Apple never learns they released yet another laptop with no freaking cooler
in it touch it and you'll burn yourself do any real work on it you'll probably
burn your whole house down at least that's how the internet reacted when
Apple's redesigned M2 MacBook Air hit the scene but here's a question for you
any situations will you find yourself in where the heat is a real problem and for
that matter would a similarly priced PC in the same form factor even perform any
better did Apple get away with this
seemingly obvious design faux pas and if
they did do we need to change the way that we think about laptop cooling we
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
cooling solution for the M2 MacBook Air or more accurately their lack of one
instead of something anything more
substantial Apple decided to basically attach a thin metal heat spreader like
you'd find on a stick of RAM to the SOC in an attempt to soak up some heat
temporarily before transferring it to the chassis which takes on the role of a
heatsink they could have gone with a
finned radiator a fan even a thicker
piece of metal orb some combination of the three but no they settled on some
bits of paper thin stamped sheet aluminum none of which would actually be
a problem if the soc stayed nice and cool except it doesn't and like for all
electronic devices this is absolutely a bad thing and while the M1 airs
performance did suffer due to poor thermals it wasn't quite to the same
degree pun intended and this is why your
typical uses for an entry-level MacBook things like content consumption web
browsing photo editing or maybe even light video editing they all have one
big thing in common they are bursty in nature and they're unlikely to put the
soc under any kind of sustained load what that means is as long as you have
enough thermal Mass to absorb your momentary heat spikes you can count on
Long idle periods to dissipate it at your leisure well the M1 MacBook Air
managed to strike this balance pretty well performing at or near its full
capability without overheating the chassis unless you were to fire up
something like cinebench blender or a 3D
game unfortunately that is not the case this
time around at least on the surface Apple has tuned the m2's thermal
controls to maintain that same 50 degree surface temperature Target as last time
which is required by law but almost
immediately after being hit by any sort of load the M2 SOC itself hits a
whopping 99 degrees Celsius because even
the pathetic cooler in the M1 MacBook Air has substantially more thermal mass
than this time around I'm frankly pretty disappointed now Apple's response to
this would be pretty obvious well these are silent machines they're not four
Pros get a MacBook Pro if you want to actually put a load on your computer
but frankly that's not a perfect solution either because until they
refresh the M2 MacBook Pro you are going to be stuck with either a super toasty
chip or the old touch bar design with
worse IO on the bright side the M2 air gets
magsafe to go with your Thunderbolt 4 ports and an overall design that's
reminiscent of the 14-inch MacBook Pro it is thicker than the thinnest point of
the previous gen airs wedge but the new flattened design is thinner overall and
from our point of view feels a lot nicer to hold in the lap and that Meg safe
charging port is capable of fast charging up to 65 Watts if you pick up
either the full GPU model or you pay an extra 20 bucks over base you also have
the option by the way of choosing a 35 watt dual type-c charger instead if that
better fits your needs and from using it we can legit see how it could be super
handy to have for travel compared to the single port fast charger
the only major difference between the air configurations that directly impacts
performance is the storage previous gen M1 MacBook airs 256 gig
variation used twin 128 gig chips to
achieve that capacity that divides the workload between those two chips and
makes it much less likely that a read or a write will stall while waiting for
another to finish the M2 airs 256 gig
variation meanwhile makes use of a single 256 Gigabyte chip that means that
the nand flash will be in a weight State more often and you can think of this
kind of like running single versus dual Channel memory in practice this means
that the lowest capacity model gets roughly half the performance of the
other storage tiers that make use of multiple chips although you guys might
not expect this I kind of feel like I have to cut Apple some slack here most
people are not going to notice the difference between 1.5 and 3 gigabytes
per second and outside of synthetic storage benchmarks the CPU is often
going to end up being the bottleneck at either of those speeds there are
situations where that might not be the case though like video editing prores
raw footage but they also aren't as likely to come up on the air compared to
a MacBook Pro the part of that is the way that the
Air's performance Gets kneecapped By Its lack of cooling which is another problem
that Apple created I'll show you what I mean though starting with gaming because
it's always kind of funny to me when people complain about gaming performance
on a machine that was clearly engineered for browsing Facebook in order to make
this a fair test given the cooling solution we're running each of these
twice to warm up and then finally taking our results from a third run and
well yeah the cooling Solution on the M2
MacBook Pro is good for a whopping 35
increase in FPS in every test except for
Total War Warhammer 3's battle Benchmark where the lead shrinks to just 30
percent In fairness to the M2 MacBook Air
