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Apple never learns they released yet another laptop with no freaking cooler

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in it touch it and you'll burn yourself do any real work on it you'll probably

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burn your whole house down at least that's how the internet reacted when

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Apple's redesigned M2 MacBook Air hit the scene but here's a question for you

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any situations will you find yourself in where the heat is a real problem and for

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that matter would a similarly priced PC in the same form factor even perform any

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better did Apple get away with this

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seemingly obvious design faux pas and if

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they did do we need to change the way that we think about laptop cooling we

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set out to answer all of those questions and we set out to tell you about our

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thank you there's been a lot made of Apple's

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cooling solution for the M2 MacBook Air or more accurately their lack of one

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instead of something anything more

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substantial Apple decided to basically attach a thin metal heat spreader like

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you'd find on a stick of RAM to the SOC in an attempt to soak up some heat

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temporarily before transferring it to the chassis which takes on the role of a

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heatsink they could have gone with a

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finned radiator a fan even a thicker

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piece of metal orb some combination of the three but no they settled on some

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bits of paper thin stamped sheet aluminum none of which would actually be

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a problem if the soc stayed nice and cool except it doesn't and like for all

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electronic devices this is absolutely a bad thing and while the M1 airs

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performance did suffer due to poor thermals it wasn't quite to the same

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degree pun intended and this is why your

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typical uses for an entry-level MacBook things like content consumption web

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browsing photo editing or maybe even light video editing they all have one

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big thing in common they are bursty in nature and they're unlikely to put the

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soc under any kind of sustained load what that means is as long as you have

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enough thermal Mass to absorb your momentary heat spikes you can count on

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Long idle periods to dissipate it at your leisure well the M1 MacBook Air

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managed to strike this balance pretty well performing at or near its full

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capability without overheating the chassis unless you were to fire up

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something like cinebench blender or a 3D

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game unfortunately that is not the case this

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time around at least on the surface Apple has tuned the m2's thermal

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controls to maintain that same 50 degree surface temperature Target as last time

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which is required by law but almost

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immediately after being hit by any sort of load the M2 SOC itself hits a

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whopping 99 degrees Celsius because even

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the pathetic cooler in the M1 MacBook Air has substantially more thermal mass

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than this time around I'm frankly pretty disappointed now Apple's response to

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this would be pretty obvious well these are silent machines they're not four

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Pros get a MacBook Pro if you want to actually put a load on your computer

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but frankly that's not a perfect solution either because until they

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refresh the M2 MacBook Pro you are going to be stuck with either a super toasty

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chip or the old touch bar design with

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worse IO on the bright side the M2 air gets

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magsafe to go with your Thunderbolt 4 ports and an overall design that's

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reminiscent of the 14-inch MacBook Pro it is thicker than the thinnest point of

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the previous gen airs wedge but the new flattened design is thinner overall and

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from our point of view feels a lot nicer to hold in the lap and that Meg safe

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charging port is capable of fast charging up to 65 Watts if you pick up

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either the full GPU model or you pay an extra 20 bucks over base you also have

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the option by the way of choosing a 35 watt dual type-c charger instead if that

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better fits your needs and from using it we can legit see how it could be super

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handy to have for travel compared to the single port fast charger

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the only major difference between the air configurations that directly impacts

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performance is the storage previous gen M1 MacBook airs 256 gig

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variation used twin 128 gig chips to

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achieve that capacity that divides the workload between those two chips and

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makes it much less likely that a read or a write will stall while waiting for

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another to finish the M2 airs 256 gig

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variation meanwhile makes use of a single 256 Gigabyte chip that means that

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the nand flash will be in a weight State more often and you can think of this

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kind of like running single versus dual Channel memory in practice this means

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that the lowest capacity model gets roughly half the performance of the

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other storage tiers that make use of multiple chips although you guys might

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not expect this I kind of feel like I have to cut Apple some slack here most

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people are not going to notice the difference between 1.5 and 3 gigabytes

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per second and outside of synthetic storage benchmarks the CPU is often

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going to end up being the bottleneck at either of those speeds there are

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situations where that might not be the case though like video editing prores

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raw footage but they also aren't as likely to come up on the air compared to

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a MacBook Pro the part of that is the way that the

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Air's performance Gets kneecapped By Its lack of cooling which is another problem

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that Apple created I'll show you what I mean though starting with gaming because

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it's always kind of funny to me when people complain about gaming performance

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on a machine that was clearly engineered for browsing Facebook in order to make

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this a fair test given the cooling solution we're running each of these

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twice to warm up and then finally taking our results from a third run and

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well yeah the cooling Solution on the M2

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MacBook Pro is good for a whopping 35

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increase in FPS in every test except for

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Total War Warhammer 3's battle Benchmark where the lead shrinks to just 30

