(upbeat music)
- What's up?
MKBHD here and welcome
to the 15-inch MacBook Air review.
This laptop, thankfully, is exactly what you think it is.
It's a MacBook Air, but bigger.
This is the Tesla Model Y of laptops.
You see the Tesla Model 3
was the most important model for Tesla.
They had other more expensive flagships,
but this was the entry level,
attainable version for the masses,
and it quickly became their most recommended
and best-selling car.
And it's the way that most people got into Tesla
and formed their first Tesla experience.
But sneakily, bigger cars are actually more popular
and in America especially, people can't help,
but want a version that's a little bigger,
a little higher off the ground.
So they did the obvious thing and made Tesla model Y.
It's built on the same platform as a Model 3,
but a little bigger and a little higher off the ground
and pretty much instantly has rocketed up
to the top of the lineup to the point
where it's now the most popular new car on planet Earth.
(tape rewinding)
See, the MacBook Air was the most important Mac for Apple.
I mean, they had other expensive flagships,
but this was the most entry level
attainable model for the masses.
And it quickly became their most recommended
and best-selling Mac.
And it's the first way most people got into the Mac
and formed their first Mac OS experiences.
But sneakily, bigger screens are actually,
the most popular and in America especially,
people can't help but want a version
with a little bit of a bigger screen.
So, they did the obvious thing
and made the 15-inch MacBook Air.
It's built on the same platform as the 14-inch MacBook Air,
but a little bit bigger screen,
and I predict it'll pretty much instantly
rocket to the top of the lineup
to the point where it is the most popular 15-inch laptop
and the most popular Mac on planet Earth.
We kinda already know what the M2 MacBook Air is.
If you haven't already seen it,
I'll link the review right below the light button
that covers it.
My only real questions going into the review
of the bigger one were,
one, is there any real benefit to the bigger screen?
How much better is it really?
And two, are there any other benefits
to getting a bigger laptop?
So, I think the whole bigger screen thing is pretty clear.
There are literally millions of people
who today go into stores and ask for a 15-inch laptop,
and when they did, Apple would have to bring people
over to the 16-inch MacBook Pro as their cheapest option,
which starts at $2,500.
So, now they have this.
Now, is there a dramatically more information
that can fit on the screen?
Not really.
Is it a dramatically better quality display
than the smaller one?
Nah, it mostly just feels bigger.
Bigger videos, bigger movies, bigger texts,
bigger windows, just just a little more room
for everything to be a little bit bigger.
And you only pay for that really
with a little bit of exercise as far as the laptop goes.
This thing is still 11 and a half millimeters thin
and weighs 3.3 pounds.
It's super slim.
It's a quarter of a millimeter thicker
and half a pound heavier than the smaller MacBook Air,
which I kinda mentioned this earlier,
but I forgot that basically,
already has 14-inch diagonal screens
with its thinner bezels.
So, you can really just measure out
1.3 extra inches diagonally
to get to the proper 15.3 inch laptop size.
Still, it has decently thin bezels,
not the thinnest in the world,
still has the notch cutout for face ID.
I mean, sorry, no face ID.
It has just a webcam and a microphone.
It still just has touch ID on the keyboard
and nothing else about
the display itself really has changed.
It's the same tech, the same pixel density,
the same brightness, 500 nits, 60 hertz.
It's fine, the screen is fine.
It's just bigger.
So all right, now that the whole footprint
of the laptop is also bigger,
what more can you get out of that?
First of all, sneaky, slightly bigger trackpad.
So, the keyboard is the same size,
but actually, the trackpad does get a little bit bigger,
which is nice.
Kind of matches the larger display.
And also, there is more room inside for speakers.
So, Apple's added not bigger speakers,
but just actually, a second set of force-canceling woofers,
which would theoretically make the sound
a little punchier, maybe add some bass.
And I can say it is louder.
It does get louder overall
and have a bit more bass than the smaller MacBook Air,
but it's not like game changing.
