I first got my 15″ MacBook Air M2 about a year ago so I figured I would give you my thoughts on the laptop after 1 year of use from everything to being a full time student to creative tasks to full-scale development. I bought the version with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage for about $750 when I traded in my old Intel 16″ MacBook Pro from 2019 and I will mostly be comparing the two laptops.

A note about this review: This is, in no way, an “objective” review of this laptop. I am a firm believer in the notion that there is no such thing as an objective review. A review is an opinion. You want objective? Go read the spec sheet. This is a story about my use and my thoughts on the product.

Why This Laptop?

So I sorta kinda impulse bought this laptop two weeks into my penultimate semester of college (I was finishing a masters degree in information systems). I went through one day of in-person class with my old laptop and I simply could not do it anymore. I was constantly worried about the battery life and the thing was just loud and clunky. I got home from class that weekend and basically went directly to the Apple Store.

I chose this over the MacBook Pro mostly because of money (I have no income), so that wasn’t a hard decision to make. I was also getting by just fine on my old laptop power-wise, it was things like the battery life that were really making me want to upgrade. I had considered a battery swap and it was going to end up being about half as much as just getting the new laptop. So I got the new laptop.

Why did I get the 15″ over the 13″? I don’t really like smaller laptops. Why not get the 14″ MacBook Pro? Again: I don’t really like smaller laptops. I can hear you saying that there isn’t that much of a difference between the 14″ and 15″ laptops. I bet you also think that there’s not enough difference in size between the Max-sized phones and the iPad mini. You would be wrong. This, quite honestly, is the smallest laptop display I would personally use. That’s really it. I’ve always owned 15″ or larger laptops and I have no interest in downsizing at the moment.

Why 16GB and 1TB of storage? Well, I wanted 16GB of RAM and the smallest storage size they had in store was 1TB. Not everything needs to have a super well thought out reason.

Apple Silicon

Transitioning From Intel

This is something that I find myself talking about any time it comes up, but it was INSANE how much of a difference was immediately noticeable when transitioning from Intel. I spent years hearing about how great these laptops were, but I was never really convinced that they were that much better now that they were on ARM. Wow was I surprised.

What actually was different? Honestly the whole thing just felt refined. I don’t really know how else to describe it. Things were snappier, the laptop was a hell of a lot thinner, and the battery life was insane. There were also certain features that weren’t available to Intel Macs like Live Text, Subject Lift, and the infamous camera features like reactions. I don’t use these features a ton, but when they’re helpful, they’re helpful and I appreciate them.

The M2 Chip

This chip has been great for the basic stuff. I’ll give more details about my specific use cases later, but I’ll give you a bit of an overview here. It can do pretty much anything, honestly. It can be used to edit videos, it can be used to compose orchestral music, it can be used to build websites and applications, it can be used to edit photos, make these articles. It can really do anything and I stand by that. The thing is, though, that it’s just the base chip in the M2 line. You’re going to get a better experience with a better chip. It’s not that the M2 can’t do the same things as the M2 Pro, Max, and Ultra, it’s just that you’re going to get things done faster on those chips and it’s up to you to figure out if that added cost is going to be worth it.

With that being said, I’ve actually run into one scenario that brought this laptop to its knees. It was, however, such an odd combination of tasks that it’s only really worth mentioning for the entertainment factor. At the time I was running two parallel Docker builds, running an iOS Simulator for Routines, running VS Code for the Routines website, and then also running Discord, Threads, Messages, and Safari. That’s a lot. This was the only time I’ve ever seen this computer lag, and it lagged hard. But, like I said, that’s such an unusual workflow for this kind of machine.

Hardware

So I’ve already talked quite a bit about my thoughts on the hardware, specifically about the size, so I’m not going to repeat that stuff, but I do have more thoughts. First: I don’t know what they’re doing to these things, but they’ve managed to get the finish on their aluminum to feel almost pillowy. I noticed this on the iPhone 15 series as well: it just feels different and I like it. The keyboard is great, I’ve always liked Apple’s keyboards (even the Butterfly Keyboard, yes). I will note, though, that the keyboard on the MacBook Air is noticeably less tactile than on the MacBook Pro. I’m not sure what it’s about, but I don’t really have a problem with it, they both feel great, just different. You might not even notice it if you don’t spend time thinking about your keyboard like I do.

The display is awesome, it doesn’t get as bright as the Pros, it’s 60Hz, and it doesn’t have an XDR display, but it gets the job done and looks great while it’s doing it. The speakers are also pretty much as good as my old MacBook Pro, which aren’t as good as the new MacBook Pros, but they’re still at the top of the market. A few Windows laptops are getting close, but Apple’s really nailed the speakers on their laptops for years now.

