MacBook Air M2

Software Engineer, use it partially for private and professional purposes. In historical Order: Thinkpad X201, Then a Thinkpad T450s, currently a Macbook Air M2, usually in the biggest configuration. Usually I use it about 7 years. Not because it doesn't work anymore, but because it gets too slow for what I am doing with it. [...]

[...] My main motivation was to have a user-friendly and opensource tool that can run (some) Windows apps on my Macbook Air M2 running Linux. [...] All those components need to be built as part of the Snap build process. [...]

Bought a used MacBook Air M2 past summer to run Asahi linux exclusively on it, the installation went hassle-free. One charge lasts 9+ hours easily, sometimes up to 12 hours. [...] The only app I'm really missing is Signal Desktop. The virtualization to run games is a noticeable performance hit and shows occasional glitches in the Steam overlay, but all my games run smoothly.

[...] I bought a Framework laptop and a Macbook Air M2 at roughly the same time a couple of years ago. [...] I think even if I used free cross platform software tools like the ones you mention, that would matter a lot to me. [...]

A year ago I set up Asahi Linux on my MacBook Air M2 as a fun little "because I can" experiment. It became my daily driver, despite the fact I only allocated 30gb of hard disk. [...]

3 years ago I got my first Apple product, a MacBook Air M2. [...] gotten an iPad for Aly, 2 iPhone 14s, which I replaced mine with an iPhone 15pro, an iMac M3 (replacement for the MacBook which Aly now has) and finally upgraded to iphone17pro. [...]

I’ve been using my MacBook Air M2 for a year now, and I’m still amazed by it. This laptop is incredible. Its battery life is perfect for travel, and its performance is powerful enough to handle any web development task or even run DeepSeek 14b.

It is two years ago since I got my Macbook Air M2 Chip and I still love it. Since then we have also changes our mobile telephones to Apple ones and we have no regrets as all of these things have the quality we want and I find them easy to use

Found it. Out of stock unfortunately. Ah well, was for a friend – I got a MacBook Air M2 on a massive discount about 4 months ago.

I got the idea for this text after learning from the Fireship channel about the latest Linux kernel exploit, which was related to a 2017 commit. [...] I’ve been using macOS since mid-2007, without dual boot with Windows until mid-2010. [...] This phase lasted until mid-2022, when I bought my MacBook Air M2. [...]

apple silicon is virtualization capable and the UTM app (on the app store, but open source so you can build it too) wraps Apple's hypervisor framework, allows me to run on my macbook air (m2 earlier, recently updated to m5 just to get more memory) macos as well as arm versions of both fedora and arch, with plasma and gnome (and i've used hyprland etc to toy around). [...]

I’ve been using podman on Mac. It’s been a nice fit as the container build files are identical to what I use on my fedora server. I have noticed my 2 virtual core 4 gb Linode vps runs apps faster in the same container as when run on my MacBook Air M2 16 gb. I expected some performance overhead but didn’t think it would be noticeable as it is. [...]

The NVIDIA DGX Spark that I use has a fairly decent ARM CPU that's roughly on par with the M3 Pro and AMD AI Max 395+ according to Geekbench, plus a GPU that's very powerful (RTX 5070 level). I'm sure it will be more than powerful enough for me to get a decent experience. I also have a Macbook Air M2 running Asahi Linux.

I use it for my mailserver (thank you openbsd.amsterdam), for the gateway in my homelab, a dedicated OpenBSD VMD machine in my homelab, and on personal machines (Macbook Air M2, a Thinkpad X220 and on a T480 that dualboots OpenBSD/FreeBSD). [...]

I have a MacBook Air M2. I bought a framework 13 last year right before the RAM shortage. I really wanted to love it but ended up returning it due to really bad battery life performance (NixOS). [...]

[...] Sequoia is crazy fast in my MacBook Air m2 16gb Not upgrading any of my Macs ever again. I was a fanboy looking for every new update like a present, for 13 years, not anymore. [...]

The main thing that held me back from using Asahi on my M2 MacBook air - was missing external display. [...] If that's true - I'd say MacBook air M2 is probably the new sweetspot - depending on how cheap you could get an M1. [...]

I've got a MacBook Air M2 and it's still zoom'n along fine. I did get 24GB RAM, which I'm sure helps... run Chrome :)

Among other things, I quite like the blog, especially travelling photos. [...] Not much to add to the topic of having a MacBook Air M2 with Linux. [...] Battery life is quite great, it’s between 3 to 4 hours with battery being at 50% of capacity. So, I expect the new battery could give me up to 8 hours, which is pretty impressive for me. [...] The only thing I miss is USB-C charging, as that way I could charge with anything when I have no charger on me. [...]

[...] It connected to my Macbook air (M2) and Windows machine without installing anything. [...]

[...] Don't get me wrong, modern Intel and AMD systems are actually impressively efficient and can offer somewhat competitive experiences, but the MacBook Air as an every-person's experience is really tough to beat (consider also, you could get a MacBook Air M2 for $650 during the most recent Black Friday sales, and you'd have a really damn hard time finding any sort of PC hardware that's anywhere near as nice, never mind match it on performance/battery life).

[...] Anyway, I've been using it on my Macbook Air M2 and it works fine for my use case [3]. [...]

