The M2 13in MacBook Air: A Year Later
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The M2 MacBook Air is Apple's latest MacBook Air redesign. And now it’s a year old. A lot has changed in that year. So let’s talk about this laptop and whether you should consider it or not. Let’s get started.
Affiliate Links to Products Mentioned in the video:
2022 M2 13in MacBook Air: https://amzn.to/3Z5Y2kR
2023 M2 15in MacBook Air: https://amzn.to/45Tgkbg
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Sony a7siii: https://go.magik.ly/ml/1qb8i/
Sony A7c: https://go.magik.ly/ml/1qb8k/
14in M1 Pro MacBook Pro: https://go.magik.ly/ml/1qb83/
M1 Mac Studio: https://go.magik.ly/ml/1qb8o/
Timestamps:
0:00 Introduction
0:20 How’s the Laptop Body after a Year?
3:55 What Upgrades Are Worth it?
5:55 How’s the Base Model Performance after a Year?
7:54 Conclusion - Would I Have Purchased This Again?
The m2 2022 MacBook Air is Apple's cheapest M2 laptop. For the last year this thing has been an absolute workhorse. It’s thin, light and every time I begin to use my 14in MacBook Pro again, I miss how light the M2 13in air is. The midnight color is still looking nice but like I mentioned in the last video, the finish around the ports is slowly chipping away to reveal a bare silver look, The rest of the body has held up pretty well, and after 122 battery cycles, the Macbook still has 97% of its battery capacity left. While you can charge it through usb-c, you probably want to charge through magsafe as much as possible. Because magsafe safely detaches once a certain amount of pressure is applied.
I have the base model configuration here, and while the 8gbs of ram and 256gb of storage are limiting on paper and the storage is half the speed of all the other storage sizes. The target demographic who’s buying this machine won’t notice those differences but it’s worth noting the shortcomings of this laptop in case you do fall out of that “typical user”. Apple uses memory swapping on their Macs. Once you fill up your ram the laptop will begin treating your computer’s storage as extra. Ram is super fast. SSDs have been getting faster, but it’s still slower than ram. So by having a slower SSD in the base model MacBook Air, you’re more likely to experience slowdowns especially if you’re the type to have a ton of apps open or do some intensive tasks. Also, RAM is meant to be written to and wiped constantly, an SSD is not meant to be as frequently as RAM. This memory swapping does increase wear on the mac’s SSD. If you have to make any upgrade to the M2 MacBook air or any base model Macbook with only 256gbs of storage, go for 16gb of ram. If you need more storage you can always get an external ssd and it’s much cheaper than what Apple charges for it. You’ll have to carry it around with you, but it can outlive your laptop and be used with your next laptop too.
So in everyday performance, this thing hasn’t let me down. I find it really useful as a lightweight companion for general productivity, but I use it like a tablet too, like for watching videos, streaming, or having reference material up when playing video games. I don’t use it too much for my YouTube channel, but when I have used it for that task, it handles my video and photo editing fine. I wouldn’t recommend gaming on this thing, because current support for games isn't great. It’s slowly getting better. Apple has been making some in-roads on this. The M2 chip in this laptop does not heat up in basic tasks, and general productivity, but does get warm during charging, or when I do something more graphically intensive like video editing. Also, these Non-pro Macs only support 1 external monitor, you don’t really notice it with this MacBook air, since it’s an on-the-go type of laptop anyway and I don’t think I was ever in a situation where I wanted to plug in two monitors to this thing. But if you are, you might want to consider the MacBook Pro 14in instead. docks that can enable this through 3rd party software, but that can be hit or miss and costs a decent chunk of change too. So if you’re considering any apple computer that doesn’t have a Pro/max or ultra chip, be sure you’re okay with this limitation.
Before, I’d recommend the M1 air because it’s budget friendly, had good enough performance and cost $200 less than the M2. Now the M2 is only a little more for a bunch of nice little quality of life upgrades, like a newer design, the convenience and safety of magsafe charging, and a faster chip. And if you’re using the laptop long-term. I think it’s worth it. This M2 MacBook air has served my own uses fine and I’d recommend it for casual laptop users focused on productivity, personal entertainment and office type tasks. This machine is pretty good. There’s rumors of a newer model in October, and if that's the case, this one will be on sale for an even better price, or you could go for the latest version instead.
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