Apple MacBook M2 Air has an all-metal body. Picture: Noel Campion.

I remember like it was yesterday when the Macbook Air was released. It was such an innovative design back in 2008. I received it for a review and I remember thinking how incredibly thin and light it was compared to anything else on the market.

The wedge-shaped Air was the first of a kind in a successful line of ultrabooks that would follow. This year’s release of the latest MacBook Air sees an update to the design and it’s one of the first machines to use Apple’s new M2 silicon.

The new MacBook M2 Air borrows much of its design from the latest MacBook Pro line and while the iconic wedge-shaped form factor is no more, the new iteration is still incredibly thin at just over 11.3 mm with a metal body with a quality build and finish. Despite how thin it is, there’s little flex in the case or screen. The entire device feels very robust with a solid hinge mechanism and like all MacBooks, you can open the lid one-handed.

The upgraded 13.6-inch display is slightly larger than the previous model’s 13.3-inches. The bezels are minimal but the new screen now comes with a notch that houses the upgraded 1,080p FaceTime camera. After using the MacBook Pro for the last few months with dark mode enabled and you’d forget it’s there. I found the same to be true on the smaller Air, but if you don’t like using dark mode or dark wallpapers, it will be noticeable.

My loan unit was the base model with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, which weighs a mere 1.24kg. The new design is gorgeous on the outside but Apple has managed to fit a lot of power inside a solid case that doesn’t come with any fans. This is a brave move but one that’s only possible thanks to the efficiency of the new Apple silicon inside. 

The benefit is silent running but, push it for sustained heavy workloads and it will throttle. However, since this is an ultrabook designed to be powerful but ultra-portable, I think most users will be happy to sacrifice a little power for convenience.

The new Air now features two Thunderbolt ports/USB-4 along with the return of the MagSafe 3.0 magnetic charger. My loan unit came with a 30W USB-C power adaptor but you can configure your purchase with a 35W dual USB-C(+€20) or a 67W USB-C (+€20) power adapter. My unit was the gorgeous Midnight colour Air that came with a matching MagSafe cable — the charging brick is white. I love the colour, but man, it attracts fingerprints and grime like a magnet. While I love the colour, I think I would opt for one of the brighter colours.

Two Thunderbolt ports are welcome and of course, you can charge the Air and still have the two ports available. The only downside is that the Air only supports a single external display which is a pity but not surprising as this is a consumer product. The MacBook Pro supports up to four external monitors, but the Air isn’t a ‘Pro’ laptop and I doubt most Air users will need more than one external monitor anyway.

The 3.5mm headphone jack has been retained and upgraded to support high impedance headphones. Using my Adeze LCD-X audiophile-grade headphones, I can confirm the headphone jack is capable of driving top-notch headphones like the LCD-X. 

I found around 70% volume was more than loud enough when listening to music. My more difficult-to-drive Hifiman Sundara headphones also worked, but I needed to increase the volume to get the same loudness. Using the Audio MIDI Setup app in utilities I could see the external headphone output supports 32-bit at 96,000 Hz — perfect for streaming lossless audio from streaming platforms such as Apple Music, Qobuz or Tidal.

This isn’t to say that the built-in headphone hardware will replace a dedicated headphone amp and DAC, but it’s nice to know it will do in a pinch.

I missed not having an SD card slot — it’s something I’ve come to rely on in MacBook Pro.

The new MacBook M2 Air now features quad speakers and they’re pretty good for an ultrabook. The speakers and microphones are fully integrated between the keyboard and display in order to fit inside such a small design. Advanced beamforming algorithms are used on a three-mic array to capture clear audio, and the speakers improve stereo separation and vocal clarity. You also get support for Dolby Atmos, which enables immersive spatial audio for both music and movies.

While the speaker system is good, it doesn’t offer the same class-leading oomph, balanced or expansive soundstage found in the MacBook Pro speakers.

I love the typing experience on the Air keyboard and the top row of keys provides full support for media playback, screen brightness as well as standard functions. On the top right is the power/fingerprint reader that’s fast and reliable. The only thing I would love to see on a MacBook keyboard is quick access to the keyboard backlighting — a minor niggle, but annoying nonetheless that you have to go into the menu bar to change this.

Moving between the gargantuan trackpad on my MacBook Pro 16 and the one on the Air makes the latter feel a little small. However, it works just as well including Apple's amazing haptic feedback and fantastic macOS gestures.

The MacBook Air screen is — if you’ll excuse the pun — top-notch. It has a large 13.6-inches Liquid Retina display with small bezels! I measured a peak brightness of 501nits which is much brighter than a lot of laptops. 

I found max brightness too bright for my use case indoors, but macOS does a great job of automatically controlling the brightness based on the ambient light. Where the extra peak brightness comes in handy is if you need to use the laptop outdoors or while watching a video.

I was also impressed by my colour calibration tests which gave me a result of 100% coverage of the sRGB, 87% of AdobeRGB and 95% of the P3 colour gamut. What’s really impressive about these results is that they’re very close to the calibration readings I got from my MacBook 16 M1’s display which uses more advanced mini-LED technology. 

