Apple’s new M2 MacBook Air takes everything users love about the world’s best-selling laptop to the next level. With an all-new, strikingly thin design and even more performance, MacBook Air also features a larger 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display, a 1080p FaceTime HD camera, four-speaker sound system, up to 18 hours of battery life, and MagSafe charging. It is now available in four finishes — silver, space gray, midnight, and starlight. According to Apple, it will begin arriving to customers, and will be in select Apple Store locations and Apple Authorized Resellers, next month.
M2 starts the second generation of Apple’s M-series chips and extends the remarkable features of M1. With industry-leading power efficiency, a unified memory architecture, and custom technologies, this new chip brings even more performance and capabilities to Apple’s most popular Mac notebooks.
M2 features a next-generation 8-core CPU with advancements in both performance and efficiency cores, along with Apple’s next-generation GPU, which now has up to 10 cores — two more than M1. M2 delivers 100GB/s of unified memory bandwidth and supports up to 24GB of fast unified memory, so it can handle even larger and more complex workloads with ease. Designed to dramatically speed up video workflows, M2 also adds a next-generation media engine and a powerful ProRes video engine for hardware-accelerated encode and decode, so systems with M2 will be able to play back more streams of 4K and 8K video than before.
The M2 MacBook Air with an all-new design is slated for a launch sometime in July. Apple hasn’t announced an exact release date, so it could be that pre-orders for the new MacBook Air don’t begin until the very last week of July… The MacBook Air will be hard to get and could very well only be available in the base model configurations.
It’s unclear what exactly the bottleneck is in the MacBook Pro production, but it doesn’t seem like the M2 chip is the culprit. Instead, it appears to have something to do with the higher-capacity unified memory and storage components.
MacDailyNews Take: If you love life, don’t hold your breath. When we finally do get the pre-orders, make sure you get your order in ASAP as the shipping dates could extend far into the future.
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If availability after announcement is so delayed, Apple should have kept selling the existing MacBooks with M1 through “back-to-school” time, then released the M2 models just before Holiday shopping (including M2 Mac mini to retire that dark Intel Mac mini). It would have also marked the two-year point of Apple Silicon transition, a good occasion for celebration with release of M2.
I’ll bite the bullet (hideous notch) and pull the trigger to order on Day One.
Already configured laptop maxed out and saved bookmark in the Apple Store.
Really love the redesigned chassis and larger screen. For home use will pair with large screen monitor, ala MDN…
There’s a great little app called “Top Notch” that I’m running on my 14inch MBPro. Works great.
Awesome tip, thank you. Makes Mac screen whole again…
Yeah, it really does. I don’t mind the notch on my phone but I have to admit it stands out on the new Macs.