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Laptops · Apple MacBook Air

Apple MacBook Air M2

135owners with an opinion
84%of verdicts positive
87/18positive/negative since 2024
1 yrslongest happy owner
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and battery; criticized for portability and value.

What owners wrote

Likes itOwned 1 year
I used a MacBook Air with M2 and 8GB for a year, it was fine. Worked on Xcode/Pixelmator/GarageBand and a 100 Safari tabs all at once. Even ran WoW and League of Legends etc just fine, hell even Baldur's Gate 3 if I'm not misremembering. and before that, I used one of the ancient Intel Core M fanless MacBooks (probably the first one) that was fine too, I mean within expectations; you knew what you were buying.
Likes itOwned 1 year
I'm sad to see this happen. I bought an M2 Air a year ago and I've been running Asahi on it since the day I got it. It hasn't been without hitches, but that was something I signed up for. I'm incredibly grateful for all the work Hector and the others have done on this project. The Air is my dream hardware (I'm a sucker for sleek fanless laptops) and getting to run Linux on it is quite amazing.
Likes itOwned 1 year
I’ve been using on my M2 Air for the last year (Secondary machine) via ALARM, and looking forward to switching to the Fedora Remix. Really great work, and happy to support this going forward as well. Webcam and Speaker support were the two big missing pieces for me, necessitating switch to Mac occasionally. And with the new energy-aware scheduling, it’s gonna last forever on my minimal usage.
Likes it
I had the same with X230. A lovely laptop that still serves as a home server after 10 years or so from being bought, and it was already used, post-lease machine back when I bought it. MacBook Air M2 is also great machine btw, if you don't mind the macOS
Likes it
Back in the Intel Mac era, it used to be that running even a single docker/vagrant container would bring any MacBook to its knees, so having a nice beefy machine for doing the Real Work was useful while the MBs were mainly used for lighter work loads while on the go. Nowadays, the M series chips are so powerful that I’ve not had a real need to use my Studio and work mainly using my M2 Air.
Neutral
I recently open-sourced my coding agent CLI that I've been working on for the past while. It is a project I never intended to make public since it was part of my own personal local AI stack. But as I chipped away at it and made it actually usable as a daily driver, I thought it would be nice to make it public for others to see and use. I initially built it to see how much I could get the harness to make small models, especially at low quantization and context to not feel terrible to use. So while Reika doesn't solve the intelligence side (it never will), it tries to solve the overall experience when using small models at the absolute scale. A lot of the testing and pain came through working on my M2 MacBook Air 16GB trying to run models like Qwen3.6 35B A3B and Qwen3.8 27B all day in agentic coding, maxing out the RAM and limits of my own machine. So the base of Reika comes from a legitimate source of truth. You can also plug in an API key for those with hybrid setups too.
Neutral
Tbh I don't think my MacBook air m2 is better than my Asus Vivobook (arm64). They're different (Vivobook is bigger) - but I'd say the OLED screen is much better than the M2 screen. The apple touchpad is better - but all touchpads suck. Still miss old school IBM ThinkPad stick.
Neutral
Almost always you can get the PKGBUILD file from either Arch Linux Gitlab or the AUR gitlab and just add the aarch64 version of the package to it and then install from that. I have an M1 and M2 macbook airs that I use for home/work and I think the only package I've actually hit a hard stop on is discord, everything else can just be built from source if they don't have a bin version..
Likes it
I can still feel performance increases, most recently was when I got an M4 Mac Mini. Compared to my M2 Air, which is no slouch by any means, there was a very perceptible improvement in latency, app opening, general task completion, and so on. But very slight, and some coming from placebo effect/marketing. These days, I feel the most performance uplift when I switch from Windows/macOS over to a Linux or BSD installation, if only because there is so little wasted effort in running a bajillion little background tasks for crap I didn't ask for. Windows 10 on my PC is highly debloated and optimized, very little in my startup services and so on, but CachyOS on the same hardware feels leagues better.
Neutral
Software Engineer, use it partially for private and professional purposes. In historical Order: Thinkpad X201, Then a Thinkpad T450s, currently a Macbook Air M2, usually in the biggest configuration. Usually I use it about 7 years. Not because it doesn't work anymore, but because it gets too slow for what I am doing with it. In one case it was the switch from C++/C# to Rust and the compile times became unbearable. The next switch might be because of LLMs.
Likes it
I had this laptop and I loved it, but it was underpowered even for basic web development by 2023. It struggled to play YouTube videos in the background while I worked. I really wish they brought back this format with the modern M processors. On the other hand, my M2 Macbook Air is around 300 grams heavier, but I don't need to carry a power adapter most of the time, and the device is much better in every conceivable way.
Doesn’t like it
Air M2, MBP 16 2019 on Intel. Created bug report where I can’t even use it on Intel sometimes because of 100% GPU usage. On M2 it’s not so bad, but still see 50% GPU usage where other editors with also smooth scrolling are much less GPU hungry, even PyCharm. Just search “CPU” or “GPU” in their issues on GH, there are a lot of them.
Doesn’t like it
Does a highly performant XLSX tool exist? I want to be able to open a 500k row, 60+ column table in Excel and manipulate it at 60+ FPS. Zero lag. I feel like Excel has never - ahem - excelled in this department. Libreoffice comes close and I enjoy it on Linux, but on my M2 Macbook Air it struggles.
Doesn’t like it
I would remove material from the outside edges of the front, not the center near the trackpad. The blue edges of my M2 air have already become silver and the palm rests have become more silver and glossy like glass from wear. I'm probably going to do something like this.
Doesn’t like it
The hardware looks fine, but Apple's software vision is so confusing. MacBook Neo is cheaper and weaker than a MacBook Air, yet shares the same price and single-app mindset as an iPad. It uses a phone chip similar to an iPad Pro, but gets multi-user support and a keyboard. I struggle to run Tahoe on my 16GB M2 Air and somewhat I have to believe running it on a 8GB phone chip is gonna be alright, which if true have me thinking what exactly is the role of iPadOS anyway. Ultimately, it feels like iPadOS and Tahoe are on a crash course for a middle ground that nobody asked for.
Doesn’t like it
Part of why Windows feels sluggish is because a lot of the components in many Windows machines are dogshit - especially storage. Even the old M2 is at 1400 MB/s write speed [2], M5 is at 6068 MB/s [2]. Meanwhile in the Windows world, supposed "gamer" laptops struggle to get above 3 GB/s [3]. And on top of that, on Apple devices the storage is directly attached to the SoC - as far as I know, no PCIe, no nothing, just dumb NAND. That alone eliminates a lot of latency, and communication data paths are direct as well, with nothing pesky like sockets or cables degrading signal quality and requiring link training and whatnot. That M2 MBA however, it only feels sluggish at > 400 Chrome tabs open because only then swapping becomes a real annoyance. [1] https://9to5mac.com/2022/07/14/m2-macbook-air-slower-ssd-bas... [2] https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/macbooks/m5-macbook-pro... [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/AcerNitro/comments/1i0nbt4/slow_ssd...
Doesn’t like it
My god I cancelled my isp because I’m moving. Thought hot spot would be fine for a few months. Every single day I have to restart my MacBook Air for hot spot to work. Multiple times every day I have to turn hot spot off and on even though it’s in discoverable but won’t connect. Multiple times every day hot spot is just off and can’t be turned on in control center. And this is with iPhone 17 and m2 on most recent updates. I can’t imagine on older hardware.