Apple never learns they released yet another laptop with no freaking cooler in it touch it
and you'll burn yourself do any real work on it you'll probably burn your whole house down at
least that's how the internet reacted when Apple's redesigned M2 MacBook Air hit the scene but here's
a question for you any situations will you find yourself in where the heat is a real problem and
for that matter would a similarly priced PC in the same form factor even perform any better
did Apple get away with this seemingly obvious design faux pas and if they did do we need to
change the way that we think about laptop cooling we set out to answer all of those questions and we
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there's been a lot made of Apple's cooling solution for the M2 MacBook Air or more
accurately their lack of one instead of something anything more substantial Apple decided to
basically attach a thin metal heat spreader like you'd find on a stick of ram to the SOC in an
attempt to soak up some heat temporarily before transferring it to the chassis which takes on
the role of a heatsink they could have gone with a finned radiator a fan even a thicker piece of
metal orb some combination of the three but no they settled on some bits of paper thin stamped
sheet aluminum none of which would actually be a problem if the soc stayed nice and cool except
it doesn't and like for all electronic devices this is absolutely a bad thing and while the M1
airs performance did suffer due to poor thermals it wasn't quite to the same degree pun intended
and this is why your typical uses for an entry-level MacBook things like content
consumption web browsing photo editing or maybe even light video editing they all have one big
thing in common they are bursty in nature and they're unlikely to put the soc under any kind of
sustained load what that means is as long as you have enough thermal Mass to absorb your momentary
heat spikes you can count on Long idle periods to dissipate it at your leisure well the M1 MacBook
Air managed to strike this balance pretty well performing at or near its full capability without
overheating the chassis unless you were to fire up something like cinebench blender or a 3D game
unfortunately that is not the case this time around at least on the surface
Apple has tuned the m2's thermal controls to maintain that same 50 degree surface temperature
Target as last time which is required by law but almost immediately after being hit by any sort of
load the M2 SOC itself hits a whopping 99 degrees Celsius because even the pathetic cooler in the
M1 MacBook Air has substantially more thermal mass than this time around I'm frankly pretty
disappointed now Apple's response to this would be pretty obvious well these are silent machines
they're not four Pros get a MacBook Pro if you want to actually put a load on your computer
but frankly that's not a perfect solution either because until they refresh the M2 MacBook Pro you
are going to be stuck with either a super toasty chip or the old touch bar design with worse IO
on the bright side the M2 air gets magsafe to go with your Thunderbolt 4 ports and an overall
design that's reminiscent of the 14-inch MacBook Pro it is thicker than the thinnest point of the
previous gen airs wedge but the new flattened design is thinner overall and from our point of
view feels a lot nicer to hold in the lap and that Meg safe charging port is capable of fast
charging up to 65 Watts if you pick up either the full GPU model or you pay an extra 20 bucks
over base you also have the option by the way of choosing a 35 watt dual type-c charger instead
if that better fits your needs and from using it we can legit see how it could be super handy to
have for travel compared to the single port fast charger the only major difference between the air
configurations that directly impacts performance is the storage previous gen M1 MacBook airs 256
gig variation used twin 128 gig chips to achieve that capacity that divides the workload between
those two chips and makes it much less likely that a read or a write will stall while waiting for
another to finish the M2 airs 256 gig variation meanwhile makes use of a single 256 gigabyte chip
that means that the nand flash will be in a weight State more often and you can think of this kind of
like running single versus dual Channel memory in practice this means that the lowest capacity model
gets roughly half the performance of the other storage tiers that make use of multiple chips
although you guys might not expect this I kind of feel like I have to cut Apple some slack here
most people are not going to notice the difference between 1.5 and 3 gigabytes per second and outside
of synthetic storage benchmarks the CPU is often going to end up being the bottleneck at either of
those speeds there are situations where that might not be the case though like video editing prores
raw footage but they also aren't as likely to come up on the air compared to a MacBook Pro the part
of that is the way that the Air's performance Gets kneecapped By Its lack of cooling which is another
problem that Apple created I'll show you what I mean though starting with gaming because it's
always kind of funny to me when people complain about gaming performance on a machine that was
clearly engineered for browsing Facebook in order to make this a fair test given the cooling
solution we're running each of these twice to warm up and then finally taking our results from
a third run and well yeah the cooling Solution on the M2 MacBook Pro is good for a whopping
35 increase in fps in every test except for Total War Warhammer 3's battle Benchmark where the lead
shrinks to just 30 percent In fairness to the M2 MacBook Air however even with its awful cooling
