Are you excited for the new M2 MacBook Air?
Well, I am.
Despite the price tag,
it looks like a really promising laptop,
especially because it's been such a long time
since the Air line-up got a refresh.
But it's not all sunshine and daisies.
There are a couple of massive issues
plaguing the launch of the M2 MacBook Air,
SSD contamination in some Japanese factories,
rumors of the M2 chip overheating and thermal throttling,
massive supply chain issues in China
causing manufacturing delays,
slow M2 MacBook SSD speeds,
oh, and Tim cook still won't reply to my DMs.
So in this video,
I'm going to break down all of these topics,
sift through all of the clickbait out there,
and try to figure out just what the hell is happening
to the new M2 MacBook Air,
including turning the fans on my M2 MacBook Pro off
to simulate what kind of performance
we might see on the Air.
Okay, so let's start with something
that is completely legitimate and will probably affect you
if you're looking to buy one of these new M2 MacBook Airs.
Unless you're one of the very first buyers,
it's probably going to take a long time
for it to actually arrive.
Like I mentioned previously,
due to a number of certain global situations
going on right now, the global supply
and logistics chain is stretched to its breaking point.
To put this into perspective for you,
buying a 40 foot shipping container
would've cost you under $2,000 in 2020,
now though, you are not getting change out of 10 grand,
which is a 500% increase in just two years.
And this is just the actual shipping container itself,
it doesn't take into consideration
all the other costs involved,
like packaging, cost of raw materials, fuel,
or even the shipping of the actual container itself.
Now the M2 MacBook Air is a brand new chassis,
so manufacturing likely only started a few months ago,
right in the middle of all of this.
We're still seeing massive delays
on the 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pros,
and they've been available since October last year.
Now this is a big problem in my opinion,
because, let's say for example,
you have an old Mac and it breaks,
or it stops working and you need to buy a new one ASAP,
you won't be able to wait 6, 8, 12 weeks
for a new M2 MacBook Air to arrive,
so you'll be forced to buy something else,
like an M1 MacBook Air brand new,
or go to the second-hand market instead.
Hello, editor Liam here with an update
to what I've just said.
Now it is 10:30 PM on Friday, the 8th of July
in Australia right now,
the M2 MacBook Air has been available
to order online for about the last half an hour.
And you can see down here,
that if we just want to buy the base model,
which I was able to do about half an hour ago luckily,
we are looking at a shipping date,
anywhere between the 29th of July and the 5th of August.
So that's almost a month away from now, worst case scenario.
And let's say for example,
you want to get a 16GB upgraded Mac,
so if I click on this upgrade option here,
you can see that delivery estimate balloons out
to potentially halfway through August.
So it does look like these are selling out quick
and Apple doesn't really seem to have
a lot of stock available.
Okay, let's move on to the whole M2 SSD situation.
Now I did a video recently
on the base model 256GB M2 MacBook Pro SSD,
and I found it was significantly slower
than the M1 MacBook Pro.
Long story short, Apple typically uses
at least two NAND chips on their Apple silicon Macs,
and these two chips work in tandem to maximize speed.
By shipping the MacBook with only one NAND chip,
the speeds are significantly reduced, as you can see here.
Now, like I said in that video,
most people probably won't notice the difference,
but there are some situations where you will,
for example transferring files and data on and off your SSD,
or when you've used up all your physical RAM
and have to rely on swap memory,
and yes, the latter can be noticeable.
If you have a few Chrome tabs open,
and maybe a couple of Word and Excel documents too,
that can be enough to make a significant difference
to performance in some situations,
especially if you're trying to export
or render something while you have other programs open.
Now there's every possibility that this is Apple
just screwing us all and cutting costs,
but it might go a little bit deeper than that.
Remember when I mentioned
that whole SSD contamination thing previously?
Yeah, I wasn't joking.
Western Digital and Kioxia lost 6.5 exabytes worth
of their NAND flash storage in January
due to contaminated materials.
That's 6.5 billion gigabytes,
and I don't even want to work out how many
128GB SSDs that works out to be.
A lot.
Now iFixit tear-downs have shown that these NAND chips
are used in, you guessed it,
the 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pros.
So only time will tell what the SSD situation will be like
on the new M2 MacBook Airs.
Personally, I don't really know what's going to happen,
I do feel like Apple is going to prefer to ship them
with the two NAND chips,
but if it comes down to one of two options,
option one, not shipping at all,
or only shipping with one NAND chip,
guess which decision Apple is going to go with.
Finally, we come to the most controversial topic,
and that is the supposed overheating of the M2 chip.
Now I have a whole video on this topic
going into a lot of depth,
so I will link that and I encourage you to check it out.
Long story short, the M2 MacBook Pro does not overheat,
unless it's a really unique, stupidly specific benchmark.
But the M2 chip does run noticeably hotter
than the M1, by about 5 to 10 degrees.
This is due to the increased clock speed
of the CPU, GPU and increased power draw
of the M2 chip itself,
sucking up about 5 watts, more than the M1 while under load.
Now, the M2 MacBook Pro was able to keep this
under control via its fan,
but this will be a little trickier
on the fanless M2 MacBook Air,
despite the improved chassis.
As a little sneak peek, I manually set the fans
on my M2 MacBook Pro to the lowest possible setting
to simulate what kind of results we might see on the M2 Air.
Now I couldn't turn them off fully unfortunately,
the lowest I could get was 1200 RPM,
and yeah, it wasn't pretty.
The CPU cores got quite toasty,
and this is during a Cinebench benchmark
which utilizes the CPU cores only.
And don't forget, both the M2 MacBook Pro
and M2 MacBook Air, share the exact same type
and number of CPU cores.
Now, granted the M2 MacBook Pro was not designed
to be passively cooled.
So take these results with a massive grain of salt.
But even then, I only noticed about a 6% decrease
in performance between when I had the fans on default,
where they kicked up to around 4,000 RPM,
versus manually setting them to the lowest setting.
Now that's pretty impressive.
And again, like I mentioned in my previous video
on this topic, I think the performance difference
between the M2 MacBook Air and the M2 MacBook Pro
will be about the same as the previous M1 generation.
One more thing I thought I'd mention,
and this is something that's going to affect
M2 MacBook Air sales, just look at the crazy prices
of used M1 MacBook Airs on the second-hand market.
They're now at the bargain price,
of anywhere from 600 US dollars to 800 or $850
for refurbished models from the Apple website itself,
which are as good as brand new MacBooks.
So I think it's going to be very hard to justify
what will potentially be a 5 to $600 price difference
between a lightly used M1 MacBook Air
and a brand new M2 MacBook Air.
That works out to be about a 50% premium.
Anyway, lots of really interesting stuff
floating around out there.
We're not going to tell for sure,
obviously until the M2 MacBook Airs start shipping
and we start receiving them in.
So I'm excited to definitely test it out.
But apart from that guys,
let me know what you think in the comments down below,
and I'll catch you in the next one.