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The new MacBook Air with the M2 chip will be released this Friday. Ahead, the first reviews of the new MacBook Air were shared by some media outlets and YouTube channels, which take 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 display with a notch, MagSafe charging, an improved 1080p camera, and new Starlight color options and Midnight alongside Silver and Space Gray. The notebook is also equipped with two Thunderbolt 3 ports and a 3.5mm headphone jack with support for high-impedance headphones.
Prices for the new MacBook Air start at $1,199. The notebook is available with up to 24 GB unified memory and up to 2 TB SSD.
overall impressions
Engadget‘s Devindra Hardawar said the new MacBook Air is “Apple’s near-perfect Mac”:
The Air is impressively thin and light, but it also has a bigger and better screen, a great speaker set, and a nifty MagSafe power adapter. And thanks to Apple’s M2 chip, it’s also much faster than the last model, a computer I called “breathtakingly fast” a year and a half ago. Once again, Apple has set a new standard for ultraportables.
The edge‘s Dan Seifert said the new MacBook Air is “a success on virtually every level,” but he said customers looking to upgrade from an older notebook should still consider the previous MacBook Air with the M1 chip , which starts at $999:
The new MacBook Air is a success on practically every level. It has a better screen, thinner and lighter design, better speakers, vastly improved webcam, great keyboard and trackpad, more convenient charging, and great build quality.
But that success comes at a price, literally, and the performance improvements over the M1 model aren’t as strong as the design and feature improvements. The M2 Air is a better choice than the 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro model for the vast majority of people, although the Pro has slightly better performance and longer battery life.
Faster performance with M2 chip
In his test, Jason Snell shared a variety of benchmarks for the new MacBook Air Six colors. In line with Apple’s advertising, Geekbench 5 results show that the M2 chip delivers up to 18% faster multi-core performance compared to the M1 model, while single-core performance is up to 11% faster is.
Thinner and lighter design
The new MacBook Air ditches the notebook’s iconic wedge-shaped design in favor of a slimmer design. The edge‘s Dan Seifert said he was “a fan of this new design”, which he described as “remarkably thin” and “extremely wearable”:
Still, it’s remarkably thin – just a touch more than 11 millimeters – and that thinness is immediately noticeable when you open the lid and start typing. It also stands out when you put it in a bag or carry it around. The tapered shape of the older MacBook Air had less visual weight and may look thinner, but the new model is actually slimmer than its predecessor.
It’s also slightly lighter, at 2.7 pounds versus the older model’s 2.8. It’s not a huge difference, and the Air is far from the lightest computer you can buy, but it makes it extremely portable and easy to take anywhere I need it.
Slower SSD in the base model
In a statement to The edge, an Apple spokesperson confirmed that the new MacBook Air’s base 256GB model will feature a single NAND chip, which will result in slower SSD speeds in benchmark tests. Apple said the new MacBook Air’s real-world performance is “even faster,” but the statement doesn’t explicitly refer to SSD speeds:
Thanks to the performance gains from M2, the new MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro are incredibly fast, even when compared to Mac laptops with the powerful M1 chip. These new systems use a new, higher-density NAND that offers 256GB of storage in a single chip. While benchmarks of the 256GB SSD may show a difference compared to the previous generation, the performance of these M2-based systems is even faster for real-world activities.
Last month, the 256GB model of the 13-inch MacBook Pro with the M2 chip was found to have up to 50% slower SSD read speeds and up to 30% slower SSD read speeds in benchmarks compared to the corresponding previous-generation model. writing speeds.
The dilemma stems from the fact that Apple has switched to using a single 256GB flash memory chip instead of two 128GB chips in the base models of the new MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro. Configurations with 512 GB of memory or more are equipped with multiple NAND chips that enable higher speeds in parallel.
If the fastest SSD speeds are important to your workflow, we recommend configuring the new MacBook Air with at least 512GB of storage.
