of its most impressive laptops it's ever made

with the M1 MacBook Air.

But as good as that machine was and still is,

all of the advancements were on the inside.

The outside of it was an old design

that we've been familiar with for years.

Now, Apple has released a brand new Air

with a complete redesign that brings the outside

up to speed with how impressive the inside is.

Plus it's got the latest M2 chip

for even better performance than before.

There are some buts, though,

and the big one is this new Air is $200 more expensive

than the older one, starting at 1199.

Plus with the M1 Air still being produced,

you can find sales and deals on it quite easily

which pushes the price gap between the two even further

while the real world performance difference

might not be as much as you might think.

So let's dive in.

(cool electronic music)

I'm here to tell you the wedge is gone.

The new Air is the same thickness in the front

as it is in the back.

Some people might be bummed that Apple's moved away

from this iconic MacBook Air shape, but I'm not one of them.

I think this new design is fantastic

and exactly what Apple needed to do.

It's modern and sleek, and just really nice to look at.

That is, unless you get this new midnight color.

This new color is quite beautiful.

It's got a blue black finish that changes in the light

but as soon as you touch it,

it gets covered in nasty fingerprints.

And if you're anything like me, those will drive you batty.

Apple's far from the only company

to face this problem on dark colored laptops.

I'm looking at you Razor.

But if that's something that will bother you,

go with one of the other colors.

I've also got the new silver gold starlight color here

and it stays fingerprint free without issue.

Though the wedge shape is gone,

the new Air is remarkably thin.

In fact, it's even thinner than the older model.

It's hard to convey in words just how thin this computer is.

But as soon as you open it and start typing on it,

you'll notice it.

The bottom half is barely thicker than an iPad.

The new Air is also slightly lighter than the old one

at 2.7 pounds versus 2.8.

Now this is far from the lightest computer you can buy,

but it's certainly light enough that toting it

around wherever I need to go isn't a problem.

But since this is an Apple computer

we're talking about here, that thinner profile

and lighter weight doesn't make

the new Air feel flimsy or weak.

It's just as well built and sturdy feeling

as the rest of Apple's MacBook line

and I don't fish foresee any bending

or durability issues here.

This is just a really nice computer to hold and use.

With this new design, Apple has basically changed

every aspect of the Air right down

to its ports and charging configuration.

It's got the resurrected MagSafe charging

that debuted on the MacBook pro 14 and 16 last year

and it's just as nice here as it was there.

You even get a color matched cable in the box.

Take that, MacBook Pro.

Since the Air can now charge over MagSafe,

you effectively get an extra port because you don't have

to use one of the two Thunderbolt ports

for charging anymore.

Though you can if you want.

Unfortunately, it's still just two ports

and they are both on the left hand side.

I'd really have loved some ports on the right side,

and while I know it would never happen,

a USBA port is still super useful

in this, the 2022nd year of our dongle.

Alas, this USB hub is staying in my bag.

Also Apple still limiting external displays

than just one here, so if you like to plug your laptop

into two monitors you'll need to step up

to a 14 inch MacBook Pro or find some other work around.

Let's talk about chargers real quick

because in a very uncharacteristic fashion,

Apple's actually giving you a choice here.

The base model Air comes at the same 30 watt USBC brick

we've been familiar with forever,

but if you get the step up model, you can choose

between a 35 watt charger with two USBC ports on it

or a larger 67 watt brick that has one port

and can fast charge the Air to 50% in about 30 minutes.

My review unit came with the two port charger

and it's fine, but I'd probably opt

for the 67 watt brick for the ability to fast charge,

even though it's physically a little bigger.

With the Air plugged into the 35 watt charger,

it gained an average of about 25% battery in 30 minutes.

The bigger charger would be about twice as fast as that,

and the 35 watt charger speed will drop

to half of its already slower pace when I've got

my iPhone plugged into it at the same time.

I wish that Apple had just put two ports

on the bigger brick, but there are a lot

of third party chargers that are smaller,

faster, and cheaper than what Apple sells

and they work just fine with the Air's MagSafe cable.

If you look down at the Air's deck, you'll probably notice

that it doesn't have any speaker grills

like virtually every other MacBook has.

Instead, the speakers are integrated

between the keyboard and the display for a cleaner look.

There's four speakers in there,

two woofers and two tweeters,

and they support Apple's spatial audio technology.

The side by side against the M1 Air,

they sound a little bit better

with maybe a little less hollow sounding

or echoey sound to them at full volume.

