M2 MacBook Air Review: All You Need to Know

This coming Friday sees the release of the updated MacBook Air, which now has an M2 processor. Some news outlets and YouTube channels have gotten a head start by publishing the first impressions of the redesigned MacBook Air ahead of schedule. Let’s evaluate what we know so far about the new Apple Mac.

At A Glance

Apple’s newest M2 processor, a redesigned design with smoother lines, a slightly bigger 13.6-inch display with a notch, MagSafe charging, an updated 1080p camera, and new Starlight and Midnight color choices join Silver and Space Gray are key highlights of the new MacBook Air. The laptop also has two Thunderbolt 3 connections and a 3.5mm headphone connector that can accommodate high-impedance headphones.

The new MacBook Air is priced at $1,199. The notebook can be ordered with up to 24GB of unified memory and a 2TB SSD.

The M2 Processor

In his review for Six Colors, Jason Snell discussed a number of different benchmarks pertaining to the new MacBook Air. The findings of Geekbench 5 reveal that the M2 processor gives up to roughly 18 percent faster multi-core performance compared to the M1 model, while the single-core performance is up to 11 percent quicker than the M1 model. Which might increase Android transfer speeds as well. This is in keeping with the advertising that Apple has been putting out.

Slower SSD

An Apple official confirmed in a recent statement that the basic 256GB variant of the new MacBook Air has a single NAND chip, resulting in slower SSD performance in benchmark testing. Apple claims that the new MacBook Air’s real-world performance is “even quicker,” however the announcement makes no mention of SSD speeds:

In testing, it was determined last month that the 256GB edition of the 13-inch MacBook Pro with the M2 chip had up to 50% slower SSD read rates and up to 30% slower SSD write speeds than the identical previous-generation model.

The problem stems from Apple’s decision to use a single 256GB flash storage chip rather than two 128GB chips in the lowest variants of the new MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro. Configurations with 512GB or more of storage use several NAND chips, allowing for greater speeds in parallel. If you need the quickest SSD speeds for your productivity, we suggest getting the new MacBook Air with at least 512GB of storage.

This is all we know for now, once the MacBook Air is launched we will test it out and let update you on the full detailed specifications and features.