For more than a decade, the MacBook Air has been the gold standard for the ultraportable laptop, and successive iterations continued to push the boundaries of what one could expect from the distinctively wedge-shaped design. Yet, the aesthetics largely remained the same, even as the rest of the industry caught up with impressive ultrabook designs that left the Apple’s most popular laptop looking just a bit dated. Even with the jump to Apple Silicon with the MacBook Air M1 back in end-2020, the design didn’t really move the needle forward. Until now, with the biggest design overhaul the Air lineup has seen since its debut, and it comes in the all-new M2-sporting MacBook Air launched last month at WWDC 2022. Having spent a couple of days with the MacBook Air M2, here are my quick first impressions.
Gone is the wedge-shaped taper that characterized the Air all these years, with the new Air inheriting a flatter design from the M1-powered MacBook Pros. Owing to the lack of a taper, it’s uniformly thick at 11.3mm, and actually weighs 50g lighter than the M1 Air (at 1.24kg). It’s still the kind of weight you can throw into a bag and forget that it’s there – for reference, a 12.9-inch iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard is a little over 1.35kg! It’s easily handled in one hand, and the lid lefts ever so readily, as always. It’s also available in a bunch of new colors (Starlight, Midnight) aside from the silver and space grey, and while it’s not the vivid colors we saw in the iMac M1, the insanely gorgeous Midnight color is... well, insanely gorgeous. It’s a dark navy blue in some light, leaning towards almost a black in other lighting. Worth noting – the last time Apple did such a dark color on any laptop was well over 15 years ago with their polycarbonate MacBooks, so I’m stoked to see this option make a comeback. There is the very clear and visible matter of the Midnight color option attracting fingerprints and smudges, unlike any other piece of tech I’ve used. No seriously, keep a micro-fiber cloth handy with this one if you don’t like the unsightly smudges each time you pick this up.
Continuing the inspiration from the pricier Pros, we see the return of the MagSafe snap-on-and-off magnetic port, which frees up the two Thunderbolt/Type-C ports for dongles and accessories…#donglelife is not going away. The nice bit is that the MagSafe charging cord is color-matched to the color option you pick, as are the obligatory Apple stickers in the box. The more divisive inclusion is the slightly larger 13.6-inch (vs 13.3 on the M1 Air), 2560x1664 pixel resolution display with the same camera notch previously seen on the MacBook Pro – of course, this isn’t as big a leap from the previous generation as the ProMotion-capable displays on the Pros, but it’s a good upgrade, nonetheless. I’ll dive deeper into the improvements on the screen and webcam in my full review, but the marginally increased screen real estate without a jump in the dimensions and footprint is certainly a plus. The keyboard too continues to build on the improvements seen on the previous Air, with a satisfying and generous amount of key travel. The force touch trackpad was as good as ever.
With the laptop’s redesign, the M2 Air takes a different approach to the speakers, which are no longer on the side of the keyboard – instead they find their way between the display and the keyboard. Two tweeters and two woofers make for a surprisingly good music listening experience, with impressively good bass for a device this thin. I’m yet to give it a full run through with some Atmos content, but initial impressions are good.
While the initial ramp-up period has been along expected lines (what with all the software one would download and install), I haven’t yet put the M2 Air through its paces to see how the lack of a fan inside the chassis impacts the sustained performance under daily workloads. Or if there are any serious performance compromises made in the base 8GB/256GB storage model I’m testing.
The new MacBook Air M2 comes in at a pricier-in-comparison (to the M1 Air) Rs. 1,19,900 for the base 8GB/256GB variant, and an upgrade to the next variant gets you 512GB storage and the new 35W dual USB-C port power adapter. In the hand, the MacBook Air M2 is a breath of fresh…air, but how does it fare over a week’s worth of work? More importantly, are the upgrades over Rs. 99,900 base M1 Air worth the extra price of admission? I’ll delve deep into all this and more in my full review.