APPLE MAC Book Air 15 Review
Lift the open MacBook by the corner of the chassis, and you'll notice only the slightest hint of flex, while the typing experience is steady and bounce free. For a machine this lightweight and slim, with these dimensions, it lies extremely still when in use on your lap.
Review of MacBook Air 15-inch M2: Performance, Display Quality, and More
The MacBook Air 15-inch M2 offers a near perfect mix of performance, display quality, portability, and battery life. It earns its spot on our best MacBooks and best laptop lists. In this review, I’ll detail why this is one of the best Apple laptops yet. The MacBook Air’s panel can get fairly bright.
When viewing HDR content, the laptop got as high as 479 nits of brightness when displaying HDR content on 10% of the display and 480 nits for 100% of the screen. These values are a smidge lower than the 13-inch model, which was just one point shy of reaching 500 nits of HDR brightness. Regarding non-HDR brightness, the panel averaged 473 nits of brightness making it brighter than the XPS 15 OLED.
Our lab tests corroborate my experience with the panel. When we pointed our colorimeter at the screen, we found it produces 111.4% of the sRGB color spectrum and 78.9% of the more demanding DCI P3 color gamut.100% is most accurate for both. That’s close to the 13-inch MacBook Air M2 but lower than the XPS 15 OLED’s saturated colors
This entry-level configuration comes with an Apple M2 chip featuring an 8-core CPU and 10- core GPU, 8GB of Unified Memory (RAM), and 256GB of SSD storage. If you need more memory and space, you can upgrade up to 24GB of RAM and up to 2TB of SSD of storage though that’ll bump the price up to $2,499. All configurations feature the same M2 chip with an 8-core CPU and 10-Core GPU.
Inside the enlarged chassis are more speakers than on the 13 inch MacBook Air, making full use of the extra real estate. Here, Apple uses a six-speaker array to deliver surprisingly big sound, including a curious woofer configuration that Apple calls force canceling sound, which pairs upward-firing woofers and downward-firing woofers together.
Blackmagic SSD test since we first published our review, testing data from MaxTech has shown the base 256GB version of the 15-inch MacBook Air has considerably slower drive performance than the 512GB model. What's causing the discrepancy you can see in the numbers above? The 256GB Air performs worse than the 512GB, 1TB, and TB versions because its SSD only has a single NAND chipset. By contrast, the drives in the more expensive 15 inch Air configurations benefit from two NAND chips.
Review of MacBook Air 15-inch M2: Specs, Touchpad, and Performance
This entry-level configuration comes with an Apple M2 chip featuring an 8-core CPU and 10 Core GPU, 8GB of Unified Memory (RAM), and 256GB of SSD storage. If you need more memory and space, you can upgrade up to 24GB of RAM and up to 2TB of SSD of storage though that’ll bump the price up to $2,499. All configurations feature the same M2 chip with an 8-core CPU and 10-Core GPU.
The accurate and responsive touchpad gets a size increase from the 13 inch Air and is all the better for it. Swiping, pinch to zoom and other gestures are easy to perform thanks to the additional space. Despite its size, I never once accidentally grazed the touchpad when typing.
Handbrake Apple's biggest omission in modern laptop technologies has long been the touch screen. Despite Apple being the brand that helped make them mainstream with the iPhone and the iPad, if you want a touch interface on your laptop, you still have to go with a Windows machine.
When we timed how long it took to transcode video using the Handbrake app, the M2-powered MacBook Air 15-inch transcoded a 6.5GB 4K video to 1080p in 7 minutes and 36 seconds. That’s a bit faster than the MacBook Air 13-inch (7:52) but not as fast as the MacBook Pro 13-inch M2 (6:51). Samsung's Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 took a bit slower.
At the most basic level, its dimensions are larger. The laptop stays slim, at just 11.5mm (0.45 inch) thick, but the footprint is larger. The footprint is 13.4 by 9.35 inches and the weight is 3.3 pounds, putting the larger MacBook Air into the desktop-replacement territory, the same size and weight class as the Microsoft Surface Laptop 5 and even the LG Gram Pro 17 (2023). That means more screens, a larger palm rest, and even a proportionally larger trackpad.
The base model sells for $1,299 and is powered by the Apple M2 chip with a 10 core GPU. That graphics core count is a step-up option if you're buying a 13-inch Air, so you're already starting with slightly more GPU power. It comes with 8GB of Unified Memory (Apple's term for RAM) and a 256GB SSD.
The base 15-inch MacBook Air starts at $1,299, and Apple has reduced the price of the 13 inch version to $1,099 (the original M1-powered MacBook Air from 2020 is still available for $999). You can max out this model for a whopping $2,499, but that’s if you want the extra RAM and massive amounts of built-in storage, so it’s not necessary for most. At the base price, this 15-inch screen is worth every penny.
Wireless connectivity gets a bit of a boost, as well. You'll still have Wi-Fi 6 for wireless networking, but the Bluetooth standard has been bumped up to Bluetooth 5.3 instead of the 5.2 used in the 13-inch MacBook Air. Though we'd like to see Wi-Fi 6E on new machines, Wi-Fi 6 will do the trick just fine for the vast majority of us.
Review of MacBook Air 15-inch M2: Battery, Performance, and Display
The 18 hours of battery life Apple promised for the 15-Inch Air was closer to 19 hours in our video rundown test, two hours longer than what we got from the already-impressive 13-inch MacBook Air. That's thanks to the larger battery inside the 15-inch model.
the passive air cooling used by the MacBook Air might benefit from the larger chassis. And the similarly equipped Apple MacBook Pro 13 Inch produces better performance, despite the active cooling being the only significant difference between the two. So, I compared the 15-inches with both the 13-inch MacBook Air and the M2-powered MacBook Pro 13-Inch.
Cinebench R23 then uses Maxon’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, to test multi-core and multi threaded processing. After that, we have a processor-intensive test in Geekbench 5.4.1 Pro by Primate Labs, which simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning.
Interestingly enough, under Rosetta the 15 inch Air produced some of the best Photoshop performance of the bunch, scoring 832 points and beating everything but the 16-inch MacBook Pro. Professionals will want to spring for a more powerful machine to save time, but for most photo editing, the MacBook Air 15-inch is extremely capable.
The 15-inch Air was right in line with the other M2-based MacBooks, and it held its own against the lowest end (RTX 3050) Nvidia RTX 30 Series GPU inside the LG Gram Pro 17 while rocketing past the integrated Intel Xe Graphics solution in the Microsoft Surface Laptop 5. But, predictably, the leading systems were the Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch (with its huge GPU-core advantage) and the Nvidia RTX 40-Series-powered Dell XPS 15 9530 (with a commanding RTX 4070).
we use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show.