macbook air 22 review
Color
It’s blue! After years of vaguely grey computers it feels great to have another color option, even if it isn’t forest green or lavender. I read complaints from reviewers about fingerprint smudges showing more easily on the darker metal, but luckily I don’t really care about smudges. They’re there, but it’s fine.
Size
Despite a thicker front of the laptop, the overall thickness of the new MacBook Air is refreshingly good. I haven’t held one of the M1 Pros but I think it’s a fair bit thicker than this computer. Whether held with one hand or two, the Air has a reassuring stiffness and from the keyboard to the screen, everything feels great.
Battery
Same awesome multi-day effective battery life from the M1 Air.
I am really not doing anything that would tax this computer, and nothing I’ve tackled thus far made it blink. I splurged a bit and got 24gb of memory for no real reason, and running an electron-based browser along with Slack, Discord, Reeder, Things, and a few small utilities I’m comfortably sitting at 16gb of physical memory used. In practice I think I just get to leave more apps running while I play Don’t Starve or watch Youtube videos and convert video with Handbrake.
Honestly, unless you’re rendering video constantly or building apps with large codebases, this is the computer to get over the Pro. The M2 (and M1 to be honest) are just so far beyond the performance of Intel’s chips it feels like a computer from the future. If you’re a tab hoarder, or just use too many chromium apps, an Air will suit you well.
Closing
If I were buying a computer anytime soon, the decision would be easy—an M1 or M2 MacBook Air. Get 16gb of memory (or more) and don’t think about a new computer for a number of years to come. This is the best computer I’ve ever owned, with the last being my M1.