With the move to M2, the Air is fine up here
If you’re after laptop buying advice, I’m your man. I’ve been reviewing PCs and technology products for more than a decade. I cut my teeth in PC Labs, spending several years with PCMag.com before writing for other outlets, among them LaptopMag.com and Tom’s Guide. While computers are my main focus, I’ve also written at length about topics ranging from fitness gear and appliances to TV and home theater equipment. If I’ve used it, I have opinions about it, whether somebody’s paying me to write them up or not.
The 2022 version of Apple's MacBook Air gets a fresh look and the more powerful M2 processor, making it Apple’s best ultraportable laptop yet.
The latest iteration of the Apple MacBook Air (starts at $1,199; $1,899 as tested) updates what may be the most iconic laptop in history. Since the original was introduced in 2008 by Steve Jobs—who pulled it out of a manila envelope, a stunt that’s still pretty amazing, 14 years on—the Air has undergone only a few really big changes. That's why 2022's revision is especially noteworthy. Not only is it one of the first Macs to use Apple’s M2 chip—the vanguard of the second generation of Apple Silicon—but it also splashes out with a completely new look. Inside, a thinner logic board makes way for a bigger, bolder screen, and allows for a new chassis that adds useful features without adding bulk or weight. This is Apple's freshest MacBook Air in a long time, and the best ultraportable Mac you can buy.
Let’s start with the physical design, since that’s where Apple has made some pretty drastic changes. The exterior of the MacBook Air is at once what you expect from the Air—ultrathin, incredibly lightweight—but it’s nothing like the MacBook Air models of the past. The long-familiar wedge design is gone, replaced with an even thinner body that’s the same thickness front and back. Measuring a mere 0.44 inch thick, the Air is still an astonishingly slim laptop, and the 2.7-pound weight makes many other ultraportables feel a bit chunky.
The aluminum chassis still looks like an Apple product, but it now comes in two new shades, in addition to the standard Silver and Space Gray: Starlight (gold), and Midnight (an even-darker Gray). Each is complete with color-matched charging cables. That’s more options for personalization than ever before, even if it’s not as colorful a spectrum as you’d get on the wildly hued Apple iMac. But the mirrored Apple logo and smooth finish are on point, matching that look and feel you’ll get from the more expensive 14-inch MacBook Pro or the latest iPad.
Much of this thinner profile is made possible by a new logic board design. In addition to hosting the new Apple M2 chip, the logic board is now designed with all of the components on one side. A dual-sided logic board has long been popular as a way to fit more components onto a smaller board, but with Apple’s latest System on a Chip (SoC) doing most of the heavy lifting, it looks like the board design is plenty compact. The goal now is thinness, not overall size, and the result is a significant achievement: The Air is the thinnest it’s ever been.
The new laptop also avoids the bulk of the MacBook Pros by sticking to passive cooling, eliminating the need for internal cooling fans. While that does mean that performance isn’t quite as impressive on the M2 MacBook Air as it is on the M2-based MacBook Pro 13-inch, it also means it’s quieter. The fanless design means that even under heavy load, the MacBook Air runs silent.
The MacBook Air's port selection is also tweaked a bit, but remains limited. The dual USB Type-C/Thunderbolt 4 ports provide connectivity for pretty much anything, although if you need a standard USB Type-A port, or an HDMI output, you’ll also need an adapter or USB-C docking station. At least there's a 3.5mm headset jack for connecting headphones or speakers.
The main update from the previous MacBook Air is the move to MagSafe charging. It's a huge win for convenience, saving you from disaster when you accidentally trip over a stray power cable, since the magnetic plug detaches more easily when yanked. Even better, your MagSafe plug will match the color of your MacBook Air, and charging the Air won't occupy one of the USB-C ports.
Another big change to the Air's design is the move to a 13.6-inch display. The Liquid Retina display is brighter and bolder than anything we’ve seen on the Air before. In addition to being larger, it boasts a 500-nit maximum brightness (it actually hit 514 nits in our testing) and support for 99% of the P3 color gamut. It's an impressive display for the MacBook Air, a system that has long felt like it was a modern laptop with a display that lagged several years behind. It does face extreme competition, though. Comparable ultraportables like the Dell XPS 13 OLED (9310) and the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon offer truly premium OLED displays, and they offer touch-display capability on top of that, something the MacBook Air and Pro have always lacked.
