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

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.