Review: Apple’s 15-inch MacBook Air says what it is and is what it says

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It's a credit to Apple's chips that when I'm using my 13-inch MacBook Air, I feel much more constrained by the screen size than I do by the performance.

That wasn't always the case. The Intel MacBook Airs of years past were perfectly fine for basic computing, but you could feel the difference between an Air and an iMac or MacBook Pro as soon as you tried to edit something in Photoshop or Lightroom or export something with iMovie. The M1 and M2 Macs also feel slower than their Pro, Max, and Ultra counterparts, but for the kinds of light-to-medium-duty work that I spend most of my time doing, I rarely find myself waiting around for things to happen.

That's why I've been looking forward to the 15-inch MacBook Air, which has been rumored for at least a year and is being released to the public this week. Before now, getting a larger Mac laptop meant paying at least $2,000 for the privilege—$2,500 for the 16-inch MacBook Pro—because getting that bigger screen also came with extra ports, more powerful chips, and fancier screen technology.

Those things are all perfectly nice to have, but they add extra weight, and they're overkill for many people who might otherwise be interested in a larger-than-13-inch screen. The 15-inch MacBook Air is for those people.

What’s different about the 15-inch Air?

The 15-inch MacBook Air isn't totally identical to the 13-inch M2 MacBook Air that Apple released nearly a year ago, but it's pretty close. Like the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus or the 11- and 12.9-inch iPad Pros, the 15-inch Air shares nearly everything with its smaller sibling except for its size and its price.

The new MacBook Air's screen is obviously the biggest departure from the 13.6-inch M2 Air. The 15.3-inch, 2880×1864 display has the same 224 PPI density as the 13-inch Air, and an aspect ratio of roughly (but not exactly) 3:2. Although the resolution and density are lower than those on either the 14- or 16-inch MacBook Pro, the screen has nearly the same density as every other Retina MacBook Air and Pro that Apple has ever released, so it's not going to feel like a downgrade for most people.

It also boasts DCI-P3 color gamut coverage and a peak brightness of 520 nits (as measured by our i1 DisplayPro colorimeter). It's not a mini LED panel, and you don't get HDR support or the high 120 Hz ProMotion refresh rates you get from a MacBook Pro, but it matches or slightly exceeds the display quality of every other MacBook that Apple has released in the last few years.

The 15-inch Air's keyboard is the same as the one in the 13-inch Air, with more padding on either side. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Per usual for Macs these days, the 15-inch Air ships using a non-native display resolution (in this case, 3420×2214), leaning on macOS's scaling technology and the relatively high pixel density to keep things from looking too fuzzy. Things look fine to my eyes no matter which of the display modes you're using; I normally use the "more space" display option, which renders at 3840×2486, and all the "larger text" options are great for people who like using bigger screens because they have trouble reading tiny text.

The larger size also adds weight—the 15-inch Air weighs 3.3 pounds, up from 2.7 for the 13-inch M2 Air. That's still reasonably light for a premium laptop with a 15-inch screen, though, beating the 15-inch Surface Laptop 5 (3.44 pounds) and Dell XPS 15 (4.21 pounds). It's lighter than either the 14- or 16-inch MacBook Pro (3.5 and 4.7 pounds, respectively). The 15-inch LG Gram, at 2.18 pounds, is one of the few that's lighter, and it's got a lower-resolution screen with a less-useful 16:9 aspect ratio.

The other change worth noting is the speaker array, which Apple says "deliver[s] twice the bass depth of the 13-inch MacBook Air with M2 for fuller sound." They're definitely nice laptop speakers with distinct-sounding bass, and they get loud enough to fill a large room—they never distort, but I do think they start to sound a bit muddier once you turn them up past 50 percent or so.

Two Thunderbolt ports and a MagSafe port on the left side; there's still a headphone jack on the right. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The 15-inch Air uses the same design language as Apple's other post-2020 MacBooks. Tapers and gently rounded edges are out; flat planes and more squared-off edges are in. MagSafe is back, with color-matched cables and connectors depending on the laptop you buy. This effectively adds an extra Thunderbolt port when the laptop is plugged in—but regular old USB-C can still charge the laptop just fine. The keyboard is identical to the one in the smaller Air, with nice travel, an even backlight, and a Touch ID sensor in the power button. The trackpad has been stretched out to take advantage of the extra space, and as with the larger MacBook Pro touchpads, I didn't have any issues with palm rejection even though my palms were usually resting on it at least a bit any time I was typing.

The one thing I still don't like about this era of MacBook design is the notch at the top of the screen, ostensibly added to make room for a 1080p webcam without adding the need for a bump or protrusion like some other PC laptops have used.

As we've said before, it's something you get used to quickly, and it's not a deal-breaker. And if you often use your Mac in full-screen mode, as I do, you don't see it much because it vanishes—the menu bar disappears, and non-menu-bar things aren't allowed to use the area to the left and right of the notch to do anything. (I would actually recommend going into the Desktop & Dock area of the Settings and changing "automatically hide and show the Menu Bar' to "Never" since you don't actually lose any usable screen space by keeping the menu bar visible in full-screen mode the way you do on a non-notched Mac).

Good laptop price, iffy upgrade prices

I was pleasantly surprised by Apple's pricing for the 15-inch Air. It starts at $1,299, just $200 more than the newly lowered price of the 13-inch model. All versions of the 15-inch Air also include the M2 variant with 10 GPU cores—once you add the same upgrade to the 13-inch M2 Air, the 15-inch version is only $100 more expensive. Given the historical gap between machines like the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros or the old 21.5- and 27-inch iMacs, it's not too much to pay for a lot of extra screen. Microsoft also puts a $200 gap between the 13- and 15-inch versions of its Surface Laptop 5, but I was expecting Apple to charge more.

