- Two years ago, Apple released one
of its most impressive laptops it's ever made
with the M1 MacBook Air.
But as good as that machine was and still is,
all of the advancements were on the inside.
The outside of it was an old design
that we've been familiar with for years.
Now, Apple has released a brand new Air
with a complete redesign that brings the outside
up to speed with how impressive the inside is.
Plus it's got the latest M2 chip
for even better performance than before.
There are some buts, though,
and the big one is this new Air is $200 more expensive
than the older one, starting at 1199.
Plus with the M1 Air still being produced,
you can find sales and deals on it quite easily
which pushes the price gap between the two even further
while the real world performance difference
might not be as much as you might think.
So let's dive in.
(cool electronic music)
I'm here to tell you the wedge is gone.
The new Air is the same thickness in the front
as it is in the back.
Some people might be bummed that Apple's moved away
from this iconic MacBook Air shape, but I'm not one of them.
I think this new design is fantastic
and exactly what Apple needed to do.
It's modern and sleek, and just really nice to look at.
That is, unless you get this new midnight color.
This new color is quite beautiful.
It's got a blue black finish that changes in the light
but as soon as you touch it,
it gets covered in nasty fingerprints.
And if you're anything like me, those will drive you batty.
Apple's far from the only company
to face this problem on dark colored laptops.
I'm looking at you Razor.
But if that's something that will bother you,
go with one of the other colors.
I've also got the new silver gold starlight color here
and it stays fingerprint free without issue.
Though the wedge shape is gone,
the new Air is remarkably thin.
In fact, it's even thinner than the older model.
It's hard to convey in words just how thin this computer is.
But as soon as you open it and start typing on it,
you'll notice it.
The bottom half is barely thicker than an iPad.
The new Air is also slightly lighter than the old one
at 2.7 pounds versus 2.8.
Now this is far from the lightest computer you can buy,
but it's certainly light enough that toting it
around wherever I need to go isn't a problem.
But since this is an Apple computer
we're talking about here, that thinner profile
and lighter weight doesn't make
the new Air feel flimsy or weak.
It's just as well built and sturdy feeling
as the rest of Apple's MacBook line
and I don't fish foresee any bending
or durability issues here.
This is just a really nice computer to hold and use.
With this new design, Apple has basically changed
every aspect of the Air right down
to its ports and charging configuration.
It's got the resurrected MagSafe charging
that debuted on the MacBook pro 14 and 16 last year
and it's just as nice here as it was there.
You even get a color matched cable in the box.
Take that, MacBook Pro.
Since the Air can now charge over MagSafe,
you effectively get an extra port because you don't have
to use one of the two Thunderbolt ports
for charging anymore.
Though you can if you want.
Unfortunately, it's still just two ports
and they are both on the left hand side.
I'd really have loved some ports on the right side,
and while I know it would never happen,
a USBA port is still super useful
in this, the 2022nd year of our dongle.
Alas, this USB hub is staying in my bag.
Also Apple still limiting external displays
than just one here, so if you like to plug your laptop
into two monitors you'll need to step up
to a 14 inch MacBook Pro or find some other work around.
Let's talk about chargers real quick
because in a very uncharacteristic fashion,
Apple's actually giving you a choice here.
The base model Air comes at the same 30 watt USBC brick
we've been familiar with forever,
but if you get the step up model, you can choose
between a 35 watt charger with two USBC ports on it
or a larger 67 watt brick that has one port
and can fast charge the Air to 50% in about 30 minutes.
My review unit came with the two port charger
and it's fine, but I'd probably opt
for the 67 watt brick for the ability to fast charge,
even though it's physically a little bigger.
With the Air plugged into the 35 watt charger,
it gained an average of about 25% battery in 30 minutes.
The bigger charger would be about twice as fast as that,
and the 35 watt charger speed will drop
to half of its already slower pace when I've got
my iPhone plugged into it at the same time.
I wish that Apple had just put two ports
on the bigger brick, but there are a lot
of third party chargers that are smaller,
faster, and cheaper than what Apple sells
and they work just fine with the Air's MagSafe cable.
If you look down at the Air's deck, you'll probably notice
that it doesn't have any speaker grills
like virtually every other MacBook has.