That 13.6-inch screen is a slightly but noticeably larger panel than the 13.3-inch display on the older M1 MacBook Air (2020), but the bigger screen fits into the same overall chassis size thanks to thinner bezels. Thin bezels in turn result in less room for a camera, so Apple has finally brought "The Notch" to the MacBook Air. The concept, borrowed from the design of the 14-inch MacBook Pro, scoops out a bit of the top of the screen to make space for the built-in 1080p webcam.
As for camera quality, it's a big upgrade from the 720p cameras that were being used just a couple of years ago. You’ll look better in Zoom meetings on this Air than on the M1 model, and it’s not just the resolution. The handling of color and overall lighting is better, too, thanks to improved image processing powered by Apple’s Neural Engine.
The Air has gotten upgrades for the ears as well as the eyes, with a new four-speaker setup that supports Spatial Audio, even without headphones.
The 2022 MacBook Air also gets the same Magic Keyboard as its Pro siblings, but Apple is quick to note that it has a full-size row of function keys running along the top. This is both a way to differentiate it from the MacBook Pro 13-inch, which still incorporates the Touch Bar, but also from the previous MacBook Air, which uses smaller function keys that are half the size of the standard keys.
Is bigger better? Probably, but it doesn't make a huge difference in our testing. Are the full-size function keys are better than a Touch Bar? That's also up for debate. Let's just note that you don’t see the Touch Bar on Apple’s more premium (14-inch and 16-inch) MacBook Pros, either, and I doubt that’s an oversight on the part of Apple’s design team.
The keyboard also includes a power button with a built-in Touch ID sensor, letting you sign on to your machine without fussing with passwords or PIN numbers, and providing secure transactions for anything you buy through Apple Pay.
The Air also gets a larger Force Touch trackpad. It’s a little taller and a bit wider, but the smooth glass surface and haptic feedback are every bit as good as on Apple’s most expensive models.
When it comes to the new MacBook Air, the M2 processor is your only option, though the older M1-based Air, the one with the wedge profile, is still around if you want a more budget-friendly Mac laptop. But there is some room to fine-tune the M2 Air to your needs, with configuration options that let you choose different GPU capabilities and different memory or storage capacities.
The base model M2 Air comes with the standard M2 chip with eight GPU cores, 8GB of memory, and a 256GB SSD for storage. This base model sells for the relatively affordable price of $1,199. Our test unit is the stepped-up model, which boasts 10 GPU cores and starts at $1,499. That model also comes with Apple’s new 35-watt charger, which is a tiny little brick that has two USB-C ports for powering laptops, phones, iPads, and whatever else you need. Our review unit also has 16GB of memory (a $200 extra), and a 1TB drive (also $200). That puts the total at $1,899, well into premium laptop pricing.
The MacBook Air sits on a precarious perch, topping many lists as one of the best ultraportable laptops out there, but also facing competition from pretty much everyone else. Top alternatives, such as the Dell XPS 13 OLED (9310) and the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9 (2021), offer comparable ultraportable designs, and 2-in-1 systems like the HP Spectre x360 14 prove that you can get the same quality with a fully touch-friendly convertible design.
But Apple’s fiercest competition right now is within its own MacBook line. The M2-powered MacBook Pro 13-inch employs the same processor, while the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro models promise even more power from the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips. And the 2020 MacBook Air is still around, with that M1-powered model serving as Apple’s cheapest laptop at $999.
Here are the specs of some of the Air's chief internal and external competitors, which we'll be using in our performance comparison tests.
We’ve noted in our previous analysis of the M2 chip's CPU grunt, and of its graphics performance, that the new processor has to walk a tightrope, delivering better performance than the M1 chip that wowed us two years ago, and less total power than the M1 Pro and M1 Max options that Apple still sells at a premium in the more expensive MacBook Pro models. It does that well in the MacBook Pro 13-inch, but it really threads the needle with the MacBook Air.
The small differences between the Air and the 13-inch MacBook Pro basically come down to the battery life and a choice of cooling fans or passive cooling. But those small differences can certainly be seen in our test results. Whether we’re stressing all eight CPU cores in a rendering test or pushing the GPU cores in a graphics test, the MacBook Air with its passively cooled M2 chip was better than the M1 across the board, but not quite as good as you’ll get on the M2-powered MacBook Pro.
