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New, the M1 MacBook Air is already $200 less than the M2 Air. If you are planning to make the move to Apple silicon at last, I would also consider the possibility of a used M1 MacBook Air. It will be more than powerful enough for most use cases while being an extremely portable, and silent, laptop. If you are still on an older Intel machine, the M2 MacBook Air is a great option. If you have an M1 MacBook Air, and you are already happy with it, I would stick with that unless you really value the new design and MagSafe. There is no one answer that will work for everybody. So if you plan to work with ProRes video on the go, and want a thin-and-light machine, the M2 Air has a solid leg-up. If you work with a lot of video, you’ll know the performance improvements that can come with hardware accelerated encoding. The H264 and H265 hardware encoders of the M1 are joined by hardware encoders for ProRes and ProRes Raw. The biggest performance improvement with the M2 over the M1 is the result of the improved media engine.
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Some people who really want to get a bit of extra performance from the M2 have performed the same thermal pad mod that was possible with the M1 Air, but that’s not recommended. M2 MacBook Air (left) and M1 MacBook Air (right) internals Once again, though, with how efficient the chips are, and the fact that neither of these laptops is designed to be a workstation replacement, that shouldn’t impact most people. This means that under heavy, continuous workloads, both laptops will get hot and eventually throttle. Neither laptop has a fan for an active cooling system, but the M1 Air had a much larger metal heatsink. M1 vs M2 Performanceīut what about in terms of the M2’s actual CPU performance? Well, that’s another case of “most people won’t notice a difference in real world use.” In benchmarks, the M2 Air performs moderately better than the M1 Air, but the M2 Air also has a much smaller heat spreader. Even with the slower benchmarked speeds of the base M2, most people won’t notice a difference in real world use – especially if you’re just using the M2 Air for document editing, video playback, web browsing, and the like. This will be noticeable when transferring particularly large amounts of data, but could also become noticeable as a slow down when the 8GB of RAM on the base model fills up and the computer has to use the SSD to swap out data. This leads to a significant decrease in SSD read and write speeds. With the switch to M2, Apple moved from using 128GB NAND chips to using 256GB NAND chips, so now the base M2 laptops only have a single chip. One of the two main “issues” with the M2 MacBook Air has been the decreased speed of the SSD on the base model. It still leaves the miniLED display tech and high refresh-rate to the higher end 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros.
The M2’s screen is also 100nits brighter than the M1 Air’s screen, which can help out a bit when its bright out. It’s an improvement, as you can see in the video, but if you want an even better camera, you can use Continuity Camera with MacOS Ventura.
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That notch houses an improved camera as well the 720p FaceTime camera of the M1 Air has been replaced with a 1080p FaceTime camera on the M2 Air. Most of the time it doesn’t bother me, but sometimes when programs have a lot of menu items, some of them get pushed over to the right side, and at that point it tends to feel a bit cluttered up top. That thinner top bezel does mean that the M2 MacBook Air gains a notch like the larger MacBook Pros before it. It got slightly larger overall, with a thinner top bezel, but the horizontal resolution is the same. The screen of the new M2 Air is a step up over the M1 Air. I prefer the haptics of the M1 trackpad, but the M2’s trackpad is still fantastic. The trackpad on the M2 Air also got slightly wider than that of the M1 Airs, and it has a different haptic click. It has the same round, recessed sensor as the larger 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros. I notice the larger top row of keys most when I am going to use the Touch-ID sensor.
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The main improvement with the M2’s keyboard is that the function row, which had been half-height keys, is now full height keys. The M2 Air’s keyboard has a slightly different feel to me than the M1 Air’s keyboard, but the change isn’t significant, and I can’t say that I have a preference one way or the other.