New MacBook Air M2?

[Mike Nagel]

My current MacBook Pro is finally showing its age. It takes about 30 seconds to open and load Designer and beachballs are getting more common when making changes.

In deciding upon which new MacBook to get, the Affinity suite (mostly Designer, but Photo and Publisher as well) is front-and-center.

I’m going to get a MacBook, without question. But I’m wondering if the new Air M2 has enough horsepower (my aging MacBook uses an Intel processor).

Is there anyone out there using Affinity on the new MacBook Air M2 who could share their experience?

Or should I just go with a new Pro model, although I don’t see that much of an advantage in features to shell out the extra cash.

 Thanks!

 

[v_kyr]

2 hours ago, Mike Nagel said:

I’m going to get a MacBook, without question. But I’m wondering if the new Air M2 has enough horsepower (my aging MacBook uses an Intel processor).

Why shouldn't it? - It's even slightly more powerful than it's predecessor the Air M1, just make sure you get a more moderate SSD and more RAM than the basic 256 GB SSD and 8 GB RAM. The bigger SSDs >= 512 GB should operate faster here and RAM well, you can never have enough of it for certain tasks.

The rest depends (as always) on what you're going to use it commonly for and if you work on a daily base with a bunch of huge longer sustained processes or not. The later, since the AIR M2 doesn't have any fans and so no active dynamical cooling if over long time heavily stressed, which in contrast means it could CPU/GPU wise throttle much earlier in order to get not too hot here. - Also the 14"/16" M1 based MBPs still have the better display panels, active cooling, more connection ports and also do support more than connecting just one external display (...for the M1/M2 AIR in order to support more than one external monitor, you would need an additional auxiliary DisplayLink dock).

Other than that it's a well build & beautiful notebook, though when well equiped it's expensive too and does nearly cost as much as an M1 based 14" MacBook Pro here.

 

2 hours ago, Mike Nagel said:

Or should I just go with a new Pro model, although I don’t see that much of an advantage in features to shell out the extra cash.

As already said above, it highly depends on what you have to do and run software wise with it. - So if you commonly need more than 24 GB RAM for running a bunch of processes/tasks over long time periods in parallel and in this context, if you don't want the CPU/GPU to throttle earlier than usual, due to heating up & and no active cooling, then the 14"/16" might still have some advantages (beside offering more ports and easier connecting more than one external monitor).