His other video on the new MacBook Air is also worth watching:
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The Definitive M2 MacBook Air Review
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His other video on the new MacBook Air is also worth watching:
That’s one of the better reviews I’ve seen, thanks.
The only point he made that doesn’t make sense was the M2 MBA SSD’s lower speed being noticeable during file copying: because 1) of the way APFS works on intra-drive copying, and 2) external drives are slower than even the single chip M2 MBA internal SSD. He claimed his review is data-driven, yet he didn’t back up that claim with any data.
It’s a little disappointing, since his position earlier in the review was to debunk “fabricated bull****” with data.
The only point he made that doesn’t make sense was the M2 MBA SSD’s lower speed being noticeable during file copying: because 1) of the way APFS works on intra-drive copying, and 2) external drives are slower than even the single chip M2 MBA internal SSD. He claimed his review is data-driven, yet he didn’t back up that claim with any data.
It’s a little disappointing, since his position earlier in the review was to debunk “fabricated bull****” with data.
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Quinn is my cousin's son. He's generally been a good and thorough reviewer and is quite entertaining to boot!
Having purchased the M2 air, had the M1 air for almost an year, and also purchased an arm64 windows 11 laptop with 5g cellular radio (lenovo x13s), I agree with the first video review. Will probably return the M2 air. They did extend the return window from 14 days to 30 days so that was nice
How did you get that return extension??? From my experience, Apple RARELY does that...
I stopped at the M1 Pro 14” MacBook Pro has better battery life. Completely wrong for almost all scenarios. And he didn’t show his work. So I’m also calling BS.
Other mistakes: he claimed that the Thunderbolt on the 14” MBP was faster. Nope. He made claims of slower swap without evidence. He claims that the M1 MacBook Air throttles in the Cinebench after 90 seconds. It depends on what you consider throttling. As far as the command line powermetrics tool is concerned, the M2 throttles much faster than the M1. I think that might be a bug though. The M2 powermetrics claims throttling while the power is still declining while the M1 is a near steady state for minutes before showing throttling.
I’m sure there are other issues in the video but that is enough for me to classify this as another poor review attempt. It is definitely not a rigorous examination of the M2 Air as claimed.
Definitely YMMV. Though while nice, not sure it'll make much of a difference as it relates to outcome.
The criticism seems to be that the M1 Air and 14” M1 Pro are better values, mostly because those models are available at sale prices. However, by the time November arrives (holiday shopping season), we are likely to see discounts on the M2 Air, as well.
Seemed like a biased one sided video, Didnt touch on the decrease value the M1 Pro will soon be in once the updated version comes up....this is a big reason many are waiting.
yeah, i'd say on par not run circles - frankly.. there's a reason the cost is similar.
In my personal unpublished testing of my own personal M1 Air, CPU throttling starts as soon as M1 CPU temp sensors reach roughly 90C. I am defining throttling simply as the CPU clock speed dropping below the maximum supported speed for the number of CPU cores active.
(The number active matters because M1 family SoCs group P cores into clusters of 4 CPUs, the CPUs in a cluster all run at the same speed, and the cluster's maximum allowed frequency varies slightly based on how many cores in the cluster are idle. If you want to observe the onset of thermal throttling, first you must establish the baseline of how fast the M1's P cluster runs while cold with all 4 P cores active, then you watch for it to dip below that frequency at all.)
When I tested how fast the M1 Air began to reduce speeds, I started from the Air idling long enough to stabilize all the temp sensors. Then I'd start an all-cores (8-thread) CPU load and time how long it took to observe powermetrics reporting a P cluster frequency below the max all-cores-active freq.
My observations were much like Quinn's - there's no step function where clocks suddenly drop off a cliff, instead there's a gradual reduction. It takes many minutes for the M1 Air to fully heat soak and reach steady state, and it looks like the M2 Air still has that property.
So I don't find Quinn's results surprising or suspicious. He's quite right about this much: there's nothing new about M2 Air throttling. The M1 Air was doing pretty much the same thing all along.
but if folks stop constantly upgrading just think about the stock price. Every new generation has to be the best ever so folks are convinced to upgrade. the hamster wheel can never stop. Now what to do with the folks who hold onto the Apple Watch for years
I’m still trying to understand what I’m seeing with the M2 under all core load. The package power draw drops steadily and once the M2 is heat soaked, it never goes back up while the test is ongoing. Going from over 30 W and then steadily down until a steady state of just over 5 W is surprising to me. I guess once the chassis is dissipating its maximum heat, the cores can’t ramp up again because it will overheat the chassis.
The heat sensors show a massive reduction of spot temperatures on the SoC as well. Going from over 110 °C to steady state at about 85 °C.
I’m still looking at this and I suspect that I don’t have the complete picture yet. Too little time to dedicate to testing.
I ignore all tech youtubers aside from Lisa from Mobile Tech Review and Dave2D for the surface level stuff! The rest of them all regurgitate the same thing - good for them on making money with it!