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percent In fairness to the M2 MacBook Air

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however even with its awful cooling the competing Dell XPS 13 doesn't Beat It by

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a significant margin in any of those tests oh but if you want something that does

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beat the competition you can check out our screwdriver on lttstore.com it's now

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independently tested and verified moving on to cinebench the M2 air loses about a

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thousand points in its score over a 10 minute run compared to a single run

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giving you some idea of how your performance might degrade under heavy

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load meanwhile the M2 Pro retains basically the same score geekbench being

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a shorter Benchmark shows basically no difference between the M2 MacBooks so

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thanks for that but that doesn't mean it's an entirely useless Benchmark

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because interestingly we can see the difference in GPU performance between

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the M1 and the M2 base models and it's

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roughly in line with the additional memory bandwidth provided by the M2 SOC

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of course unless you work at our Testing Lab you probably don't spend all day

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running benchmarks so let's take a look at real world workloads starting with an

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Adobe Lightroom export and wow not only

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is the M2 air faster than the M1 air it's actually rough in line with the pro

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class machines with active cooling the M2 also picks up a significant winning

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compressor thanks to the addition of prores encoding engines on the base

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model SOC that's over 475 percent faster than the M1 CPU

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fallback h.264 isn't significantly different

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however indicating that that encoder is more or less identical between the socs

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and Final Cut Pro can use up to three of these prores streams on the M2 air

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MacBooks which is more than the M1 air could handle and one less than the pro

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pretty impressive if you're at DaVinci Resolve user well

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you're going to want to get a RAM upgrade regardless of the rest of the

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performance numbers if you're using an air or a pro because 8 gigs isn't nearly

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enough with 24 gigs the air managed a respectable 40 minute export with the

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pro running about eight and a half minutes faster than that so overall the

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base model M2 air is roughly 35 percent faster than its M1 counterpart and the

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higher end M2 air is roughly 21 slower

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than the M2 Pro though the biggest

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outliers are mostly in gaming which I think for many Mac users is not terribly

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important if we look purely at productivity then it's within nine

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percent which is frankly extremely impressive considering the Monstrous

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difference in cooling capacity the main difference for this as we pointed out

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before is that most of these real world use cases just aren't going to be

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continuous loads that will throttle the heck out of the chip I mean even DaVinci

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Resolve ends up being more of a stop and go Affair into terms of CPU usage it's

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not stop and go Floatplane though check out our recent exclusive where we try out some Norwegian hockey Pulver while

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we run our battery life tests for our battery tests we calibrated each

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laptop to roughly the same output as 50 brightness on the M2 air and we let them

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rip on a YouTube video the first to follow was the XPS 13 with the M2 air

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falling second though at nearly double

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the battery life the difference in battery life between the M1 and the M2 MacBook airs seems to

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be primarily due to the larger brighter display as we've seen other outlets

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report worse battery life at lower brightness as well but that's not to say

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that the soc makes no difference the M2 MacBook Pro ended up with a result over

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an hour and a half worse than the M1 pro

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model and those share the same display which seems to suggest the M2 SOC can

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draw more power than its predecessor assuming that adequate Cooling and power

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budgets are allotted to it overall still excellent battery life for both but you

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are giving up a bit of run time for the extra performance of the M2 SOC all of

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which is to say that it very much depends on what you do with your laptop to determine whether the cooling design

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flaw is a fundamental one that kills your experience or is merely a minor

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annoyance and you wish they just put a little fan in it it seems like in most

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real world workloads it's just not going to suffer that much and at a starting

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price of twelve hundred dollars for the air it's likely that a lot of folks are

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in fact going to use it as a glorified Chromebook as for the 13-inch M2 MacBook

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Pro I am having a hard time seeing the benefit considering how close the air

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comes most of the time yes when specked in a way I would

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consider appropriate it's the same price as the air for better performance but at

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that point you're only 300 out from a similarly spec'd 14 inch MacBook Pro

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making that the more attractive Prospect for now in my humble opinion for your

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extra money you're getting a much faster CPU and GPU a larger 120 hertz liquid

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Retina xdr Display an additional Thunderbolt 4 port and dedicated HDMI

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and SD card readers I'm not about to pass judgment if you don't care about

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any of those things but for my money that is more than worth it regardless of

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your priorities I certainly wouldn't suggest going with the cheapest M2

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13-inch MacBook Pro if you care that little about RAM and storage you would

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do just as well with the cheaper air and it would be Slimmer and Silent we're

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going to have all of those linked down below that gives the M2 MacBook Air my

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vote between the M2 Max currently on the market and if you want to get real work

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done well you can either Spritz compressed air on whenever you fire up

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something intensive or save up a little more and wait for the 14-inch M2 Pro you

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review of the M1 air the platform's not mature yet but boy has it ever come a

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long way