In our Handbrake video transcoding test, the MacBook Air converted a standard 4K clip into a smaller 1080p version in less than eight minutes. That’s substantially quicker than the 11 minutes the M1 Air could manage in the same test, but it’s edged out by the M2-based Pro, which did the same task in less than seven minutes. But most telling, all of these results are better than what we saw from the likes of the HP Spectre x360 14 and the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9 (2021).
Interestingly enough, the results of our other two general productivity tests, Cinebench R23 and Geekbench 5.4, weren’t as clear cut. In Cinebench, which renders a complex image using Maxon’s Cinema 4D engine, the M2 Air offered a slightly lower score than the older M1 version did, even though both handily beat out the scores from the Windows systems.
Our other processor-intensive test is Primate Labs’ Geekbench Pro, which simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Here the gap between the M2 machines was extremely narrow, with the M2 Air scoring only 17 points behind the MacBook Pro 13-inch. Both achieved right around 9,000 points, as competitors from HP and Lenovo failed to hit the 5,000-point mark.
Graphics capability was a different story, with mixed results in GFXBench, a cross-platform rendering test. In the basic 1080p Car Chase test, the M2 MacBook Air fell behind the M1-based Air again, with a wider gap between the M2-based MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models. But in the more demanding 1440p Aztec Ruins test scenario, the M2 MacBook Air was much closer to the MacBook Pro 13-inch, leading the old M1 MacBook Air by 29 points, and only falling 10 points behind the M2 MacBook Pro. But, in a common refrain for Apple’s latest Macs, the best Windows machines in this lot (relying on Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics) still struggled to keep up, with all current Macs leading by a sizable margin.
No, it’s not built for gaming, but the MacBook Air should be able to handle some pretty stout media work. Tasks like running multiple 4K streams of video or even editing 8K content can all be done with the same 10-core version of the Air that we tested, tasks that were impossible on an ultraportable laptop just a few years ago.
If there’s one disappointing facet of the new MacBook Air, it’s battery life. Maybe it’s due to the thinner design not offering the room for a larger battery, or perhaps the M2 chip is a bit more demanding than the M1 processor was. Maybe that extra 0.3 inch of a brighter display contributes, hitting the battery more than we expected. Whatever the reason, the MacBook Air lasted just shy of 17 hours in our testing. That's still quite good, and likely to get you through a full workday, but less than what we got out of the M1-powered model.
For what it's worth, Apple pegs both the M1 and M2 models of the Air at 18 hours, and our test results rarely line up in lockstep with manufacturer estimates. (See more about how we test laptops.)
After two years of consistently seeing stellar MacBook battery-life readings, often exceeding 20 hours, it’s a bit of a surprise to see such a short result from Apple’s most portable Mac. That said, this still puts it in good company. The Dell XPS 13 OLED (9310) and HP Spectre x360 14 only offer 11 or 12 hours of endurance, and 17 hours is plenty long enough to get you through the average day of work or school.
The Apple MacBook Air (2022, M2) is a massive upgrade to an already iconic laptop. From the new design to the added features and the beefed-up M2 chip, this is the best version of the MacBook Air that Apple has ever made.
It’s not the best Mac that Apple offers, but it’s clear that this is easily the best Mac for everyday users. If you need to save some money, there’s the older M1 Air and the closer-to-base models below our test configuration. And the more premium Apple MacBook Pro models are always available if you’re willing to pay more for extra power. But for the average Mac user working from home, taking their laptop to the classroom or office, or traveling for work, this is the MacBook to get.
The 2022 version of Apple's MacBook Air gets a fresh look and the more powerful M2 processor, making it Apple’s best ultraportable laptop yet.
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If you’re after laptop buying advice, I’m your man. I’ve been reviewing PCs and technology products for more than a decade. I cut my teeth in PC Labs, spending several years with PCMag.com before writing for other outlets, among them LaptopMag.com and Tom’s Guide. While computers are my main focus, I’ve also written at length about topics ranging from fitness gear and appliances to TV and home theater equipment. If I’ve used it, I have opinions about it, whether somebody’s paying me to write them up or not.
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