the competing Dell XPS 13 doesn't Beat It by a significant margin in any of those tests oh but if
you want something that does beat the competition you can check out our screwdriver on lttstore.com
it's now independently tested and verified moving on to cinebench the M2 air loses about a thousand
points in its score over a 10 minute run compared to a single run giving you some idea of how
your performance might degrade under heavy load meanwhile the M2 Pro retains basically the same
score geekbench being a shorter Benchmark shows basically no difference between the M2 MacBooks
so thanks for that but that doesn't mean it's an entirely useless Benchmark because interestingly
we can see the difference in GPU performance between the M1 and the M2 base models and it's
roughly in line with the additional memory bandwidth provided by the M2 SOC of course
unless you work at our Testing Lab you probably don't spend all day running benchmarks so let's
take a look at real world workloads starting with an Adobe Lightroom export and wow not only is the
M2 air faster than the M1 air it's actually rough roughly in line with the pro class machines with
active cooling the M2 also picks up a significant winning compressor thanks to the addition of pro
resin coating engines on the base model SOC that's over 475 percent faster than the M1 CPU fallback
h.264 isn't significantly different however indicating that that encoder is more or less
identical between the socs and Final Cut Pro can use up to three of these prores streams on the M2
air MacBooks which is more than the M1 air could handle and one less than the pro pretty impressive
if you're a da Vinci resolve user well you're going to want to get a ram upgrade regardless
of the rest of the performance numbers if you're using an air or a pro because 8 gigs isn't nearly
enough with 24 gigs the air managed a respectable 40 minute export with the pro running about eight
and a half minutes faster than that so overall the base model M2 air is roughly 35 percent
faster than its M1 counterpart and the higher end M2 air is roughly 21 slower than the M2 Pro though
the biggest outliers are mostly in gaming which I think for many Mac users is not terribly important
if we look purely at productivity then it's within nine percent which is frankly extremely
impressive considering the Monstrous difference in cooling capacity the main difference for this as
we pointed out before is that most of these real world use cases just aren't going to be continuous
loads that will throttle the heck out of the chip I mean even DaVinci Resolve ends up being more of
a stop and go affair in terms of CPU usage it's not stop and go float plane though check out our
recent exclusive where we try out some Norwegian hockey Pulver while we run our battery life tests
for our battery tests we calibrated each laptop to roughly the same output as 50 brightness on the M2
air and we let them rip on a YouTube video the first to follow was the XPS 13 with the M2 air
falling second though at nearly double the battery life difference in battery life between the M1 and
the M2 MacBook airs seems to be primarily due to the larger brighter display as we've seen
other outlets report worse battery life at lower brightness as well but that's not to say that the
soc makes no difference the M2 MacBook Pro ended up with a result over an hour and a half worse
than the M1 pro model and those share the same display which seems to suggest the M2 SOC can
draw more power than its predecessor assuming that adequate Cooling and power budgets are allotted to
it overall still excellent battery life for both but you are giving up a bit of run time for the
extra performance of the M2 SOC all of which is to say that it very much depends on what you do
with your laptop to determine whether the cooling design flaw is a fundamental one that kills your
experience or is merely a minor annoyance and you wish they just put a little fan in it it
seems like in most real world workloads it's just not going to suffer that much and at a
starting price of twelve hundred dollars for the air it's likely that a lot of folks are in fact
going to use it as a glorified Chromebook as for the 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro I am having a hard time
seeing the benefit considering how close the air comes most of the time yes when specked in a way I
would consider appropriate it's the same price as the air for better performance but at that point
you're only 300 out from a similarly spec 14-inch MacBook Pro making that the more attractive
Prospect for now in my humble opinion for your extra money you're getting a much faster CPU and
GPU a larger 120 hertz liquid Retina xdr Display an additional Thunderbolt 4 port and dedicated
HDMI and SD card readers I'm not about to pass judgment if you don't care about any of those
things but for my money that is more than worth it regardless of your priorities I certainly wouldn't
suggest going with the cheapest M2 13-inch MacBook Pro if you care that little about RAM and storage
you would do just as well with the cheaper air and it would be Slimmer and Silent we're going to have
all of those linked down below that gives the M2 MacBook Air my vote between the M2 Max currently
on the market and if you want to get real work done well you can either Spritz compressed air
on whenever you fire up something intensive or save up a little more and wait for the 14-inch M2
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five dollars to spend on their first purchase thanks for watching guys go check out our
initial review of the M1 air the platform's not mature yet but boy has it ever come a long way