The 15" Air is a new class of laptops. No longer a real Air in terms of portability, my 2017 Air is smaller and ligher by exactly the right amount to be ultra-portable. Sadly the 15" Air is also not a common 15" working machine as it comes with only two sad USB-C ports and magsafe. Not even an SD-card reader. In a 15" laptop. Which, specced-up to standards (16 G/1 TB) is almost 2300 bucks in Europe. But reading an SD card requires a dongle in a 2023, 15" laptop priced for some 2.2k. What gives, Apple?

On the upside, it is a wholesome computer as it is. Laaarge touchpad, now that I am without mouse for a week, I only use touchpad for the time being and it works fine. Keyboard is good enough to type longer texts. The screen is better than expected. No true black as it is LCD not OLED, but good black-point while very bright. And clear. And crisp. And having colors pop. Only downside: With the linear scaling from 13 to 15 inch, the menu bar is slightly larger than the notch cut-out. I use custom desktop backgrounds to make the upper 64 pixel lines black, hiding the notch even in not-full-screen mode.

The 15" Air has good speakers. Very good for podcasts, acceptable for some music here and there. Power adapter has 2x USB-C out so I can also charge my Iphone 13 mini or Airpods while occupying only a single plug. Useful for travel.

As photo-editing machine (Lightroom powerusage, some light edits in Photoshop) it is up to the task. While two different Bloon Towerdefense games run in the background so I can get my daily quest rewards, and a Youtube podcast plays as well. Topaz AI tools also perform very good. Occasionally there are some hiccups, sometimes the laptop reacts not instantly to input, or switching tabs in Chrome lead to a very small disruption of audio playback. But I only notice this because most of the time, the laptop works really good.

I use Chrome instead of Safari because clicking forward to see the next image in Smugmug causes a blank screen for a blink of an eye there. Chrome just has a little delay without blanking before showing the next photo.

As gamer, and due to my workspace environment being with technical support for a Windows product, I use Windows more than I like to. With MacOS I am having a BSD again. Including a real shell like bash or now, zsh. My first Mac was the 2008 Macbook Aluminum bought in 2009, used almost daily into to 2015, then getting the 2017 Air at max specs including CPU upgrade. That Macbook is suprisingly fast for its formfactor and time, but the fan noise not acceptable. It is silent during normal video playback so now it is my bedroom Youtube and Amazon Prime Video machine.

The 15" Air is not as portable as a classic Air, but for its thin 15" form factor, nicely robust. Took it on travel and the Starlight finished laptop survived some rougher handling without a scratch. So far. Knock on wood! I am afraid the finish eventually wears off or that an unfortunate drop dents the case.

Apple computers are not about specs on paper, rather the experience for content creators. The M2 Air instantly wakes up from sleep mode. The screen has a very good viewing angle, gets nicely bright for daylight use and when typing, does not oscillate as much as expected. One can open up the screen without having to hold the lower side of the laptop. Connecting the computer to everything is easy so far. I just use this Mac. Having Pages pre-installed and this high-res screen means fonts finally look really good, while older non-retina displays in earlier Macbooks left some strange font aliasing artifacts. Any text looks so good on current Macbooks! The fonts are excellent, to. I feel more inspired to type than on my Windows devices.

Photos look very good as well. I use an external 4 TB Samsung T7 SSD as photo archive – because internals storage is overpriced and limited. Setting up this new Mac I found an inconsistency (placement of "Skip for now") and two bugs (Pressing 'return' did not work and I had to click, and the timezone setting only affects the clock widget but not system time), after the extremely well designed unboxing experience that stood out. I hope Apple fixes all that but again, there is more good than bad.

Giving up the wedge shape, the M2-based Airs now look more like a thinner Macbook Pro. The 15" size of the Air works well with the unbinned M2 version which includes 10 GPU core. Under sustained peak load the M2 does throttle and reaction times in MacOS do increase a bit, but the keyboard is not too hot to be used and the overall performance is still good. I could not afford 24 GB of RAM and 32 G is not even available, I am confident a current Macbook Pro 32 GB would not have any of those hiccups. Still, for the form factor and for 100% silent cooling, the M2 Air 15" with 16 GB is an extremely capable laptop. Not just for light office tasks or coding. I do real stuff here. With the build-in keyboard, trackpad and monitor. At any place, in my living room or on a train. The battery life of course is not 18 hours as Apple claims, for my home-use it is some 12 hours, for actual workload it lasts maybe 5 hours. Looking at the form factor, it still seems like a miracle. Battery life can be somewhat improved with low-power mode. Lightroom performance suffers a bit but the laptop is kept cool this way.

Gaming? Worse than expected. Blizzard no longer supports Mac beginning with Overwatch. No D2-Remake, no D4, not even Diablo Immortal even though it runs perfeclty on my A15-based Iphone. Steam has a couple of games but Rosetta only works with 64-bit x86-executables, so many older games no longer run on M-based Macs. If you are a Baldur's Gate fan, the Mac is fine, also Steam-based Bloon TD games are available. Not much more though. No Prison Architect, no Banished, no Thomas Was Alone. No Stanley Parable. Not even Counter-Strike. No Doom, no Mortal Kombat. Not even any Fallout. Any Elder Scrolls game? No.

Path of Exile and Shadow of Mordor are available but the M2 Air does not have enought performance for any useful gameplay. Apple-Silicon Macbooks are not for gamers as the software library is very limited compared to Windows. Not even support for Valheim, which is a real bummer. There is an early Mac-compatible alpha somewhere on Github, but no official build. Give me Valheim on Mac and I declare gaming choices acceptable.

You can of course use Lichess or chess.com, as installed game you have Civilization available for your long summer nights, you can play Icewind Dale and Planescape Torment if you really have the time. You can enjoy Night In The Woods and other games. Minecraft runs well, Factorio can be played, there you go. You can play World of Warcraft Retail and Classic, with very good performance in full resolution. Some emulators allow you to play classic Nintendo and Atari games, reliving the old times. I am not getting bored if on travel I only have my Macbook and no other gaming device. Still, many of my favorite tiles are not running at all.

However: For what it is, I like the 15" specced-up M2-based Macbook. Still called "Air" by Apple but it is over 3 pounds and too big for lightweight travel. It is a lightweight 15" laptop. The extra screen size allows me to run apps in windowed, not full-screen mode and still look better than on the 13" device. Video content is more immersive than the slight bump in display size suggests. Audio is good enough so that I don't always need my Airpods (I have Airpods 3, and Airpods Max. Both are still better but I prefer to not have something touching me around or in my ears.) However the loudspeaker setup assumes you are in front of the laptop, the sound gets audibly muffled if you walk around the room while listeing.

The 15" laptop Macbook 'Air' combines the disadvantage of a current 13" Air, meaning it has not enough ports and no SD-card slot, but also gives up the classic Air-level portability. It is a new class of 15" laptops. Lightweight and thin yet solid but having a poor port layout. However the other build-in hardware is flawless with the oversized and tactile trackpad, useable keyboard and exemplary 15" consumer-grade high-res, bright display, plus loudspeakers incomparable to any other, even very expensive Windows laptop I know. The 15" laptop Macbook Air is for amateur content creators like me. It does not matter if a Lightroom export of a lot of photos takes 3 or 5 minutes, the thing is it just takes minutes. Being passively cooled would be a downside for a professional where time is money, but is a blessing for home users. I rather have the M2 throttled – and still being faster than M1 at full speed – than a fan spinning up.