M2, new design, and more.
It’s been over a year since the M1 MacBook Air made its impressive debut, and it’s still a great laptop. But for all of the incredible advantages Apple silicon afforded, Apple didn’t really change much about the MacBook Air. But reports say that’s going to change. Apple is rumored to have big plans for its cheapest laptop, plans that could make the MacBook Air better than it’s ever been. Here’s are five big ways Apple could change the next MacBook Air and bring a huge dose of excitement to its entry-level notebook.
The M2 chip will bring a big performance boost
When the MacBook Air used Intel processors, we had to sacrifice some performance in order to have a laptop that prioritized portability. Then the M1 came along, and it also brought a significant performance boost—in most tests it’s actually as fast as the 13-inch MacBook Pro, a laptop that puts performance first.
When the next generation of Apple’s system on a chip, the M2, makes its debut, it will almost certainly be in the MacBook Air. According to Bloomberg, the M2 will have eight CPU cores, with four performance cores and four efficiency cores, just like the M1. The M2 will most likely be based on the same architecture as Apple’s A15 SoC in the iPhone 13, so if we use the A15 as an indicator of performance, the M2 could have a single-core performance increase of roughly 10 percent over the M1 and multi-core CPU performance increase of 20 percent. That’s a little bit better than an incremental boost percentage-wise and a tremendous jump compared to the Intel processors Apple used to use.
Read more at MacWorld.com