I'm impressed that they can get louder without distorting,
but they are not close to the maybe
unfair 16-inch MacBook Pro speakers.
But just to give you an idea of the context.
Also, some people have noted it looks kind of weird
to have like no speaker grills
to the left and right of the keyboard,
but the speakers are still in the same place
as they were on the smaller one.
up in the hinge of the MacBook Air.
And then there's also more room inside for bigger battery.
And my experience actually lines up pretty well
with what Apple said, which is,
look, it's the same chip set,
very similar laptop, bigger screen
and bigger battery sort of cancel each other out.
And you end up with roughly
the same battery life as a smaller machine.
And that's to say it's quite good,
full workday of battery life pretty much guaranteed,
multiple light days in a row.
No problem.
So, then the last thing I wanted to test is,
actually, is there a difference in performance
between the small M2 MacBook Air and the big one?
Since theoretically, there's just a little more room inside
for a little extra thermal headroom.
Like there's no way it's significant,
but these are very different sized laptops
and the old one when it was torn apart,
didn't have a heatsink.
So maybe there's room for
a little passive heatsink in this one.
They're both fan less, but I had to check it.
So, in single core bursty performance,
I never expect to see any difference and I really didn't.
I ran off back to back Geekbench 6 benchmarks,
small drop off after the first one for each,
but no noticeable difference.
But then I ran back to back
10 minute Cinebench multi-core benchmarks,
which kind of just run continuously
to test some more reliable sustained workloads.
And there was a slightly bigger dip
on the smaller M2 Air.
And so potentially, yes, over time
this may add up to a bit more thermal throttling.
But my conclusion is, you can see the numbers on paper,
but this difference is unlikely to be noticeable.
Like I said, they're both running the M2 chip
and most behavior on laptops like this
is so bursty and short that
they perform basically identically.
But if you do happen to get into
those long multi-minute sustained workloads in a row,
like exporting a video, editing a video, gaming even,
then maybe you'd notice
a little bit more out of this bigger one over time.
But you'll notice a bigger difference
on the 14-inch MacBook Pro,
which is just a little bit above this one in price.
So, if you know you're gonna be doing workloads like that
then you probably are looking at a Pro laptop.
And matter of fact, let's just talk about
what I think is the biggest X-factor with this laptop.
The biggest hurdle between this
and being the Tesla Model Y of laptops, is the price.
So, this baseline version, this a little Starlight one,
which kind of almost matches this a little bit,
little sand color, starts at 1,299.
And that is the base version,
which you can't upgrade these laptops over time.
So, you tend to wanna get as much as you can
out of the initial purchase.
This base version only has eight gigs of shared memory
and 256 gigs of storage
that can actually pretty quickly become a $1,700 laptop
with just a few clicks to upgrade those things.
And that's pricey.
So, there's a lot of Windows laptops that you can get
at that price that will probably do
one specific thing better than this one,
whether it's the XPF 15 with a nicer display
or the ROG Zephyrus,
which is gonna be better for gaming and has more ports.
You can get flipping and folding laptops
that spin over backwards and gaming laptops even.
But none of them will be quite the package that this is,
which is a really thin and light
daily 15-inch screen laptop,
like this is kind of just
the ultimate baseline for most people's activities.
So, to have all those things sort of well-rounded into one,
the thinness and lightness, the nice display,
the great battery life,
the impressive performance from the M2,
that's what makes this the MacBook Air.
It's got the A1 build quality,
it's got the color matching braided MagSafe cable,
which also connects to the 35 watt charging brick
with dual USB-C ports,
which you could actually swap out
for a slightly larger 70 watt brick
with a single port for faster charging.
That's a free swap on Apple site.
And of course, you can't forget the ecosystem stuff,
the messages, the FaceTime, et cetera,
all the stuff that plugs into Apple's world.
Despite its potentially premium price,
people will pounce on this popular pick.
Thanks for watching.
Catch you guys the next one.
Peace.
(upbeat jazz music)