Let me cut to the chase. If you’ve been waiting four or five years to upgrade your MacBook Air, do it now.
That’s because the new 2022 MacBook Air, powered by Apple’s in-house M2 chip, is the ideal partner for working from home (or anywhere, really) . Starting at $1,200, the new M 2AIR offers everything you need for a computer-centric job. Rock-solid battery life, a larger 13.6-inch display than previous models, an unstoppable keyboard and enough horsepower to handle daily tasks with ease.
Is it perfect? Absolutely not. The new m 2macbook Air is still in dire need of an upgrade in terms of refresh rate and port selection. But if, like me, you’ve spent too much time working on the old MacBook Air, this upgrade is out of the question.
Bigger, but still slim
Apple’s latest MacBook Air is a direct successor to the M1-POWERED MacBook Air in late 2020, so I’ll use that as my baseline for most comparisons. Its physical appearance is actually one of the biggest differences between the two models.
The new M 2air, with its redesign, will mean little to the average person, but may be obvious to more tech-savvy people. Previous MacBook Air laptops had a lower half that gradually decreased in size from one end to the other. In other words, when using a laptop, one end of the keyboard and trackpad is thinner than the part connected to the display.
Today, this primary design of the MacBook Air is a thing of the past. Apple has switched to a 1.13-centimeter universal thickness, up from 0.41 centimeter at the bottom of the 2020 model and 1.61 centimeter at its thickest. As someone who appreciates symmetry and consistency, this pleases me; I want one end of my laptop to be the same size as the other. Its peak thickness may not be the same as before, but overall it is still a very thin machine.
And that’s impressive, because Apple has upgraded the display from its previous 13.3 inches to a new 13.6 inches. A third of an inch may not sound like much, but when it comes to ultraportable laptops, it can make a big difference. I’ve been working on a 2016 MacBook Pro with a 13.3-inch screen for the past three and a half years, and I immediately felt the difference, so trust me on this one.
Apple’s ability to expand the size of the display while remaining admirably thin and actually losing weight (2.7 pounds versus 2.8 pounds for the 2020 Air) is certainly impressive. One thing I find less impressive is the new camera gap, which is preserved from the 2021 MacBook Pro. This is something I can live with on my phone screen (although I don’t really care about it) because it’s smaller. But I do find the grooves distracting on larger laptop displays.
To its credit, when it comes to streaming video, the gap doesn’t actually get in the way (from YouTube to Sling, anyway, there are black bars where the gap is) , but to me, it looks pretty bad.
That said, the gap includes a major upgrade to the 1080p camera, as opposed to the last round of shoddy 720p lenses. Simply put, if you decide to pull the trigger on the new m2macbook Air, your video calls will look better, not just because of the improved resolution.
The last major physical change is the addition of a MagSafe charging port next to the two pre-existing Thunderbolt/USB-C ports on the left side of the MacBook Air. Of course, this allows you to charge your laptop while keeping both Thunderbolt/USB-C ports open. Still, I’d love to have one or two more ports, to keep it on par with the crappy 2016 Model I used, which had four in all. But there is one thing I can not complain about. The bad boy has a 3.5 mm headphone jack on his right.
Before moving on to how it feels to actually use it, here’s a more detailed look at the m2macbook Air Specs.
- Four colors: Space Gray, Starlight, midnight, silver
- 13.6-inch display, 60Hz refresh rate
- 1080p front-facing camera
- 8GB, 16GB, or 24GB of memory
- 256GB to 2TB of storage space
- MagSafe 3 ports, two Thunderbolt/USB-C ports, 3.5 mm headphone jack
A king-style keyboard
From the perspective of someone who has been using Apple’s fearsome old-fashioned butterfly keyboard for years, switching to the M 2macbook Air is pretty much what I imagined it would feel like. It’s an amazing keyboard — and it should be a selling point for anyone stuck on a butterfly keyboard.
The buttons feel good, but there’s almost no noise. When typing, it just feels good to press a button, man. It actually feels like pressing a real button, unlike a butterfly keyboard, which feels like pressing something stuck in molasses. In other words, the keyboard feels almost identical to the 2020 m1macbook Air, so it’s not a revolutionary pioneer in keyboard design. Rather, it is a continuation of a positive trend.
One major change is that the functional lines along the top have been extended so that the buttons are full-sized, rather than half-sized, as they were on the 2020 Air. In practice, this basically means that the escape key feels large and is the same size as the Tab key. I got ta say, I like it. My fingers are a little big, so in my opinion, bigger size is always better. There’s also a Touch ID key in the upper-right corner of the keyboard that works perfectly as a way to log in to the machine, rather than typing out your password every time.
Needless to say, if you’re still using a slightly older MacBook, this keyboard is the best reason to upgrade. I wish I could say the same for the monitor.
Need more hertz
To be clear, the new m2macbook Air’s display, by and large, is a good one. Its 2560×1664 resolution makes images, videos, web sites, and other things look sharp on a monitor of this size. At its maximum brightness of 500 nits, it is 25 percent brighter than the 2020 Air model, which has a maximum brightness of 400 nits. You won’t have any problems using this monitor for almost any of your day-to-day tasks.
I just have a big problem with it. The highest refresh rate is 60 Hz. That’s not good enough for a laptop that costs at least $1,200. That’s good enough for streaming, which happens to be the biggest refresh rate on almost any streaming site, but basic web browsing looks and feels much better at 120Hz. I want that smoothness, guys. I need it.
Still, don’t let the screen be an excuse not to buy the new m 2macbook Air. Like I said, it’s good enough for everything else, and I love watching baseball on it as a second screen while doing other things on my main TV. The refresh rate may not be as fast as possible, but the overall performance picture paints a more pleasant picture.
Quick and quiet
The M2 processor, like its M1 and m1pro predecessors, makes the new MacBook Air very fast. That’s not surprising, since top-notch performance is one reason why people are so willing to pay a hefty“Apple tax” on every device the company makes. We’re looking forward to a great apple product, and that’s exactly what the new MacBook Air offers.
In my tests, I used it primarily as a machine for day-to-day work and web browsing. That means chatting with my boss on Slack, video-chatting with dozens of colleagues, browsing Twitter, writing articles, playing the aforementioned baseball game, and deleting a lot of e-mails, to achieve that sweet, sweet“Inbox-zero” feeling.
These are the things that will drag down my 2016 MacBook Pro in one way or another. They are also things that in any way stand in the way of the 2022 m2macbook Air.
The entire experience is fast and slick, supported by GeekBench benchmark scores, and in some ways it’s close to or above the more expensive 2021 MacBook Pro. While Apple’s assessment of battery life is no different than that of the 2020air (15 hours of web browsing/18 hours of video playing) , that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I was able to get 24 hours of real-time use between charges, which was totally acceptable for a laptop like this.
