I have a 14" M1 Pro from work and a personal M2 Air and it's always surprising how much heavier the M1 Pro feels from my Air.
And percentages are not at all misleading, the 14” does feel a lot heavier.
Bag, a book, a few pens, a water bottle and cables/headphones/drives is a pretty minimal load that makes a 360g increase a small delta.
By contrast the M1 Pro 14” just tips over into unwieldy. So much so that I regret not just going the whole hog and getting the 16”, since at this weight I prefer to have it sitting on a proper table and could’ve used the extra screen real estate.
I had intended to sell the Air but ended up keeping both, mainly for this very reason. The Pro rarely leaves its dock.
On processing power, I have no doubt the Air would have sufficed.
I was willing to take the weight/size penalty for the ports!
Killing MagSafe has to be the singled DUMBEST product decision anyone ever made.
I'm so glad they finally brought it back.
I'll actually miss the Touch Bar. It's an interesting idea that seems useful, but isn't, except in one very useful case: it's really nice being able to slide the volume to exactly where I want it. With the keys back I'll have to memorize Shift+Option+VolumeUp (or whatever it is).
It is possible. You can ignore the magsafe and power via any of the USB-C ports on the MBPs that also have magsafe, definitely.
Thankfully, the computer was perfectly fine.
On the other hand, my M1 Pro MacBook Pro don't have any problem charging on either side, not like my previous Intel.
In retrospect, I think i would have bought the Air! I somehow thought the Air still had only two USB-Cs, one of which would be occupied by power if plugged in. Which was not enough. Two USB-Cs plus a separate magsafe would, barely, be enough for me.
the price difference is not huge once I put in 16GB of RAM and a 1TB HD. But the smaller size of the Air is nice! I suspect even the Air is enough CPU for me, although the new M2 MBP seems like a lot more CPU I think.
When I'm on the go I only want to bring one charger and cable for backup for every device, which is USB-C. (I don't own an iPhone)
As a photographer and DJ even the MBP runs out of ports pretty quickly, so I had a standing collection of travel hubs for this already + a CalDigit thunderbolt hub for home.
Our 286 (which was the first computer my family owned) also had a 40MB Hard Disk, which seemed like plenty at the time. It could run Windows 3.1 with that, although it wasn't exactly fast.
I've done many drugs and many years since then.
I believe that this computer had a 20MB hard drive, and that I eventually ran Stacker to compress the volume and squeeze out a bit more space. I know for sure that I never got anywhere close to 100MB.
On one of my computers in this era, I managed to get a paperwhite VGA and Windows 3.11 (for workgroups) running despite not meeting product specs. My 40-something brain is not quite reliable enough for me to state this with any certainty.
Wrong, misleading and outright false.
I have had a M2 Air with 8 GB RAM and 512 GB SSD, and it's perfectly fine, including having a bunch of apps (Xcode, Pixelmator, Logic, etc.) on multiple desktops, games, multiple users, tens of Safari tabs, all while on a 4K external display.
I currently have an 8GB M1 running with four users logged in. Three users are iTunes media servers, and the fourth is a regular user.
No heavy computing tasks, obviously, but it's absolutely possible to have more than one user logged in.
I'm looking to upgrade, and I want to go for the lowest config M mac that I can get away with for smooth 4k edits.
I plan on getting a re-furb, not sure if I can return one of those...
It’s heavier, and I think thicker, than my 2012 MacBook Pro. Now I expected it to be heavier, but was expecting it to drop back maybe one iteration to MacBook 2014 kind of heft. But we’re a full decade back of beefiness.
I need a big screen though so it’s the only option. Unless they make a nice thin 16 inch air. I am pretty confifent it would sell extremely well.
I'd welcome a 15in or 16in Air. The rumour mill suggests a 15in Air is in the works. However, I'm now used to the 120Hz display of the Max, which I suspect wouldn't be an option for the non-pro models...
Really it's where the beefiness always should have been for the performance class / power envelope they are (and have been) targeting.
But yeah, a large screen thin & light seems like an obvious hole in the lineup.
