Now that the M2 Air has gone ultra-slim, the performance benefit could be more significant. In the M1 era, this model was a tough sell given the pricing differential and modest performance advantage, mostly a bigger battery and better sustained performance under load due to active cooling. The 2016-era chassis with Touch Bar is retained but the M1 chip is swapped out for M2. The previous gen M1 Air is still available for £999 - 8-core CPU, 7-core GPU and 8GB Unified Memory, 256GB storage. There’s a choice of Midnight, Starlight, Space Grey and Silver finishes. It’s also possible to specify 24GB of memory for £400 extra as compared to base model. £1,549 provides a 10-core GPU, 512GB storage and 35W Dual Port USB-C power adapter. Pricing starts at £1,249 for an 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU M2 chip with 8GB unified memory and 256GB SSD, plus a 30W USB-C power adapter. It can drive one external display at up to 6K resolution. There’s no HDMI or SD Card slot, just two USB4/Thunderbolt 3 ports and a 3.5 headphone jack (with support for high impedance headphones). Like the MacBook Pro 14, MagSafe is back and allows for fast-charging. The M2 MacBook Air running Adobe Photoshop. Just as with the M1 Air, there’s no fan, but Apple claim it’s capable of 40% faster editing complex timelines in Final Cut Pro - no doubt in part leveraging specific hardware optimisation. There are also three integrated microphones and four speakers supporting spatial audio and Dolby Atmos. The Liquid Retina screen is slightly larger, 13.6 inch rather than 13.3, and 25% brighter at 500 nits but with a notch for a new 1080P FaceTime HD camera with twice the resolution and low-light performance of previous gen. The world’s bestselling laptop has been reborn with a radical new design which ‘evolves’ that distinctive wedge profile into something much more like a flattened MacBook Pro 14” or an iPad Pro. This allows them to deliver the ultra slim, fan-less Air without compromising performance for that class of machine, while still ensuring plenty of headroom for pro upgrades. There’s also a 40% faster neural engine and an increase in CPU cache memory by 4MB to to 16MB.īy Apple’s own primary goals of power efficiency, they claim M2 offers 87% of the performance of an Intel 12-core laptop chip at 25% of the power. While M1 offered hardware support for 4K, H.264 and H.265 video encode/decode, M2 adds ProRes, ProRes RAW and 8K as was originally seen with the M1 Pro/Max chips. The GPU’s core count is increased to 10 for 35% faster performance, but there’s an entry level option with 8-cores. Memory bandwidth is increased by 50% to 100GB/s and there’s support for up 24GB in LPDDR5 memory (up from 16GB in M1). The M2 CPU has the same 8 core layout as before, four high performance and four low power efficiency cores, but a second-generation 5nm process enables 25% more transistors (over 20 billion in total) and an 18% faster CPU. Two years after M1’s announcement we get a successor which again targets the entry-level, best selling Macs and will, no doubt, be upgraded as the year progresses with more cores, more capability for more powerful Macs. Second generation M2 Apple Silicon, new laptops and a major advance for iPadOS were of particular note. This year’s Apple event for developers showcased a slew of new features with a theme of intelligence, sharing and communicating with new personalisation.
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