Instead, the speakers are integrated
between the keyboard and the display for a cleaner look.
There's four speakers in there,
two woofers and two tweeters,
and they support Apple's spatial audio technology.
The side by side against the M1 Air,
they sound a little bit better
with maybe a little less hollow sounding
or echoey sound to them at full volume.
But the difference really isn't huge
or my ears are just old and I can't tell anymore
but I can tell you that they aren't on the level
of the MacBook Pro 14 or 16's, bassy, thumpy speakers
but they're still excellent for video calls,
watching TV shows and movies,
or whatever else you might wanna listen
to on a thin and light laptop like this.
Plus, there's fortunately still a 3.5 millimeter
headphone jack for wired audio.
Last note on the design here, the branding.
If you look closely and maybe if you have an older Air
to compare side by side, you'll notice that the Apple logo
on the lid is about 30% bigger than before
but at the same time, the new Air doesn't have MacBook Air
printed anywhere on it.
It's not under the screen.
It's not on the bound panel.
It's nowhere.
You'll just have to trust me that this is in fact
the new MacBook Air and not some other laptop model.
The other big thing that comes
with this new design is a brand new display.
It's a little bit bigger, 13.6 inches versus 13.3.
But most of that is in the height
as it's noticeably taller than before.
There are also smaller bezels around the sides
and top and bottom giving it a more modern feel.
It's also noticeably brighter than the older Air,
hitting 434 nits of peak brightness in my tests.
That makes it bright enough to use outdoors
and it's just more comfortable to look at all day long.
Makes the screen feel more roomy, less cramped,
and just more comfortable to work on
without making the computer so much bigger or bulkier.
It is not as impressive as the mini LED screens
you get on the MacBook Pro 14 or 16,
but it's a certain improvement
over the old Air's display and better
than what you get on the 13 inch MacBook Pro M2.
But this display now comes with a notch
just like the MacBook Pro 14 and 16.
Let me tell you, I hate the notch
on my own 14 inch Pro, and I hate it on this thing.
It's not because it's ugly or distracting,
it's because it completely messes up
how I use the menu bar on a Mac.
See, I love menu bar apps.
I've got ones for clocks, calendars, tasks,
system monitoring, and a bunch of other utilities
but the notch takes up enough space that a lot
of my menu bar apps just don't show up anymore.
There are ironically other menu bar apps you can use
to make this workable, Bartender happens to work best
for my needs, but it's annoying that a third party app
is necessary to make Apple's own design usable here.
Fortunately, inside that notch is a new 1080P webcam
that's so much better than the crappy 720P camera
on the older Air models and the current M2 MacBook Pro.
It's got better color, contrast, more detail.
It just really looks great for video calls.
While we're on the topic of video calls,
the MacBook Air's three mic array really sounds great.
It's got great noise cancellation
and clear audio, no complaints.
All right, that's all the new stuff on the outside
but Apple's also made some updates to the internals here.
My review unit is a $1,499 configuration
with eight gigabytes of Ram and 512 gigs of storage.
It's probably the right spec for most people,
which I'll get into in a bit.
The main update here is it has the new M2 arm chip
which is also in the MacBook Pro 13
that Monica recently reviewed.
In the base Air, it has eight CPU cores and eight GPU cores.
In the model I've got here, it's got 10 GPU cores,
same as the 13 inch Pro, and two more than you could get
in the M1 air.
But while the Pro is a little thicker and has a fan,
the Air is thin and sleek, and it doesn't have a fan.
It's a perfectly silent computer, but the lack of fan
and thinner design makes the M2 chip
perform noticeably worse in benchmark testing.
It doesn't really take much to get the system to throttle
back the power being sent to the chip,
and slow its speeds down
to keep temperatures manageable.
Here you could see the impact of that in our test results
of the multicourse in a bench 23 benchmark.
It also shows up in other stress tests
like when we're using Premier Pro for video editing
or exporting a lot of raw photos from Lightroom.
The Air is just noticeably slower
at these things than the Pro.
The bottom of the computer also gets considerably
warm doing these tests.
The other thing to be aware of is Apple confirmed
to me that the base 1199 model with 256 gigs of storage
has just one NAND storage chip,
which makes its storage perform much slower
when copying files or multitasking
between a bunch of apps that models
with the 512 gigs or more of storage,
which have two NAND chips.