The port situation is honestly fine, this is a MacBook Air, not a Mac Studio, I don’t find that I really need more from it as a laptop. Even as a student I never felt hampered by only being able to output to one display, it all worked great for me. MagSafe has been a nice addition, too. It’s not groundbreaking and USBC still works great for charging the laptop, but I like not having to take up another port just to get power to the laptop on the few occasions where I actually have to worry about battery life.

Mourning the TouchBar

I’m not afraid to say it: I loved the TouchBar so much. It was something different and it worked well for what I needed from it. Now that I’m back to function keys I really like having them, but at the same time I wish I still had the TouchBar. To this day I haven’t found a better way to open the address bar in Safari and I will never forget that. With that being said, the Do Not Disturb key on the keyboard is one of my new favorite things; I appreciate having a “shut up” button for the world. Honestly that’s the only key I actually use that wasn’t easily accessible on the TouchBar other than the occasional skip forward when I’m listening to music.

My Use

As a Student

As a student I feel like I was in an…odd intersection of workloads for this thing. I studied information systems (if you don’t know what that is, think of it as a hybrid computer science and business degree). I’ve done everything from basic word processing to making statistical models to building full on AI applications on this thing with no problems. The laptop is light, it fits well in a backpack, and you never have to worry about battery life on this thing.

As a Developer

Now that I’ve graduated school, I’ve been looking for a job. Since the job market’s crap I’ve been doing my own thing. I’ve spent the past few months working on developing both iOS and web applications and have been pushing this thing rather extensively. I regularly use Xcode, Simulator, Zed, VS Code, Docker, and Figma for my work and, as mentioned earlier, I have brought this thing to a halt doing this.

Build times in Xcode can vary, but they’re pretty quick. Loading more than one Xcode preview at a time is…not great, but that’s more an Xcode preview thing than anything else (they’re just really slow, I really only use them when an app is just starting out). Docker can get pretty rough on this thing too, as I mentioned earlier. I haven’t gotten to really pushing this thing with web development, I’m currently only building basic websites, but plan on exploring web development further actually quite soon.

Final Thoughts

Recommendations for Students

It’s important to remember that in school you’re learning. You’re not building ChatGPT on a laptop, you’re not making Star Wars on a laptop. You’re going to be mostly doing proofs of concepts and scaled down software. I genuinely wouldn’t consider a MacBook Pro. If you want one I can’t stop you, but you won’t be taking advantage of the power with your schoolwork.

As it stands, I still think that most students will do just fine with 8GB of RAM. If you’re working with media or building software I would bump it up to 16GB of RAM if you can, but it’s not the end of the world if you don’t. Storage is really up to you. Documents are small, photos and videos are large. Make of that what you will. I can’t tell you what your use is. I personally am using a little over 300GB of storage on my laptop presently and I have entire codebases for multiple applications, multiple versions of iOS, all of my iCloud storage, as well as some video projects and the entirety of Apple’s build-in sound library for Logic stored on this thing.

Recommendations for Developers

If you are developing full-time, I wouldn’t consider this laptop, honestly. That’s not to say that it can’t be done on this laptop, I’m a full-time developer working off the M2 MacBook Air, but it’s not really a problem of power. This is where the device’s rather limited I/O can be problematic. I regularly wish I could output to at least one more display working on projects and you just can’t do that on this laptop (though the M3 versions can). Additionally, I don’t have a dock for my laptop so I am severely limited by the port situation. You can get a dock and be just fine, though.

The CPU is where I’m noticing most of the bottlenecks if I’m being honest. I’m regularly hitting 600% or more CPU usage when performing Docker builds (remember, 100% usage is for 1 CPU core, I’m not talking about total CPU load, which depends on a lot of different factors) and they can take upwards of a half hour to actually build. I wish I could just be like “yeah throw more RAM at it” but that’s not really the solution.

My Future

So obviously I just spent a ton of time talking about how this laptop isn’t right for what I’m using it for at this point. But I’m still using it. Where do I think I’m going to go with this in the future? Well I think I’m going to get a Mac Studio. I don’t know if I’m going to get the newest one or an older one (Mac Studios have held onto their value annoyingly well), we’ll burn that bridge when we get there. That device is much more conducive to the workflow I have. I don’t really like using a docked laptop all the time, I find that there are enough differences between how I like to use a laptop and how I like to use a desktop to be super annoying.

I won’t be getting rid of this laptop any time soon, at least not in any foreseeable time horizon. I really like it for what it is and I understand what it isn’t. If you need a good all-around-er for your job and you’re mostly working on the web, writing documents, and doing the occasional light creative or developer work, this thing is going to be great for you. It’s perfect for students, and I cannot recommend a laptop more for that work than this one, but if you plan on pushing it further than that, I would consider stepping up to a Pro model.

Do you have this laptop? Are you interested in it or maybe the M3 version? Do you have any additional questions? Let me know in the comments, or mention me on Mastodon or over on Threads.