The downside of the price is that the 15-inch Air still includes 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage—that's not unusable for basic browsing, but most people will want to upgrade one or both, and the 16GB memory and 512GB storage upgrades cost $200 each. (24GB of RAM and up to 2TB of storage are also available).

Before we get back to what's good about the new MacBook Air, it's important to note that Apple's storage prices are pretty outrageous. Apple wants $800 for a 2TB drive when top-tier PC SSDs will run you just $160, and others can be had for even less. We're many years past the point when Apple's SSDs could outperform standard NVMe SSDs for PCs. And the storage controller is built into the M2, so Apple is essentially just charging you for the NAND chips.

This isn't exclusively an Apple problem, as all PC makers charge well above market rates for memory and storage upgrades (Microsoft's are generally just as bad as Apple's). The issue is partly the upgrade prices and partly that Apple's base configurations in its entry-level products often feel a bit stingy. Just keep in mind that the 15-inch MacBook Air will end up costing at least $1,499 or $1,699, depending on the upgrades you want—some people can get by with 8GB and 256GB, but 16GB and 512GB will be much more comfortable in the long run, especially for power users who might be attracted to the larger screen. (Apple sent us a 16GB/512GB system for review.)

Performance and battery life

There's very little to say about the M2 MacBook Air's performance because it has the same fanless M2 chip that the 13-inch one has. All configurations combine four large performance cores, four smaller efficiency cores, and 10 GPU cores.

This means that for almost everything, it performs great, and when doing typical things like browsing and chatting in Slack and Discord and listening to music, the laptop doesn't even feel warm. That said, the larger screen in the 15-inch Air might tempt you to do more serious photo or video editing work on it. And while the M2 is still pretty good at this kind of thing—it even has dedicated ProRes hardware encoding and decoding support, which makes more sense now that we know the M2 has to handle all the video passthrough happening in the Vision Pro headset—it can get a bit warm and even throttle a bit when it's running a heavy-duty workload for extended periods.

The performance, power use, and thermals in the 15-inch Air are all pretty similar to the 13-inch version; Apple has neither boosted the performance nor changed the Air's passive heatsink just because it's in a larger computer. Throttling is mainly a problem in situations where the CPU and/or GPU are running at full-tilt for an extended period of time; for example, the actively-cooled M2 in the 13-inch MacBook Pro can finish our Handbrake video encoding test a couple minutes faster than the passively-cooled versions. In this test, the M2 without a fan is about as fast as an M1 with a fan.

The PCMark-based battery life test we use on PCs doesn't support macOS, so we don't have apples-to-Apples battery life comparisons for you. According to the Battery screen in System Settings, I logged about 11 hours of mixed-use screen-on time on a single charge and some screen-off time when the laptop was active but the screen was sleeping, plus a full night of sleeping unplugged with the lid closed. I had the screen's auto-brightness settings turned off and screen brightness set to just over 50 percent (Apple says its 15-hour battery life claim assumes screen brightness set "8 clicks from the bottom" out of a possible 16 clicks; I was usually using it at 9 clicks). It's not as scientific a test as I'd like, but we can at least say it's easily better than any Intel Mac you could be using.

A larger Air—no more, no less

The 15-inch MacBook Air in "Starlight," a toned-down version of the old gold color that looks like a warmer version of the traditional silver finish. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

There are currently two $1,299 Macs that bridge the gap between the baseline 13-inch MacBook Air and the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro. One is the 13-inch MacBook Pro, an odd design throwback that doesn't feel like it's filling any specific gap in Apple's lineup (unless there's a pocket of ride-or-die Touch Bar users out there somewhere). The other is this 15-inch MacBook Air, which actually feels like it's doing something that none of Apple's other laptops were doing before.

It's a larger-screened laptop that will be great for certain kinds of professional work that benefit from more screen space without needing a ton of extra computing power. It's of a piece, actually, with the M2 Pro version of the Mac mini, which provides a similar bridge between the basic one-size-fits-most Mac mini and the pricey Mac Studios. It's been a good year for Mac owners whose needs straddle the line between Apple's consumer and "pro" lineups.

Apple MacBook Air 15-inch

$1250 at Amazon $1299 at Best Buy $1299 at Apple

I still have some issues with the M2 Air's design: the notch, the limited number and type of ports, it uses a bit more power, and runs a bit warmer than the M1 version. But they're mostly minor quibbles that don't meaningfully affect the usefulness of the machine. And the larger screen does make it feel a lot more useful if you don't mind the extra size and half-pound or so of weight.

The good

Great-looking thin-and-light laptop that bridges Apple's consumer and Pro laptop lineups
Best-in-class keyboard and trackpad
Very good performance and battery life, courtesy of Apple Silicon
Just $200 more expensive than the 13-inch version, or $100 more expensive than the 13-inch version with the same number of GPU cores
Still happy about the return of MagSafe
Excellent laptop speakers

The bad

Only Thunderbolt ports, and only two of them
No active cooling for M2 can reduce performance in specific scenarios
Notch is a continued minor irritant
M2 only supports a single external display

The ugly

RAM and storage upgrade prices

Listing image: Andrew Cunningham

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Andrew Cunningham Senior Technology Reporter

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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