2012 15in [1]:
- Height: 0.95 inch (2.41 cm)
- Weight: 5.6 pounds (2.56 kg)
2023 16in M2 [2]:
- Height 0.66 inch (1.68 cm)
- Weight (M2 Pro): 4.7 pounds (2.15 kg)
- Weight (M2 Max): 4.8 pounds (2.16 kg)
The battery capacity is still reported as 91%of spec which does not explain this behaviour.
I hope yours holds up better.
I get like 45 minutes battery time out of my 1,5 year old Dell XPS 17. Not even enough for a meeting.
1) Turn off siri suggestions & privacy and all the app watching it does. System Settings -> Siri & Spotlight -> Siri Suggestions & Privacy. It turned it off for every app.
2) Turn off siri all together. System Settings -> Siri & Spotlight -> Ask Siri Toggle
3) Turn off Spotlight for everything you do not need. System Settings -> Siri & Spotlight -> Search Results check boxes
4) Turn off login items. System Settings -> Login items. Remove what you do not need from the list.
5) Turn off run in background items. System Settings -> Login items -> Allow in background
6) Remove items from ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ that you do not need. I had an old docker vnet item that wasn't needed.
Other than #6, you can do the first 5 things on all of your Apple devices and it makes a big difference in battery life. I just did the same steps with my phone and ipad.
I hope this helps your battery life a little bit.
In activity monitor, I also saw that Steam and iStat Menus both hand an "impact" of 50 which made them the top 2, the next had an "impact" of 5.
But I think it must still be something else as it also consumes power in sleep. And I have disabled function to wake up and check mail.
The other was just a straight-up hardware issue with the computer. I'd close the lid close to a low battery and let it stay closed long enough for it to hibernate, and then when I'd open it back up it will have completely drained and I'd get a kernal panic. They replaced it after quite a lot of back and forth until I was able to prove it.
If that's something you do more than once in a while, definitely opt for the Pro. For any other workload that's less than maxing out CPUs, or just bursty, the Air has been excellent.
I still think the M1 Air was a better value overall. And I liked the curves to it more than the M2's boxy design.
For photography work it's been fine. But I haven't done multiple-minute exports since buying it so I can't really say.
I _can_ say that under my normal workloads (coding web apps, office applications open, chrome with say 20 tabs, often playing chess, live streaming / zoom) heat has never been an issue. It's also my DJ computer for gigs and no issues I've noticed there, although it's not on my lap.
Contrasted with the 2019 intel MBP it's again night and day. Heat was very noticeable, as were heat-related throttling issues. It would just grind to a halt under normal workday loads esp when screen casting zoom + having all my normal apps and IDEs running.
Nowadays after the Apple Silicon transition my employer no longer offered an Air. The reason was too few employees wanted it and it was too much trouble to maintain a separate SKU in the inventory for the few of us. Really quite a bummer.
I find that, while more difficult, removing excess poundage from my waistline has a lot more impact on that ... :(
I really couldn't be happier. I run a small WFH / Music Product / Photography studio in my basement and I really wanted an always-on always connected computer, for which the Studio has been perfect.
The M2 Air is pretty close to a perfect laptop. My complaints (low audio volume, slighty cramped screen) are absolutely dwarfed by the long list of decades-old issues this laptop just eliminates:
- All day battery life. Basically like the Apple Watch - charge it overnight and it's really good all day with normal workloads (e.g. not rendering video). But it was absolutely surreal the first couple of weeks watching an hour long show while running a dozen apps and seeing the charge go from 100% to like 98%. It makes no sense and I had to adjust work habits.
- Extreme snappiness. It's in every way snappier than my previous computer, a 32GB 2019 MBP. It _might_ be slower on long CPU-bound or RAM-bound workloads, but photo editing is both and it feels faster on the Air.
- Form factor. It's my first Air. I'm not going back. I'm 40+ and keeping extra pounds off my lower back matters for me. The Air, if it's all you're carrying, is barely noticeable.
It's just fantastic. If you were wondering if you can replace an MBP with the Air yet, it's almost certainly a yes (though I wouldn't try all this on 8GB RAM). At $2000, what I paid, it's a revelation.
Also if like me you work on a desktop/laptop Apple setup at your desk, the new continuity features are totally incredible. Working with the studio/air together is totally seamless (You can extend the screens and use the same keyboard/mouse). It just works. Apple really is getting a lot of things exactly right on the software side in the Apple silicon era.