It's even likely to be slower than the base model
M1 Air storage because that used two chips.
Now the new 13 inch Pro has the same problem
and we'll be testing the base Air just to see how
slow it is in practice.
So be sure to check out the verge for that.
The short answer though, don't buy the base model
if you can avoid it.
The overall question with most of these performance results
though is does it really matter for the Air?
And the answer is for most people, probably not.
For the things that an Air is ideal for:
productivity work, browsing the web, video calls,
watching TV shows or movies, writing term papers,
stuff like that, the performance is more than adequate
even if you're spending all day doing those tasks.
I never once ran into a performance issue
or felt the computer heat up while I was using the Air
to do my actual job as a knowledge worker.
It's also fine for occasional light photo and video editing
especially if you're using Apple's photos
or iMovie apps for those tasks.
There's just no good reason to buy 13 inch M2 Pro
over the Air to save a few seconds on tasks
you only do occasionally and then give up
all of the other benefits you'd appreciate
on the Air every single day, like the better screen,
better webcam, MagSafe, thinner and lighter weight,
and so on.
If you think you're going to be relying on your computer
for regularly doing intensive creative work
like professional video editing, raw photo editing,
or even a lot of coding, you should probably be looking
at a MacBook Pro and likely the 14 or 16 inch models.
For the rest of us, unless you really have your heart set
on that mini LED screen and are willing to pay a lot for it,
the Air is where it's at,
and we get a lighter, quieter computer to boot.
All of these design changes and new internals may cause
some concern about battery life, but I'm happy to report
that in my testing, battery life is right
in line with what we saw on the M1 Air.
That means I can get eight to 10 hours
of real continuous use out of the machine for my workloads,
maybe a little on the lower end of that
if I'm doing a lot of zoom calls.
Perhaps slightly longer on days I have fewer meetings,
and that's with the display at a comfortable 200 nits
of brightness and using Chrome, Slack, multiple spaces,
all my lovely menu bar apps, and lots of other
inefficient things that I do throughout the day.
It's not as impressive as the battery life Monica got
on the new 13 inch MacBook Pro with M2
but I tend to get worse battery life in my laptop usage
than a lot of my colleagues and other people I've spoken to.
So I don't think it's a reason to be concerned with the Air.
If you're coming from an older Intel MacBook Air
like most people who are likely to buy this computer,
you'll be thrilled with the battery life you get out of it.
So that's a new MacBook Air.
It's a computer that's been a long time coming.
The last time Apple redesigned
this model was four years ago,
and even then it wasn't hugely different
from the one that preceded it for nearly a decade.
But here we've got something completely new
and aligned with the advancements Apple's made
in its processor line over the past couple of years.
That isn't to say it's perfect or the right computer
for those with specific demanding needs,
but it is the right computer
for a huge section of laptop buyers.
I can absolutely say I choose this new Air
over the 13 inch MacBook Pro M2 any day of the week.
I just can't see buying that MacBook Pro
for its minor performance boost and longer battery life,
and then giving up all of the Air's other advantages,
at least for my needs.
The harder choice might be between this new Air
and the older M1 model which has similar battery life
and performance and can be bought for a lot less money
but you'll give up the new design, better display,
MagSafe, and better camera there too.
I think most people buying the new Air are well suited
by the mid range, 1499 configuration I reviewed,
which provides a little more processor power,
faster and more roomy storage,
faster charging, and great performance.
You might consider bumping up the Ram to 16 gigabytes
if you can swing it, but I don't think
most people will need to.
And if you've already got an M1 Air,
you don't need to upgrade yet.
The performance differences aren't enough
to really warrant it, and that's still
an excellent machine in its own right.
But if you're coming from an older Air,
especially an Intel model, or you're looking to switch
from windows to Mac for the first time,
the new MacBook Air brings a lot to the table
and you won't be disappointed,
provided you can put up with its cost.
Hey all, thanks for watching.
Monica's unfortunately been under the weather lately
so I filled in for her on this review
but I promise she'll be back on the next one.
We're also gonna be doing a lot more follow up testing
on the new MacBook air on the verge.com,
so what else do you wanna know about it?
Let us know in the comments below.