15-Inch MacBook Air Reviews: The Sweet Spot for Performance, Size, and Value

[compwiz1202]

And it would be. Buying RAM upgrades from the OEM vendor is always a terrible deal, and you see the same with Dell/Lenovo/HP/etc. For reference, checked some random ThinkPads and Lenovo wants $90 for 8->16GB DDR5 upgrade or $150 for 8->16GB LPDDR5 upgrade.

At the moment, both DRAM and NAND prices are incredibly low (not even thinking about the wholesale & bulk contracts that an OEM like Apple gets into) so the high price of OEM upgrades is particularly notable on un-upgradable computers.

Yes and the not upgradable part is what makes it more BS. At least if the user could do it, charge whatever you want since it's convenience.

 

[compwiz1202]

You forgot Air has more colours and a bigger screen

Those two things and it being a reasonable base price are the main reasons I may get it.

 

[redheeler]

I can't believe it took them this long to finally make a 15 inch Macbook Air. It just makes sense

Best part it's at a really great price. It's cheaper than all the other 15 inch notebooks out there, and faster than them, and with 5x the battery life of them

The 15 inch Macbook Air is pretty much the final nail in the coffin for the Dell XPS lineup.

It should start at 16 GB / 512 GB, it would be a perfect product and I might even buy one to replace my 16" Intel. Looking at the XPS and that one does.

 

[Dorv]

Looks like a great product. Makes me fail to see the point behind the 13” when this is such a good value.

Corporate will still buy the 13in model for most users.

 

[Dorv]

Still don't love that they've crippled it by not allowing dual external displays.

Before you go saying "that's a Pro only feature, the Air is a lightweight non-Pro box", have a look at Apple's marketing page for the Air, literally marketing it with After Effects and "intense workloads".

The hardware is most certainly capable of it...although Vision Pro may make that point entirely moot early next year.

I don't love this, but have gotten around it with a DisplayLink dock ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Looks like a nice product, but I'll wait for the next iteration to see if they add dual monitor support. No reason to upgrade from the M1 Air without that feature.

It's 2023, dual monitors are not just for "pros" anymore.

Get a DisplayLink dock. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I hate that dual monitors aren't supported out of the box, but at least there's an option.

 

[Dorv]

[Delete]

 

[nfl46]

Watching videos is faster on a Mac?

Forgive the illusion of sarcasm, its just you listed browsing the watching as your only 2 uses and an iPad is built for this in mind.

I also said this:

 

[ndouglas]

So regular LCDs just have one big backlight that covers the whole of the screen (so blacks appear a washed-out grey, because they're also being backlit), but Mini-LED backlighting has lots of different zones (think it's something huge like 10,000 zones on the MBPs?) where each has a separate backlight. so these can be switched on or off independently, giving you pure blacks in some areas even when other zones are turned on. One downside of this is something called “blooming”, where sometimes black areas have a kind of light halo bleeding into them, because the zone needs to be illuminated to show (for instance) a white portion of the image, so the black area surrounding it gets illuminated as well. This is different to OLED and MicroLED, where the LEDs themselves provide the luminance of the screen (so no blooming) — in Mini-LED the various backlights provides the luminance, whereas the LEDs in front of the backlight tell it what colour to be.

ProMotion is just to do with how often the screen refreshes — on the MBPs I think it's between 10–120 Hz (times per second), so if what's on screen is static then it'll refresh less often, and if you're scrolling it'll ramp up to 120 Hz to make it look smoother. And it'll play video in its native frame rate, e.g. 24 Hz, which both saves battery life (because the screen needs to refresh less often) and gets rid of any judder that might've occurred from trying to play a 24 Hz video at 60 Hz (which most displays refresh at).

I'm not an expert in this stuff so might've got one or two things above slightly wrong, but the gist should be right.

Interesting, that helps…thank you!

 

[bmustaf]

I don't love this, but have gotten around it with a DisplayLink dock ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


Get a DisplayLink dock. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I hate that dual monitors aren't supported out of the box, but at least there's an option.