However, the Pro display has far greater contrast, a 120Hz refresh rate instead of Air’s fixed 60Hz and a peak brightness of 1,600nits.

My loan unit was the base model with an eight-core CPU, eight-core GPU, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. There’s been a lot of talk about the 256GB SSD being much slower than the 512GB but in my testing, while the speed is half the speed of the 512GB SSD, it’s roughly the same as other 256GB laptops I’ve tested recently — some of which were more expensive than the base MacBook M2 Air.

I ran a lot of benchmarks and speed tests but these rarely tell the full story. In everyday use, the M2 performs tasks with ease. 

While 8GB of RAM doesn’t sound like a lot, thanks to the Apple silicon architecture, the M2 defies everything this reviewer thought he knew about how much memory you need on a system — coming from a Windows OS perspective. This isn’t to say that 8GB of RAM and 256GB will be enough for everyone but it will be for most users.

I ran several real-world torture tests. I opened a Lightroom catalogue with 500, 61MP RAW photos from an external 1TB Thunderbolt drive. I then exported all 500 photos to full-resolution jpeg files onto the internal SSD, which took 41 minutes. For context, I did the same export on my MacBook Pro (16GB RAM and 512GB SSD) and it took less than 11 minutes. While exporting 500 photos might seem a little excess, it’s not unrealistic, especially for professional wedding photographers who may have to export several thousand photos.

I also created a 13:13 minute 4K video with footage captured on an iPhone 13 Pro with titles, transitions, additional music and colour corrections in iMovie. The 4K ProRes export (41.56GB movie file) took 5:17 minutes on the M2 Air and 1:56 minutes on the MacBook Pro.

Scrubbing through the timeline was smooth and I didn’t notice any frame drops.

However, the Air is not intended for workloads like this — the fanless design of the Air just can’t cope with heavy sustained loads without thermal throttling. That being said, editing high-res photos in both PhotoShop and Lightroom was responsive with things like the sliders working in real-time and without any lag. I found the same while editing video. I had no problems during playback or adding extra layers to the timeline. The biggest difference over the Pro is in export times which are substantially longer.

You can configure the MacBook M2 Air with up to 24GB of RAM and 2TB of storage but at that point, you may as well buy a MacBook Pro 14.

While macOS doesn’t offer near the same quantity or quality of games as PCs, I did fire up my Steam library to test the likes of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Metro Exodus and Counter-Strike. While the frame rates or experience weren't as good as the MacBook Pro, with a little tweaking of the graphic settings I was able to play and enjoy those titles on the MacBook M2 Air.

Apple Arcade is another avenue Mac gamers have open to them and there’s an impressive list of excellent indie titles that work well on the Air — Where Cards Fall, Overland 2 and Lego Builder’s Journey are a few of my favourites.

You can also play games using cloud services like Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and others. While it’s nice to be able to play the odd casual game on the MacBook Air, I don’t think most people will be using it for gaming.

The one area where Apple can’t be beaten is in battery performance. Many manufacturers claim long battery life but as soon as you put the system under load, the battery will drain fast. The MacBook M2 Air has the same performance regardless of whether it’s plugged in or not. This is what makes MacBooks with M1 and M2 game-changing and revolutionary.

In my testing, I was able to get 5-6 hours with heavy use. An equivalent PC laptop would last less than half of that time and if you really needed it to work at peak performance, you’d end up plugging it in. With medium to light use, I was easily able to get a full day or two with up to 12 hours.

Using the supplied 30W charger, I was able to bring the battery from 22% to 70% in one hour and to 91% after 90 minutes with the lid closed.

The MacBook M2 Air is an expensive, entry-level Apple laptop but it is far from basic. The new design is both practical and portable with exceptional materials and built quality. The M2 is a powerhouse and a revolution in what we’ve come to expect in ‘base’ laptops for performance. Even the base MacBook Air is capable of Pro tasks but for sustained workloads, the MacBook Pro is a no-brainer.

The small form factor means you can easily bring the M2 Air with you everywhere and still do almost anything on battery power. Of course, the majority of users won’t be buying the MacBook Air to create hours of YouTube videos in 4K or edit thousands of 61MP RAW photos, that’s really what the MacBook Pro is for, but the fact it can is amazing.

Average users will appreciate the MacBook M2 Air for its compact form factor, silent running, stunning screen, exceptional battery stamina and overall smooth and responsive performance which is unbeatable.

The M2 Air has many improvements over the previous version including a bigger brighter screen, a better webcam, a boost in performance and the convenience of MagSafe charging. The new design looks great and is one of the best-built laptops you can buy.

The only downside is the €300 price hike over the Air M1 but I think the improvements and upgrades are justified. That being said, the M1 Air is still a great machine and worthy of consideration if you don’t want to pay the extra for the newer model.

Apple MacBook Air M2 from €1,529

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