While I had originally planned to pass on the M2 MacBook Air, my M1 work Air was acting up, so I ended up buying an M2 MacBook Air in January 2023. The specs were: M2, 24GB of RAM, 1TB SSD. I’ve owned and used the machine daily for a year now, so I figured it was time for a long-term review.
The short version: I think this is the best laptop that Apple has ever produced.
The screen is great, the keyboard is great, it feels fantastic in the hand, it is almost as light as the 12” MacBook, but is faster and more powerful in daily use than any x86 laptop I have used, and the battery life is simply unbelievable. That it manages to do all of this with no active cooling is an engineering feat that I appreciate daily. It is the best computer I’ve owned.
Apple’s M2 MacBook Air is the biggest redesign since 2010 and is arguably the biggest redesign ever. It is an impossibly thin laptop with top-notch performance and battery life. Look and feel-wise, the M2 MacBook Air is essentially a slimmed down version of the 14” MacBook Pro. As with it’s predecessor, it opts for a slimmer, lighter design at the expense of the HDMI and SD ports. This is the right trade off for this machine.
The new keyboard is just great. A true return to form. The keys feel great, the travel is just right.
While the performance of a well configured M1 MacBook Air still holds up in 2024, the M2 MacBook Air, especially when configured with 24GB RAM, up from the max of 16GB on the M1, is noticeably faster, especially under load.
Where even high-end PCs seem to struggle with throttling to maintain reasonable battery life, Apple Silicon laptops, as exemplified by the MacBook Air, seem to just magically keep up, so much so that I often forget how many apps I have running across many virtual desktops.
With the M2 MacBook Air, the best word that I can use to describe it is effortless. Everything runs quickly and without issue. It almost never feels to me like the machine is working hard, and I push it harder than any x86 machine I’ve owned, often running dozens of apps across 8 Spaces for days and weeks on end, always plugged in to a 5K external display, traveling daily, and used frequently for in-person meetings that I never leave enough time to get to.
I honestly don’t know how long the battery lasts, because I’ve never come close to running it to 0% in the year that I’ve used it. It definitely lasts 10 hours of actual, normal use. It’s probably significantly better than that. I’ve traveled with it and gone an entire weekend of light use on a single charge. I’ve removed the battery icon from the menu bar because it’s always more than enough.
I thought long and hard about whether to get the Air or 14” MacBook Pro. It came down to weight or me. I walk the laptop in and out of work every day, and take it with me to in-person meetings every day. The Air is almost a pound lighter than the Pro, and that makes a big difference in my day-to-day. The Pro also has vents cut for active cooling that bug me when I carry it. I know it is a fussy complaint, but for something I carry this much, it matters. It is my main work tool, and I want it to be exactly as I want it.
A year in, I am still not a fan of the screen notch. It bugs me enough that I install an app, TopNotch, to essentially hide it. It’s not actually the notch that I have a problem with, it’s what the notch does to the top menu bar. If you use “More Space” as a display resolution, the notch forces the menu bar to be taller than normal, and I cannot adjust to how it looks. If Apple could make the notch small enough to not stretch the menu bar, I’d have no complaints. In the meantime, TopNotch will do.
I love the rounded corners on the display. As with the iPad, I don’t get tired of that nice little detail. For the M2 Air, I bought the first plain silver Mac I’ve owned in a few years, and I like it more than the Space Grey I’d been buying. I especially like the look of the silver between the keys. I prefer it to the black of the MacBook Pro deck.
I just purchased a second M2 Air as a backup. This time I opted for the midnight blue. It is a very dark blue. I haven’t owned it for long, but it’s a nice change of pace. I think it would be fun and appropriate for Apple to release MacBook Airs in the same colour options as their 24” iMacs, but until they do, the silver and blue are nice.
This MacBook Air is a bit thinner and lighter than the M1. In day-to-day use, but it feels significantly thinner and more solid. I’d say it’s the most solid laptop I’ve ever used; feeling like a single, solid-state piece of aluminum.
My dream MacBook would be a smaller Pro, with the same screen tech as a MacBook Pro, even more RAM, but maintains the passive cooling. The M2 Air gets closer to this, but I would still hold out hope for an even higher-end smaller laptop from Apple.
The Surface Laptop 3 (4/5) was my previous choice for the design ideal of a laptop. The M2 MacBook Air now takes that honour. This is a truly stellar machine.