Yeah, that's definitely a way and an option, you're totally right.

For my use case (and the one the MBA is marketed to IMO) is portability. So, if I'm lugging around a DisplayLink dock now, then I've not just lost the advantage of moving to an MBA vs at 14" MBP or 16" MBP, even, but I'm now futzing with even more cables.

I have a few offices I travel between, home (where I don't even use a laptop, I just have a Mac Studio with a few monitors set on my desk, anyway) and if I'm at coworking space, etc that has multi-monitor setups, just plugging in and working, in 2023, with advanced SoC tech, etc should "just work". It did back in the Intel days, which is the really insulting thing about all this...

 

[bmustaf]

Yes and the not upgradable part is what makes it more BS. At least if the user could do it, charge whatever you want since it's convenience.

I was all against soldered-in RAM when it merely a form-factor item, but the memory bandwidth of on-die RAM just blows away anything else that requires a connector....it's not just a form factor thing.

 

[bmustaf]

And it would be. Buying RAM upgrades from the OEM vendor is always a terrible deal, and you see the same with Dell/Lenovo/HP/etc. For reference, checked some random ThinkPads and Lenovo wants $90 for 8->16GB DDR5 upgrade or $150 for 8->16GB LPDDR5 upgrade.

At the moment, both DRAM and NAND prices are incredibly low (not even thinking about the wholesale & bulk contracts that an OEM like Apple gets into) so the high price of OEM upgrades is particularly notable on un-upgradable computers.

I did not like unupgradeable for no reason computers, but until connector tech gets good enough, you simply cannot beat the performance of on-die RAM, it's absurd what the unified memory arch of the M1/M2 SoC can do that connector-based technology just cannot.

 

[ccsicecoke]

No floppy, no CD drive, no usb A, no buy.

Your analogy failed miserably.

One just has to remember that Tim added SDXC back to all MBPs and Mac Studio. Did he add back those floppy or CD drive as you mentioned?

 

[TechnoMonk]

Your analogy failed miserably.

One just has to remember that Tim added SDXC back to all MBPs and Mac Studio. Did he add back those floppy or CD drive as you mentioned?

No it’s perfect analogy for MBA. SD card has been discontinued for long time on MBA. It’s not coming back to MBA just like floppy and others.

 

[2fifty6]

I'm currently working from a 15" 2012 MacBook Pro (yes, you read the year right) and am debating upgrading. I like the screen size, so it's between the new 15" Air, a 16" M2 MBP, or a 16" M1 MBP. Leaning towards MBP in general because of the additional ports and the speaker quality, and leaning towards the M1 because I can find it a lot cheaper than the M2, especially used or refurbished. That said, thoughts on this 15" Air vs the 16" M1 MBP? (Or is there a compelling reason to eat the cost and get the M2 MBP?)

 

[TechnoMonk]

I'm currently working from a 15" 2012 MacBook Pro (yes, you read the year right) and am debating upgrading. I like the screen size, so it's between the new 15" Air, a 16" M2 MBP, or a 16" M1 MBP. Leaning towards MBP in general because of the additional ports and the speaker quality, and leaning towards the M1 because I can find it a lot cheaper than the M2, especially used or refurbished. That said, thoughts on this 15" Air vs the 16" M1 MBP? (Or is there a compelling reason to eat the cost and get the M2 MBP?)

Depends on what you do with the MBA/MBP. I have an M1 Max 64 GB MBP 16. It’s been my work horse for almost 18 months. My home shared laptop is MBA M2. M2 MBA starts throttling if I do something at sustained load for 15 mins. My kids love MBA, I use MBP 16.
Personally I would have gotten MBP M2 Max with 96 GB ram and GPU cores if I was in market for MBP 16. I keep my MBP for long time, so incremental cost over 7-8 years is not much.

 

[Kingcoherent]

The 13inch Air is amazingly portable, and I couldn't be happier with mine.