But the difference really isn't huge

or my ears are just old and I can't tell anymore

but I can tell you that they aren't on the level

of the MacBook Pro 14 or 16's, bassy, thumpy speakers

but they're still excellent for video calls,

watching TV shows and movies,

or whatever else you might wanna listen

to on a thin and light laptop like this.

Plus, there's fortunately still a 3.5 millimeter

headphone jack for wired audio.

Last note on the design here, the branding.

If you look closely and maybe if you have an older Air

to compare side by side, you'll notice that the Apple logo

on the lid is about 30% bigger than before

but at the same time, the new Air doesn't have MacBook Air

printed anywhere on it.

It's not under the screen.

It's not on the bound panel.

It's nowhere.

You'll just have to trust me that this is in fact

the new MacBook Air and not some other laptop model.

The other big thing that comes

with this new design is a brand new display.

It's a little bit bigger, 13.6 inches versus 13.3.

But most of that is in the height

as it's noticeably taller than before.

There are also smaller bezels around the sides

and top and bottom giving it a more modern feel.

It's also noticeably brighter than the older Air,

hitting 434 nits of peak brightness in my tests.

That makes it bright enough to use outdoors

and it's just more comfortable to look at all day long.

Makes the screen feel more roomy, less cramped,

and just more comfortable to work on

without making the computer so much bigger or bulkier.

It is not as impressive as the mini LED screens

you get on the MacBook Pro 14 or 16,

but it's a certain improvement

over the old Air's display and better

than what you get on the 13 inch MacBook Pro M2.

But this display now comes with a notch

just like the MacBook Pro 14 and 16.

Let me tell you, I hate the notch

on my own 14 inch Pro, and I hate it on this thing.

It's not because it's ugly or distracting,

it's because it completely messes up

how I use the menu bar on a Mac.

See, I love menu bar apps.

I've got ones for clocks, calendars, tasks,

system monitoring, and a bunch of other utilities

but the notch takes up enough space that a lot

of my menu bar apps just don't show up anymore.

There are ironically other menu bar apps you can use

to make this workable, Bartender happens to work best

for my needs, but it's annoying that a third party app

is necessary to make Apple's own design usable here.

Fortunately, inside that notch is a new 1080P webcam

that's so much better than the crappy 720P camera

on the older Air models and the current M2 MacBook Pro.

It's got better color, contrast, more detail.

It just really looks great for video calls.

While we're on the topic of video calls,

the MacBook Air's three mic array really sounds great.

It's got great noise cancellation

and clear audio, no complaints.

All right, that's all the new stuff on the outside

but Apple's also made some updates to the internals here.

My review unit is a $1,499 configuration

with eight gigabytes of Ram and 512 gigs of storage.

It's probably the right spec for most people,

which I'll get into in a bit.

The main update here is it has the new M2 arm chip

which is also in the MacBook Pro 13

that Monica recently reviewed.

In the base Air, it has eight CPU cores and eight GPU cores.

In the model I've got here, it's got 10 GPU cores,

same as the 13 inch Pro, and two more than you could get

in the M1 air.

But while the Pro is a little thicker and has a fan,

the Air is thin and sleek, and it doesn't have a fan.

It's a perfectly silent computer, but the lack of fan

and thinner design makes the M2 chip

perform noticeably worse in benchmark testing.

It doesn't really take much to get the system to throttle

back the power being sent to the chip,

and slow its speeds down

to keep temperatures manageable.

Here you could see the impact of that in our test results

of the multicourse in a bench 23 benchmark.

It also shows up in other stress tests

like when we're using Premier Pro for video editing

or exporting a lot of raw photos from Lightroom.

The Air is just noticeably slower

at these things than the Pro.

The bottom of the computer also gets considerably

warm doing these tests.

The other thing to be aware of is Apple confirmed

to me that the base 1199 model with 256 gigs of storage

has just one NAND storage chip,

which makes its storage perform much slower

when copying files or multitasking

between a bunch of apps that models

with the 512 gigs or more of storage,

which have two NAND chips.

It's even likely to be slower than the base model

M1 Air storage because that used two chips.

Now the new 13 inch Pro has the same problem

and we'll be testing the base Air just to see how

slow it is in practice.

So be sure to check out the verge for that.

The short answer though, don't buy the base model

if you can avoid it.

The overall question with most of these performance results

though is does it really matter for the Air?

And the answer is for most people, probably not.

For the things that an Air is ideal for: