I’ve been using the 15” MacBook Air as my every-day laptop for over a month and I think
this is the closest Apple has ever gotten to the perfect laptop—but that doesn’t mean I'm going to
keep using it; nor should you should rush out to buy one. Lemme cook here. Since the MacBook Air
debuted 15-years-ago, it hasn't been offered in a size greater than 13". For a few years there,
we had an even smaller version available at 11.6", but never larger than 13 and it... never
made sense. The simple reality is that a lot of people want big screens: be it aging eyesight,
larger workspace requirements, laptop-only workflows, whatever... and until last month,
the only way to get an Apple laptop larger than 14" in size was to spend at least $2,500 for a 16"
MacBook Pro that is hulkingly overkill for many that merely seek more display real estate. Adding
a larger panel to the M2 MacBook Air everyone already liked was a no-brainer and most everything
that was good about that machine transfers over: the phenomenal keyboard is the best Apple has ever
put in a laptop with excellent travel and a full-size function row, the webcam won't
hold a candle to a smartphone but provides better picture quality than most competing products and
offers a number of useful effects. Our testing discovered that the screen offers surprisingly
even backlighting and about 470 nits sustained brightness which is adequate for most buyers. Now,
that larger display does require a beefier battery, but our testing still achieved 10-11
hours of fairly heavy mixed use—which is, in a word: great. And the good doesn't stop there.
In fact, there's a number of things that the 15" does even better than it's smaller sibling.
I was really underwhelmed by the tinny 13" Air's speakers—they were bad. The
15" Air has much better low-end response and avoids distortion altogether; however,
I did still find it to get a tad muddy near about 70% volume or higher. They
don't hold a candle to the MacBook Pro, but they're adequate. Here's a comparison:
We discovered in our review of the 13" M2 Air that the silicon throttled fairly heavily
during sustained workloads due to the lack of a spinning fan. The 15" continues this trend and
it can't match the sustained performance of an actively cooled M2 Mac mini; however, it makes
fairly major improvements over the smaller Air in sustained workloads across the board: from
synthetic tests like Cinebench to real-world loads such as video encoding tasks and Xcode project
compile times. Given the nearly identical looking cooling strategy, this basically comes down to
good 'ol physics: greater thermal mass can absorb and dissipate greater thermal energy. Go figure.
While the keyboard doesn't add any features over the 13" Air, the trackpad certainly does gaining
a massive size increase. Other small changes found between models are that I find the 15" easier to
open one-handed given its heavier bottom case, and despite having the same webcam, the 15" Air seems
a little bit sharper than the 13". Additionally, the same-sized-notch-on-a-bigger-screen means
that you're less likely to encounter apps that push menubar items across said notch—though,
it'll still happen pretty often if you're a heavy pro apps user.
Whereas these computers share the same strengths, they also share the same weaknesses. I mentioned
in last year's M2 Air review that the advertised starting price is a bit of a lie because anybody
wanting to future-proof themselves would do well to avoid this insane stock config:
256GB of storage and 8GB of memory. In 2023. For reference, those were the same stock specs on the
2015 MacBook—a computer with the same starting price tag as this one—but released 8 years ago.
Additionally, like the 13" Air before it, the upgrade pricing for memory and storage on this
machine is ludicrous. We live in a world where you can pick up a 2TB Samsung 980 Pro with 3x
greater disk speeds than the SSD in this machine for $100. What does Apple charge to upgrade to 2TB
of storage? Oh, you know, just eight times more than that. By the time you hit what I'd consider
a reasonable configuration for now and the future, you're no longer at $1,300—you're at $1,700. And
guess what you can get for $1,700? A 14" M2 Pro MacBook Pro. That's a machine that has a massively
improved display—best in class, in fact—with a high refresh rate, HDR, miniLED backlighting,
better color accuracy, and dual-pixel native resolution. It's a machine with a significantly
faster SoC that also stays whisper quiet offering better performance and similar battery life.
It's a machine with better speakers, a better microphone array, a better webcam, better I/O, the
ability to drive multiple displays, it's better at literally everything save one area: weight and
size. But here's the thing... it's only marginally heavier with a moderately smaller screen.k
And that's something I haven't brought up yet. The 15" MacBook Air is not Air-like.
You will not find yourself marveling how light it feels relative to how large it is
like Apple's smaller notebooks. This thing is 22% heavier and 27% larger than the 13"
MacBook Air and you feel every percent. In a backpack, I cannot tell the difference
between the 15" Air and the 14" Pro. The new Air is not even class-leading when comparing
itself to Windows notebooks in weight. Both the latest Microsoft Surface and LG Gram are lighter.
Don't misunderstand... I'm not saying the 15" MacBook Air is a bad buy—if you value screen
size relative to weight above all else, you'll be very happy with this machine. Furthermore,
this is going to be a big hit amongst businesses that want to offer a larger display size option
to employees without the expense of a 16" MacBook Pro. But if you're a regular joe that finds 13"
just a little too small, I urge you to go check out the 14" MacBook Pro. If that's a screen size
that seems viable, you'll be happier with the display, silicon, I/O, and everything else now
and into the future. The 15" MacBook Air is nearly perfect—but it has to compete with the best value
laptop Apple's ever made—a computer I don't think Apple themselves will be able to ever top again.
If you'd have told me 5-years-ago that we'd need to weigh our options when considering
a new MacBook because they're all too good, I'd have never believed you—but the future
is now, baby. And I'm here for it. Thanks so much for watching, and as always, stay snazzy.