 Apple never learns. They released yet another laptop with no freaking cooler in it. Touch it, and you'll burn yourself. Do any real work on it? You'll probably burn your whole house down, at least. That's how the internet reacted when Apple's redesigned M2 MacBook Air hit the scene. But here's a question for you. How many situations will you find yourself in where the heat is a real problem? And for that matter, would a similarly priced PC in the same form factor even perform any better? Did Apple get away with this seemingly obvious design faux pas? And if they did, do we need to change the way that we think about laptop cooling? We set out to answer all of those questions, and we set out to tell you about our sponsor. Simple MDM. Simple MDM is a ridiculously simple Apple device management for IT. Enrolling your company's Apple devices and keeping them up to date doesn't have to be frustrating. Try it free for 30 days on unlimited devices at simplemdm.com slash Linus. There's been a lot made of Apple's cooling solution for the M2 MacBook Air, or more accurately, their lack of one. Instead of something, anything more substantial, Apple decided to basically attach a thin metal heat spreader, like you'd find on a stick of RAM, to the SoC in an attempt to soak up some heat temporarily before transferring it to the chassis, which takes on the role of a heat sink. They could have gone with a thin radiator, a fan, even a thicker piece of metal, or some combination of the three, but no, they settled on some bits of paper-thin stamped sheet aluminum, none of which would actually be a problem if the SoC stayed nice and cool, except it doesn't. And like for all electronic devices, this is absolutely a bad thing. And while the M1 Air's performance did suffer due to poor thermals, it wasn't quite to the same degree, pun intended. And this is why. Your typical uses for an entry-level MacBook, things like content consumption, web browsing, photo editing, or maybe even light video editing, they all have one big thing in common. They are bursty in nature, and they're unlikely to put the SoC under any kind of sustained load. What that means is as long as you have enough thermal mass to absorb your momentary heat spikes, you can count on long idle periods to dissipate it at your leisure. Well, the M1 MacBook Air managed to strike this balance pretty well performing at or near its full capability without overheating the chassis, unless you were to fire up something like Cinebench, Blender, or a 3D game. Unfortunately, that is not the case this time around, at least on the surface. Apple has tuned the M2's thermal controls to maintain that same 50 degree surface temperature target as last time, which is required by law, but almost immediately after being hit by any sort of load, the M2 SoC itself hits a whopping 99 degrees Celsius, because even the pathetic cooler in the M1 MacBook Air has substantially more thermal mass than this time around. I'm frankly pretty disappointed. Now Apple's response to this would be pretty obvious. Well, these are silent machines. They're not for pros. Get a MacBook Pro if you wanna actually put a load on your computer. But frankly, that's not a perfect solution either, because until they refresh the M2 MacBook Pro, you are gonna be stuck with either a super toasty chip or the old touch bar design with worse IO. On the bright side, the M2 Air gets MagSafe to go with your Thunderbolt 4 ports and an overall design that's reminiscent of the 14 inch MacBook Pro. It is thicker than the thinnest point of the previous gen Air's wedge, but the new flattened design is thinner overall, and from our point of view, feels a lot nicer to hold in the lap. And that MagSafe charging port, it's capable of fast charging up to 65 watts if you pick up either the full GPU model or you pay an extra 20 bucks over base. You also have the option, by the way, of choosing a 35 watt dual type C charger instead, if that better fits your needs. And from using it, we can legit see how it could be super handy to have for travel compared to the single port fast charger. The only major difference between the Air configurations that directly impacts performance is the storage. The previous gen M1 MacBook Air's 256 gig variation used twin 128 gig chips to achieve that capacity. That divides the workload between those two chips and makes it much less likely that a read or a write will stall while waiting for another to finish. The M2 Air's 256 gig variation, meanwhile, makes use of a single 256 gigabyte chip. That means that the NAND flash will be in a wait state more often. And you can think of this kind of like running single versus dual channel memory. In practice, this means that the lowest capacity model gets roughly half the performance of the other storage tiers that make use of multiple chips. Although, you guys might not expect this, I kind of feel like I have to cut Apple some slack here. Most people are not going to notice the difference between 1.5 and three gigabytes per second. And outside of synthetic storage benchmarks, the CPU is often going to end up being the bottleneck at either of those speeds. There are situations where that might not be the case though, like video editing ProRes raw footage, but they also aren't as likely to come up on the Air compared to a MacBook Pro. Though part of that is the way that the Air's performance gets kneecapped by its lack of cooling, which is another problem that Apple created. I'll show you what I mean though. Starting with gaming, because it's always kind of funny to me when people complain about gaming performance on a machine that was clearly engineered for browsing Facebook. In order to make this a fair test, given the cooling solution, we're running each of these twice to warm up, and then finally taking our results from a third run. And well, yeah. The cooling solution on the M2 MacBook Pro is good for a whopping 35% increase in FPS in every test except for Total War Warhammer 3's battle benchmark, where the lead shrinks to just 30%. In fairness to the M2 MacBook Air however, even with its awful cooling, the competing Dell XPS 13 doesn't beat it by a significant margin in any of those tests. Oh, but if you want something that does beat the competition, you can check out our screwdriver on lttstore.com. It's now independently tested and verified. Moving on to