Tech review: Apple MacBook Air 2022 with the M2 chip
This year’s MacBook Air has a retro touch. While it’s fast and powerful, and offers great battery life, it also sees the return of a feature from yesteryear.
This year’s MacBook Air has a retro touch. While it’s fast and powerful, and offers great battery life, it also sees the return of a feature from yesteryear.
Back from the dead is Apple’s MagSafe cable that magnetically clips to the side of the Air. The concept is old, being used on Macs from about 2006 and with the recent iPhone MagSafe charger. The original MagSafe cable would disengage from a Mac if you tripped over it, saving your precious notebook from hitting the deck.
I don’t know why Apple bothers with the ‘safe’ in the new MagSafe 3 as I found that the USB-C to MagSafe cord didn’t disengage easily. I could drag the Air across a table by the cord and I could even play tug of war, with one hand pressing down on the keyboard panel while the other pulled at the cord.
Nevertheless you don’t have to use USB-C charging. When MagSafe is attached the two USB-C ports at left remain available for other purposes. The cord is made of quality material, is a decent two metres and doesn’t dent easily when folded.
You get a 35W power adapter for your trouble with two USB-C ports for charging two devices. Apple also sells a 67W charger should you want fast charging, which this Air supports.
There’s more to the 2022 MacBook Air than resurrection culture. It’s slightly lighter at 1.24kg, and thinner than the previous M1 model yet the screen is bigger - 13.6 inches compared to 13.3 inches - due to a thinner border. The screen is brighter at up to 500 nits instead of 400 nits.
Battery life remains exceptional: my review unit went 20 hours 54 minutes playing 1080p video non-stop at 200 nits brightness. That figures as the M2 Air battery capacity is bigger than with its predecessor.
The 2022 Air has the same M2 chip as the new 13.3-inch MacBook Pro, and you get similar benchmark performance.
Using the Geekbench benchmark, the 2022 Air scored 1914 and 8672 for single and multi core CPU performance with its M2 chip.
That’s only slightly less than the 13-inch MacBook Pro M2 scores of 1944 and 8927, and better than the MacBook Pro M1 scores of 1745 and 7750.
The OpenCL score for graphics performance was 27308, compared to 27434 for the 13-inch MacBook Pro M2 and 19845 for the MacBook Pro M1. All other things equal, the 2022 Air is capable of better performance than the 2020 MacBook Pro, but the configuration of CPU and GPU cores, RAM and other hardware impact performance.
For example, my Air review unit has an 8-core GPU; you can buy one configured with a 10-core GPU.
The biggest difference between the Air and the Pro (which starts at only $100 more) is that the Pro has a fan and the Air doesn’t. While the Air’s performance can match the Pro’s initially, it will slow should it heat up from intensive use during fast framed gaming or multi-stream video editing.
Professional users have found the Pro M2 capable of getting hot itself performing tasks such as exporting Canon 8K RAW video, so expect the 2022 Air to slow considerably if you stress test it like that.
When testing the 2022 13-inch MacBook Pro, some experts discovered that the SSD read speed had halved from about 2900 to 1450 MB/s compared to the previous model, while write speeds had dropped significantly from 2215 MB/s to 1460 MB/s. That’s a big drop.
Sites such as Max Tech attributed this to Apple moving from two storage chips on the M1 MacBook Pro to a single storage chip.
Using the same Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, reads on my Air test unit were 2600 to 2800 MB/s, while writes were 2200 to 2300 MB/s - results more aligned to the better speeds albeit a tad slower.
This year’s Air comes with 2 USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports at left, along with the MagSafe port, and a headphone port at right.It’s minimalist so you’ll need an attachment for HDMI, cable Ethernet, or USB-A and more USB-C ports.
The selfie camera resolution has been bumped up from 720p to 1080p so you’ll look more handsome on video calls. There’s also broader support for Apple spatial audio music.
Nevertheless the 2022 MacBook Air with an M2 processor is great tech. I can’t think of any better combination of power, portability and long battery life in a notebook for days on the road.
One with an 8 core GPU starts at $1899 and one with 10-cores costs from $2349. The bargain now is the older 2020 M1 Air starting at $1499.