At work I'm standardising the team on 16inch MBP Max 96GB RAM (researchers, engineers and designers). It's a chunky machine, but now that pytorch can target metal I'm hoping we'll see some proper benefit from them. However, the main selling point of the 16inch was the large screen for productivity without an external monitor. The 15 may be enough for many people. Kind of a shame that they don't have more ram on these things - but that really would cannibalise the pro line up.

 

[TechnoMonk]

The 13inch Air is amazingly portable, and I couldn't be happier with mine.

At work I'm standardising the team on 16inch MBP Max 96GB RAM (researchers, engineers and designers). It's a chunky machine, but now that pytorch can target metal I'm hoping we'll see some proper benefit from them. However, the main selling point of the 16inch was the large screen for productivity without an external monitor. The 15 may be enough for many people. Kind of a shame that they don't have more ram on these things - but that really would cannibalise the pro line up.

It’s not canibalization, there is no way MBA will have Mx Pro or Mx Max with out a fan. M2 doesn’t support higher unified memory.

 

[a.jfred]

I have a 16" 2019 Intel i9 MBP, a 16" M2 Pro MBP and a 13" M1 Air. The MBP's are both work machines and the M1 Air is my personal laptop. The Intel MPB is rubbish compared to the Apple Silicon Macs. It's hot, slow and has very limited battery life. The M2 Pro MPB is a great workhorse, is super fast and has good battery life. It's also quite a big, heavy laptop and lives on my desk. My M1 Air is pretty much the perfect personal laptop - thin, light, fast and with great battery life. If I was going to replace the 13" Air, then I'd definitely be looking at the 15"

Thank you!

A coworker picked his up today, and ... man, it's pretty. I was a little concerned about only having 2 USB-C ports, but with the MagSafe charger (colour-matched on the Midnight model), that shouldn't be an issue at all. It's def a little thicker than I was expecting, and I'm not sure how I feel about the notch - but given it really is time to upgrade.

 

[Kingcoherent]

It’s not canibalization, there is no way MBA will have Mx Pro or Mx Max with out a fan. M2 doesn’t support higher unified memory.

There was a conditional implied in my "I wish they had more RAM in these things". I realise it's not supported now, so they can't cannibalise pro sales.

As for CPU throttling, I clearly spend too much time doing power point these days! From my experience, CoreML and Torch inference surprisingly effective even on the Air (of course I've never tried to train/fine tune locally - I'm sure that would throttle). The only problems I've seen are with Rosetta emulated code.

 

[teh_hunterer]

thats not splitting hair, your statement that m2 throttle beating m1 non throttle while the difference is only a few hundred cinebench points, meaning real world translation of maybe 3-4fps difference, now thats splitting hair.

congratulation! you discovered the scientific method lol.

the overheating/throttling is whatever it starts to throttle my guy.

Edit: for the record it’s 30 mins not 2 hours something as you stated

If you care about real world results, the link you posted only proves my point, which is that the M2 throttled tends to outperform a non-throttled M1. You might find some example where this isn't the case but it's true for the most part from the numbers I've seen.

So you are claiming that any computer that throttles is overheating? But you said people would be complaining about the overheating once people game on Apple Silicon. I guess you just meant they would be complaining of a 10%-15% drop in performance under sustained loads?

 

[TechnoMonk]

There was a conditional implied in my "I wish they had more RAM in these things". I realise it's not supported now, so they can't cannibalise pro sales.

As for CPU throttling, I clearly spend too much time doing power point these days! From my experience, CoreML and Torch inference surprisingly effective even on the Air (of course I've never tried to train/fine tune locally - I'm sure that would throttle). The only problems I've seen are with Rosetta emulated code.

It has nothing to do with cannibalization. It’s technically not possible. May be with 3nm in M4 it may go to 32 GB or 64 GB.

 

[ilikewhey]

If you care about real world results, the link you posted only proves my point, which is that the M2 throttled tends to outperform a non-throttled M1. You might find some example where this isn't the case but it's true for the most part from the numbers I've seen.

i have no idea how you arrived at that conclusion since the link i posted clearly shows a throttled m2 achieved a lower score than a not throttled m1. what you have demonstrated so far neither proves your point true nor accurate for the most part.

