Photo Credit: Apple
The MacBook Air with M2 chip is now available for pre-order and will begin shipping on July 15.
The new MacBook Air features a larger 13.6-inch retina display, a four-speaker sound system, and up to 18 hours of battery life. It’s Apple’s more budget-friendly model compared to the MacBook Pro series, loaded with all the performance improvements the new M2 chip brings.
The newest MacBook Air features a four-speaker sound system. Apple says to fit in such a thin design, the speaker and mics are completely integrated between the display and keyboard. “A three-mic array captures clean audio using advanced beamforming algorithms, while the speakers produce improved stereo seperation and vocal clarity,” Apple claims in its marketing materials. “MacBook Air also supports immersive spatial audio for music and movies with Dolby Atmos.”
The M2 chip is the next generation of Apple silicon for Mac, with more performance and power efficiency. M2 adds a next-generation media engine with a powerful ProRes video engine for hardware-accelerated encode and decode. MacBook Air with M2 can play back more streams of 4K and 8K video content than before.
Apple says intensive workloads like editing complex timelines in Final Cut Pro are also reduced. They’re up to 40% faster than M1, but up to 15x faster for those who haven’t upgraded to the M1 chip. The MacBook Air with M2 is available in four finishes including midnight, starlight, silver, and space gray. It starts at $1,199 for the base model.
The M1 Mac has already proved itself capable of handling many more tracks in DAWs than Intel Macs. Both heat and fan noise are also worlds apart when it comes to comparing Apple silicon to the older Intel machines. Apple’s improvements for the M2 chip means producers and creators will be able to juggle more plug-ins with their favorite DAWs without experiencing slowdown or heat issues.