Are you looking at buying an M2 MacBook Air?
Maybe you are wondering if it's going to cook your thighs
into a medium rare human steak, because as you already know,
the M2 MacBook Air does not have a fan,
and instead uses passive cooling to dissipate heat,
unlike of course the M2 MacBook Pro.
But even with the fan, some people claim,
that the M2 chip just runs really hot
and thermal throttles a lot.
So how about the M2 MacBook Air?
How hot does it get? Does it thermal throttle?
And what kind of performance loss can we expect
compared to the M2 MacBook Pro?
Well, in this video, I'm going to put the Air
through a series of real life tests,
compare the temperatures with the previous M1 MacBook Air,
and also perform the most important test of them all,
the lap test.
Now, before we get into this video,
it's important to understand,
that at the end of the day, this is a fan-less MacBook.
So it is going to thermal throttle,
and that's not a bad thing.
I mean, it's designed this way, and don't forget,
some of the trade offs of having no fan,
including of course no fan noise,
a lighter weight, thinner chassis,
and not needing to open the MacBook up every once in a while
and clean out all the dust.
The MacBook Air is for your average user,
who's looking for something compact and portable,
but isn't going to be regularly pushing the machine
to its limits.
And so that is what I'm going to be focusing on
in this video.
Starting with the internals,
here's the M1 MacBook Air to begin with.
You can see the little metal heat sink
over the M1 chip and this dissipates heat,
a lot of it absorbing into the back cover.
And this is the new M2 MacBook Air,
which looks completely different.
The entire logic board is covered
in thermal dissipation material,
spreading the heat more evenly.
And again, a lot of this heat is then absorbed
into the chassis of the MacBook.
Contrasted with the M2 MacBook Pro,
which has a metal heat sink over the M2 chip
and a fan actively cooling this heat sink
via an air intake at the rear.
So as you can see,
the thermal design has changed quite a lot
between the M1 and now M2 MacBook Air.
And we will see how this impacts performance in this video.
Also, just FYI,
we are doing a giveaway on this channel.
It's either an M1 MacBook Air
or a 1000 US dollar Apple gift card.
All you need to do to enter is subscribe
and check the description down below for more details.
Okay, let's have a chat about just how hot
the M2 MacBook Air gets.
If you are just browsing the internet or watching a video
it won't even get warm,
but what about once you start doing something
a bit more intensive?
Well, for the first couple of minutes,
the CPU cores would reach over 100 degrees Celsius,
which is very, very hot
and is significantly hotter than the M1 MacBook Air.
So it seems Apple is allowing the M2 CPU
to reach much higher temperatures before throttling
and as expected after that initial burst
of typically around three to five minutes,
the temperature would drop to a relatively cool 85 degrees.
This is because the M2 chip actually reduces the wattage,
AKA uses less power on purpose to lower the temperature.
And you can see this in action
during an entirely unrealistic thermal stress test I ran.
The CPU performance cores on the M2 MacBook Air
were initially the same as the M2 MacBook Pro,
achieving the maximum 3.2 gigahertz clock speeds.
However, after a few minutes due to heat,
they throttle down to around two gigahertz,
unlike the MacBook Pro which stayed the same,
due to its fan keeping the M2 chip cooler.
And you can also see that because of this,
the M2 MacBook Air's power usage is greatly restricted,
only using around 15 Watts versus 26 Watts on the Pro.
So how does all of this relate to actual performance?
Let's start with the CPU.
Now, bear in mind that unlike the GPU,
this is an apples to apples comparison
because both the M2 MacBook Air
and M2 MacBook Pro base models,
which we are comparing in this video,
both of them come with eight CPU cores.
So if you do a quick code compilation
or export a few Lightroom photos, for example,
and the CPU is only at 100% for a few minutes or less,
you won't notice a difference between the two,
as you can see in these examples.
So let's move on to some situations
where the CPU does in fact, get a bit toasty.
I'm going to start with Cinebench,
which is a benchmark that stresses the CPU cores
at 100% for about 10 minutes.
And in my opinion I don't really see many people
putting their CPU under this much pressure
for much longer than this.
So I think this is a pretty good example.
And looking at the results,
you can see a pretty respectable performance
from the M2 Air,
only 8% slower than the M2 MacBook Pro.
And this is also better than the 10% gap
between the previous M1 MacBook Air
and MacBook Pro generation.
But if you're doing anything longer than about 10 minutes
this gap starts to widen.
