Unsurprisingly my favourite review of this new computer was written over at Daring Fireball.
The M2 Air is not designed for rendering huge amounts of video. It’s not designed for those that have huge 3D modeling needs. It’s designed for my wife who does email, and occasionally needs to edit audio with minimal tracks under 4 minutes for her figure skaters performances. Once a year she edits a bit of video for similar reasons for her skaters.
The M2 Air is absolutely fine for her. In fact, it’s overpowered.
Heck, most of my YouTube videos are under 15 minutes in length so the M2 Air is plenty fine for me too. I notice my Mac Studio does my pre-rendering faster and the render is faster, but it’s not like I’m saving hours a week. I don’t do compiling on my computer regularly. I push my code to a web server and some build process goes on there and then deploys my code.
Yes, I’m saying that at least part of my Mac Studio was a choice because I wanted to have a bunch of monitors, not because I needed the power.
I’ll watch a few reviews of each machine that comes out but as soon as they started talking about multiple renders or multiple runs of some synthetic benchmark, I checked out.
99.99% of users getting the M2 Air will never do this. The few that will likely know it’s not the best computer for multiple streams of 8k footage, but all they can afford is the M2 Air. I was there once, purchasing my first “nice” computer when I got paid by a client and then had the money to purchase a computer that could actually do the work they were paying me for.