So you are claiming that any computer that throttles is overheating?

overheating is when a product's temperature has breached the design tolerance, throttling is designed to protect the product from a complete shutdown, these two words are often used in conjuncture in a cause and a effect scenario.

But you said people would be complaining about the overheating once people game on Apple Silicon.

yeah, i imagine so, anyone with a older iphone trying to play a graphic intensive game would know that experience, since both the mba and iphone don't have fans.

I guess you just meant they would be complaining of a 10%-15% drop in performance under sustained loads?

10-15% is a pretty big drop, folks on the pc gaming side pays hundreds of dollars in updating their cpus and gpus, finetuning their overclock for hours, just to chase that 10-15% performance.

 

[teh_hunterer]

i have no idea how you arrived at that conclusion since the link i posted clearly shows a throttled m2 achieved a lower score than a not throttled m1. what you have demonstrated so far neither proves your point true nor accurate for the most part.

The picture I posted, from a good source (Snazzy Labs), clearly shows a throttled M2 outperform a not throttled M1.

overheating is when a product's temperature has breached the design tolerance, throttling is designed to protect the product from a complete shutdown, these two words are often used in conjuncture in a cause and a effect scenario.

Throttling down to 10%-15% is generally not considered 'overheating'. Overheating is generally accepted to refer to when the device has to shut itself down because it got too hot.

yeah, i imagine so, anyone with a older iphone trying to play a graphic intensive game would know that experience, since both the mba and iphone don't have fans.

It's not quite the same thing. iPhones and iPads have their screen and internals all in the same part of the device, so the heat builds up much worse and you run into things like the screen having to dim because the device is getting too hot.

That's a big part of why laptops with the M2 for example outperform an iPad with the same chip - it's not just the bigger chassis, but the fact that the screen is completely separate from the SoC and battery that allows a lot more thermal headroom.

10-15% is a pretty big drop, folks on the pc gaming side pays hundreds of dollars in updating their cpus and gpus, finetuning their overclock for hours, just to chase that 10-15% performance.

It depends where it's dropping from and what it's dropping to. Let's not forget the vast bulk of laptops that have active cooling will also throttle down from their maximum performance. The fact that many actively cooled Apple Silicon devices don't throttle at all is a recent phenomenon.

There are people who are happy gaming on the Nintendo Switch, which is less powerful than smartphones that were out when it was released, and doesn't even begin to touch the power of the M1/M2. And there are people who will pay thousands for just a GPU. To each their own.

 

[Tagbert]

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[ilikewhey]

The picture I posted, from a good source (Snazzy Labs), clearly shows a throttled M2 outperform a not throttled M1.

except your source only did 8 run, while the link i posted did 16+, the more runs you do the clearer the picture,

It's not quite the same thing. iPhones and iPads have their screen and internals all in the same part of the device, so the heat builds up much worse and you run into things like the screen having to dim because the device is getting too hot.

That's a big part of why laptops with the M2 for example outperform an iPad with the same chip - it's not just the bigger chassis, but the fact that the screen is completely separate from the SoC and battery that allows a lot more thermal headroom.

granted there are thermal conductivity given how close each conponents are in a phone or ipad, however the principle is still the same.

It depends where it's dropping from and what it's dropping to. Let's not forget the vast bulk of laptops that have active cooling will also throttle down from their maximum performance. The fact that many actively cooled Apple Silicon devices don't throttle at all is a recent phenomenon.

There are people who are happy gaming on the Nintendo Switch, which is less powerful than smartphones that were out when it was released, and doesn't even begin to touch the power of the M1/M2. And there are people who will pay thousands for just a GPU. To each their own.

pc laptop are garbage at heat management to begin with given how much TDP x86 and gpu pushes out, while arm based AS is designed with low thermal output to begin with so its not a fair comparison.