For all the developers and programmers out there,
I compiled the Firefox source code
and found that the Air starts to throttle quite a bit.
once you get past that 10 minute threshold.
You can also see that the difference
between the M1 generation is smaller here.
And that's because the M1 CPU cores use less wattage,
resulting in lower overall temperatures and less throttling.
Now, some people might say
that this is an unrealistic workflow, right?
Like putting the CPU under 100% pressure for 20 minutes
doesn't happen very often.
And while that might be the case,
you do also have to understand that the MacBook Air line up
is very popular for developers and coders.
And this is something that some of them
will do relatively often.
Moving on, once we add the GPU into the mix,
things start to get a little bit different.
One thing to note here is that we are comparing base models.
So the M2 MacBook Air has eight GPU cores
versus ten on the M2 MacBook Pro.
And likewise, the M1 MacBook Air has seven GPU cores
versus eight on the M1 MacBook Pro.
So just remember that this difference in GPU cores
will account for some of the performance differences
we're about to see.
And if you're wanting to see
how the upgraded 10 core GPU M2 MacBook Air compares,
that is a separate video.
Now, again, for short bursts of a few minutes or less,
you really won't notice much of this difference.
Anything longer than that though,
and the increased clock speed, wattage, and performance
really starts to heat up the M2 MacBook Air quite a bit.
Starting with a popular Blender render workflow,
the M2 Air is about 24% slower
when compared to the M2 MacBook Pro,
that being said it's still significantly faster
than the M1 MacBook Air, which is awesome to see.
Now, if you want to do some light gaming,
something that is very much possible, even on the Air,
on paper and in synthetic benchmarks,
the M2 MacBook Air should see a decent boost over the M1.
In reality though, and the hotter the MacBook Air becomes,
these results can vary.
After playing Tomb Raider for 30 minutes,
to mimic a typical gaming session,
and to make sure the CPU and GPU cores
were as hot as possible,
I achieved these results.
The M2 MacBook Air's performance
was a massive 32% less than the Pro,
and wasn't that much better than the M1 MacBook Air.
In all fairness to the M2 MacBook Air though,
it does only have one extra GPU core
when compared to the M1 MacBook Air,
but it does still seem like all that additional heat
is really starting to kick in here
and impact performance of the M2.
Moving on to some video editing.
Here's a 20 minute 4K project.
This isn't a very demanding timeline,
so it's perfect for the M2 MacBook Air.
And the reason why both Air and Pro models
are so close to each other is that they're taking advantage
of their built in hardware video encoders and decoders.
And let's be honest,
most people doing editing on the M2 MacBook Air
are going to be using some kind of footage
that can take advantage of this.
So H.264, HEVC, or even ProRes for example.
This means that because these encoders are so efficient,
very little heat is produced during the render
and the CPU never got above roughly 75 degrees.
Now one thing I thought I'd mention here,
is that your ambient temperature can also have an impact.
So for example, if you live in a hot country
or area of the world, for me,
I live on the east coast of Australia,
it gets very warm here.
You might actually see a pretty significant increase
in the temperatures of your machine,
versus the M2 MacBook Pro with the fan.
Now honestly, I don't think this will probably apply to you
that much, even if you do live in a hot country,
cuz most of the time you'll be inside or in air conditioning
if you're doing anything intensive on your MacBook
but it is still something to consider.
Okay so moving on
to the most important experiment in this video,
and that is the lap test.
Looking at a worst case scenario,
for example, when gaming or rendering 3D scenes,
the M1 MacBook Air's chassis was a bit cooler than the M2,
but only by about four degrees.
Flipping them over and looking at the part
that's actually going to be roasting your thighs,
again the M1 MacBook Air was slightly cooler,
although both of them are still too hot
to be comfortable on your lap.
But if you're just browsing the internet
or even editing a video
without rendering or anything like that,
they're perfectly fine to have on your lap.
Okay, so overall I think we found
pretty much what we expected.
For those short five minute or less intensive tasks,
you really won't see any major differences
between the M2 MacBook Air and the M2 MacBook Pro.
Anything longer than that though,
significant throttling will occur,
especially during GPU heavy tasks
like 3D rendering or gaming.
That being said, I was really pleased to see
that in just general day to day usage
or even editing a 4K video on your lap
didn't cause any uncomfortable heat at all.
And let's be honest
you're not going to buy a fan less MacBook
to be gaming or rendering all day.
So this probably doesn't even apply to you
in the first place.
Apart from that though guys,
thanks for watching this video.
Any questions let me know down below
and I'll catch you in the next one.