Cinebench, the M2 Air loses about a thousand points in its score over a 10 minute run compared to a single run, giving you some idea of how your performance might degrade under heavy load. Meanwhile, the M2 Pro retains basically the same score. Geekbench being a shorter benchmark shows basically no difference between the M2 MacBooks. So thanks for that. But that doesn't mean it's an entirely useless benchmark, because interestingly, we can see the difference in GPU performance between the M1 and the M2 base models. And it's roughly in line with the additional memory bandwidth provided by the M2 SoC. Of course, unless you work at our testing lab, you probably don't spend all day running benchmarks. So let's take a look at real world workloads, starting with an Adobe Lightroom export. And wow, not only is the M2 Air faster than the M1 Air, it's actually roughly in line with the Pro class machines with active cooling. The M2 also picks up a significant win in compressor thanks to the addition of ProRes encoding engines on the base model SoC. That's over 475% faster than the M1 CPU fallback. H.264 isn't significantly different, however, indicating that that encoder is more or less identical between the SoCs. And Final Cut Pro can use up to three of these ProRes streams on the M2 Air MacBooks, which is more than the M1 Air could handle and one less than the Pro. Pretty impressive. If you're a DaVinci Resolve user, well, you're gonna want to get a RAM upgrade, regardless of the rest of the performance numbers, if you're using an Air or a Pro, because eight gigs isn't nearly enough. With 24 gigs, the Air managed a respectable 40 minute export with the Pro running about eight and a half minutes faster than that. So overall, the base model M2 Air is roughly 35% faster than its M1 counterpart, and the higher end M2 Air is roughly 21% slower than the M2 Pro. Though the biggest outliers are mostly in gaming, which I think for many Mac users is not terribly important. If we look purely at productivity, then it's within 9%, which is frankly extremely impressive considering the monstrous difference in cooling capacity. The main difference for this, as we pointed out before, is that most of these real world use cases just aren't going to be continuous loads that will throttle the heck out of the chip. I mean, even DaVinci Resolve ends up being more of a stop and go affair in terms of CPU usage. It's not stop and go at Float Plane though, check out our recent exclusive where we try out some Norwegian hockey pulver while we run our battery life tests. For our battery tests, we calibrated each laptop to roughly the same output as 50% brightness on the M2 Air, and we let them rip on a YouTube video. The first to fall was the XPS 13 with the M2 Air falling second, though at nearly double the battery life. The difference in battery life between the M1 and the M2 MacBook Airs seems to be primarily due to the larger, brighter display, as we've seen other outlets report worse battery life at lower brightness as well. But that's not to say that the SoC makes no difference. The M2 MacBook Pro ended up with a result over an hour and a half worse than the M1 Pro model, and those share the same display, which seems to suggest that the M2 SoC can draw more power than its predecessor, assuming that adequate cooling and power budgets are allotted to it. Overall, still excellent battery life for both, but you are giving up a bit of runtime for the extra performance of the M2 SoC, all of which is to say that it very much depends on what you do with your laptop to determine whether the cooling design flaw is a fundamental one that kills your experience or is merely a minor annoyance and you wish they just put a little fan in it. It seems like in most real-world workloads, it's just not gonna suffer that much. And at a starting price of $1,200 for the Air, it's likely that a lot of folks are in fact going to use it as a glorified Chromebook. As for the 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro, I am having a hard time seeing the benefit considering how close the Air comes most of the time. Yes, when spec'd in a way I would consider appropriate, it's the same price as the Air for better performance, but at that point, you're only $300 out from a similarly spec'd 14-inch MacBook Pro, making that the more attractive prospect for now in my humble opinion. For your extra money, you're getting a much faster CPU and GPU, a larger 120 Hertz Liquid Retina XDR display, an additional Thunderbolt 4 port and dedicated HDMI and SD card readers. I'm not about to pass judgment if you don't care about any of those things, but for my money, that is more than worth it. Regardless of your priorities, I certainly wouldn't suggest going with the cheapest M2 13-inch MacBook Pro. If you care that little about RAM and storage, you would do just as well with the cheaper Air and it would be slimmer and silent. We're gonna have all of those linked down below. That gives the M2 MacBook Air my vote between the M2 Macs currently on the market and if you wanna get real work done, well, you can either spritz compressed air on it whenever you fire up something intensive or save up a little more and wait for the 14-inch M2 Pro. You won't have to wait for our sponsor though, Privacy. Privacy is a free service that gives you control over who can charge you and how much they can charge. By using virtual payment cards, you can directly manage your free trials, your one-time purchases or your monthly subscriptions all from your browser. Privacy helps you keep track of what you're subscribed to and helps ensure that you aren't being charged anything extra. You can set spending limits, pause your cards and even close them outright anytime you want to. And if you're the victim of a fraudulent transaction, Privacy.com automatically declines the transaction and notifies you. Privacy.com is PCI DSS compliant, uses AES 256 encryption and offers two-factor authentication. Plus, since they make their money from merchants and business accounts, there's no cost to you to use it personally. So check it out today at privacy.com forward slash Linus and sign up for an account. New customers automatically get $5 to spend on their first purchase. Thanks for watching guys. Go check out our initial review of the M1 Air. The platform's not mature yet, but boy has it ever come a long way.