the M2 chip offers multi-core performance up to 18% faster compared to the M1 model, while the single-core performance is up to 11% faster.
Thinner and lighter design
The new MacBook Air removes the iconic wedge-shaped design from the laptop in favor of a flatter design. Dan Seifert of The Verge said he is “a fan of this new design,” which he described as “extraordinarily thin” and “extremely portable”:
However, it is very thin, just a little over 11 millimeters, and this thinness is immediately noticeable when you open the lid and start writing on it. It is also noticeable whenever you fit it in a bag or carry it. The sharp shape of the older MacBook Air had less visual weight and might look thinner, but the new model is actually thinner than its predecessor.
It’s also a little lighter, with 2.7 pounds compared to the previous model’s 2.8. It’s not a big difference, and the Air is far from the lightest computer you can buy, but it makes it extremely portable and easy to carry where you need it.
Slower SSD on base model
In a statement issued to The Verge, an Apple spokesman confirmed that the 256GB base model of the new MacBook Air has a single NAND chip, which will result in slower SSD speeds in benchmark tests. Apple said the actual performance of the new MacBook Air is “even faster,” but the statement makes no explicit reference to SSD speeds:
Thanks to the performance increases of the M2, the new MacBook Air and the 13-inch MacBook Pro are incredibly fast, even compared to Mac laptops with the powerful M1 chip. These new systems use a new higher density NAND that offers 256GB of storage using a single chip. While the benchmarks of the 256GB SSD may show a difference compared to the previous generation, the performance of these M2-based systems for real-world activities is even faster.
Last month, it was discovered that the 256GB model of the 13-inch MacBook Pro with the M2 chip has SSD read speeds up to 50% slower and SSD write speeds up to 30% slower compared with the equivalent model of the previous generation at the benchmarks.
The dilemma arises from the fact that Apple went on to use a single 256GB flash storage chip instead of two 128GB chips on the base models of the new MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro. Configurations equipped with 512 GB of storage or more are equipped with multiple NAND chips, which allow faster speeds in parallel.
If faster SSD speeds are important to your workflow, we recommend setting up your new MacBook Air with at least 512GB of storage.