however even with its awful cooling the competing Dell XPS 13 doesn't Beat It by
a significant margin in any of those tests oh but if you want something that does
beat the competition you can check out our screwdriver on lttstore.com it's now
independently tested and verified moving on to cinebench the M2 air loses about a
thousand points in its score over a 10 minute run compared to a single run
giving you some idea of how your performance might degrade under heavy
load meanwhile the M2 Pro retains basically the same score geekbench being
a shorter Benchmark shows basically no difference between the M2 MacBooks so
thanks for that but that doesn't mean it's an entirely useless Benchmark
because interestingly we can see the difference in GPU performance between
the M1 and the M2 base models and it's
roughly in line with the additional memory bandwidth provided by the M2 SOC
of course unless you work at our Testing Lab you probably don't spend all day
running benchmarks so let's take a look at real world workloads starting with an
Adobe Lightroom export and wow not only
is the M2 air faster than the M1 air it's actually rough in line with the pro
class machines with active cooling the M2 also picks up a significant winning
compressor thanks to the addition of prores encoding engines on the base
model SOC that's over 475 percent faster than the M1 CPU
fallback h.264 isn't significantly different
however indicating that that encoder is more or less identical between the socs
and Final Cut Pro can use up to three of these prores streams on the M2 air
MacBooks which is more than the M1 air could handle and one less than the pro
pretty impressive if you're at DaVinci Resolve user well
you're going to want to get a RAM upgrade regardless of the rest of the
performance numbers if you're using an air or a pro because 8 gigs isn't nearly
enough with 24 gigs the air managed a respectable 40 minute export with the
pro running about eight and a half minutes faster than that so overall the
base model M2 air is roughly 35 percent faster than its M1 counterpart and the
higher end M2 air is roughly 21 slower
than the M2 Pro though the biggest
outliers are mostly in gaming which I think for many Mac users is not terribly
important if we look purely at productivity then it's within nine
percent which is frankly extremely impressive considering the Monstrous
difference in cooling capacity the main difference for this as we pointed out
before is that most of these real world use cases just aren't going to be
continuous loads that will throttle the heck out of the chip I mean even DaVinci
Resolve ends up being more of a stop and go Affair into terms of CPU usage it's
not stop and go Floatplane though check out our recent exclusive where we try out some Norwegian hockey Pulver while
we run our battery life tests for our battery tests we calibrated each
laptop to roughly the same output as 50 brightness on the M2 air and we let them
rip on a YouTube video the first to follow was the XPS 13 with the M2 air
falling second though at nearly double
the battery life the difference in battery life between the M1 and the M2 MacBook airs seems to
be primarily due to the larger brighter display as we've seen other outlets
report worse battery life at lower brightness as well but that's not to say
that the soc makes no difference the M2 MacBook Pro ended up with a result over
an hour and a half worse than the M1 pro
model and those share the same display which seems to suggest the M2 SOC can
draw more power than its predecessor assuming that adequate Cooling and power
budgets are allotted to it overall still excellent battery life for both but you
are giving up a bit of run time for the extra performance of the M2 SOC all of
which is to say that it very much depends on what you do with your laptop to determine whether the cooling design
flaw is a fundamental one that kills your experience or is merely a minor
annoyance and you wish they just put a little fan in it it seems like in most
real world workloads it's just not going to suffer that much and at a starting
price of twelve hundred dollars for the air it's likely that a lot of folks are
in fact going to use it as a glorified Chromebook as for the 13-inch M2 MacBook
Pro I am having a hard time seeing the benefit considering how close the air
comes most of the time yes when specked in a way I would
consider appropriate it's the same price as the air for better performance but at
that point you're only 300 out from a similarly spec'd 14 inch MacBook Pro
making that the more attractive Prospect for now in my humble opinion for your
extra money you're getting a much faster CPU and GPU a larger 120 hertz liquid
Retina xdr Display an additional Thunderbolt 4 port and dedicated HDMI
and SD card readers I'm not about to pass judgment if you don't care about
any of those things but for my money that is more than worth it regardless of
your priorities I certainly wouldn't suggest going with the cheapest M2
13-inch MacBook Pro if you care that little about RAM and storage you would
do just as well with the cheaper air and it would be Slimmer and Silent we're
going to have all of those linked down below that gives the M2 MacBook Air my
vote between the M2 Max currently on the market and if you want to get real work
done well you can either Spritz compressed air on whenever you fire up
something intensive or save up a little more and wait for the 14-inch M2 Pro you
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on their first purchase thanks for watching guys go check out our initial
review of the M1 air the platform's not mature yet but boy has it ever come a
long way