The $1,199 M2 MacBook Air cuts too many corners

Benchmarks bear out our fears: Performance is shockingly bad in some tests.

- DAVID PRICE

The M2 MacBook Air is here and, like the M1, Apple has two options to choose from, one with an 8-core GPU and one with a 10-core GPU. We've been testing both models at Macworld, the step-up model that starts at $1,499 (the model we tested and reviewed here [fave.co/ 3zbn711] has 1TB of storage and 16GB of RAM for $1,899), and the entry-level model with 256GB of storage, which costs $1,199.

That's a pretty big difference in price, which led us to wonder what exactly you're getting for the extra money. It turns out you're getting quite a lot.

With two fewer GPU cores, less RAM, and an SSD configuration that appears suboptimal for read and write speeds, the cheapest MacBook Air faces several obstacles in trying to compete with its costlier sibling. In some cases we were shocked by how much worse it performed, but there were some pleasant surprises too.

Read on to find out how both the top-end and entry-level versions of the M2 Air got on in our speed and performance benchmarks. Where possible we've included equivalent scores for the 256GB version of the M1 MacBook Air released in 2020, and for the quad-core Intel i5 model that came out in the same year.

RAW PROCESSING POWER

We began by looking at processing power using the Geekbench 5 and Cinebench R23 CPU benchmarks. We didn't expect a huge difference here, given that our 2022 Airs have the same processor with the same number of CPU cores, although the top-end model we tested did have twice as much RAM (16GB versus 8GB).

Things were off to a promising start, with the entry-level Air tracking close to its more expensive sibling across all four tests (it was never more than 2.2 percent behind) and showing gains of up to 16.5 percent on 2020's M1 Air. In fact, the 256GB Air scored slightly higher than the 1TB model in Cinebench's multi-core component, although this was by less than 1 percent and probably just an anomaly.