The Macbook M2 Air running Asahi Linux is easily my favorite Linux laptop ever, far superior to any Thinkpad or Dell XPS I've owned, imo. I think things like Thunderbolt and some DisplayPort features are missing, but I have never needed this as it is purely a laptop for me. But it has everything else I could want: suspend/sleep, proper frequency scaling, great GPU drivers, USB/wifi/bluetooth, speakers, brightness/keyboard settings, etc. [...] The battery life is great, though macOS is still quite a ways ahead in that department.

[...] Funny enough, I’ve only had one Apple computer during each era - an Apple //e (65C02), a Mac LC II (68K), A PowerMac 6100/60 (classic Mac PPC), Mac Mini G4 (OS X PPC), a Core Dúo Mac Mini (x86) and now a MacBook M2 Air. [...]

[...] Philosophically I am with you, e-waste and consumerism are bad, but pragmatically it is not worth punishing yourself from a dollars and cents standpoint. [...] You can grab a MacBook Air M2 for around $500. Why suffer with slow hardware? [...]

[...] But at home, I have a desktop (Linux Mint), a NUC server (Proxmox w various VMs/containers) and a MacBook Air M2/iPad that wife/kids use. [...]

First off I’d say you can run models locally at good speed, llama3.1:8b runs fine a MacBook Air M2 with 16GB RAM and much better on a Nvidia RTX3050 which are fairly affordable. [...]

[...] Here's the ollama version (4.6bit quant, I think?) run with --verbose total duration: 21.193519667s load duration: 94.88375ms prompt eval count: 77 token(s) prompt eval duration: 1.482405875s prompt eval rate: 51.94 tokens/s eval count: 308 token(s) eval duration: 19.615023208s eval rate: 15.70 tokens/s 15 tokens/s is pretty decent for a low end MacBook Air (M2, 24gb of ram). [...]

I'm writing tests, fixing bugs, and adding features to improve the quality of a piece of financial software that transfers certain financial data on a special private network. It's way less fancy than it sounds, but I'm enjoying improving the tests and adding important security and legal compliance features. [...] I'm also working on learning about building software with LLMs, specifically I am building a small personal project that will allow me to experiment with them using measurable hypotheses and theories, rather than just tweaking a prompt a bunch and guessing when it is working the best. I know others have done this, but I am building it from the ground up because I'm using it as a learning experience. I plan to take my experimentation platform and build a small "personal agent" software package to run on my own computer, again building from scratch for my own learning process, that will do small things for me like researching something and writing a report. I don't expect anything too useful to come out of it, since I am using 1.7B/4B models on a MacBook Air M2 (later I might use my 3080 but that won't be much improvement), but it will be interesting to build the architectural stuff even if the agents are effectively just useless cycle-wasters.

Depending on the use case, it happily runs on my MacBook air M2 16GB ram with mps for small pdfs, and searching over 100-150 documents with colpali takes a 2-ish minutes. [...] For ingestion, takes around 15-20-ish seconds a page, which is on the slower end. On an A100, it takes 4-5 seconds per page for ingestion using Colpali to run (we haven't performance optimized, or optimized batch sizes yet tho). [...]

PWM is a real concern that impacts, say, 10% of the population, and probably only 0.1% are aware of it. It's been a growing, silent epidemic due to a very clear culprit: OLED screens, particularly on cell phones. Phone manufacturers know that OLED screens cause eye strain, and they've tried to mitigate it, but it's still sort of an unsolved problem that phone manufacturers haven't prioritized. [...] A quick intro to the topic: Personally, I am grateful to have an LCD laptop (the MacBook M2 Air's screen is a godsend), and I hope more people would recognize OLED PWM as the source of their eyes strain and complain about it, so that manufacturers change their priorities.

Using Rider on an Macbook Air M2 (24 GB RAM) -- admittedly, pretty small/simple code-bases for the most part. Great performance. [...] With that I don't notice performance issues - but the battery drain is noticeable at that point.

Executing cargo bench on Limbo’s main directory, we can compare SQLite running SELECT FROM users LIMIT 1 (620ns on my Macbook Air M2), with Limbo executing the same query (506ns), which is 20% faster. [...] That's not how database performance should be measured or compared. In any case, the programming language should have little to no impact on the database performance, since the majority of the time is spent waiting on io anyway

[...] It freezes while playing CS2 and takes up 15 minutes to wake from sleep. [...] My Macbook Air M2 is the exact opposite of that. [...]

[...] The quality of the hardware feels higher to me and I like the screen ratio more. The keyboard feels even better than my Macbook Air M2's. [...]

I run USB-C with one cable to a Thunderbolt4 dock station (ThinkPad Hybrid USB-C with USB-A Dock) running two high-res screens from my Macbook Air M2 + all other accessories. [...] Note: Most docking hubs only support a feature of DisplayPort called MST to run two monitors off a single connection. [...] It needs to be Thunderbolt for full MST support with dual, unique displays.

I can make a clean build of Firefox in less than 15 minutes on my MacBook Air M2, C++, Rust, and all. If you’re working on a frontend feature that only needs to modify Firefox’s frontend JS code, you can use “artifact builds” (prebuilt object files) so you don’t need to recompile the native code.

totally. i have a macbook air m2 and it performs better than my work m1 pro because of the bloatware. my zsh config spawns in 90ms on my macbook air m2 while it takes 600ms in the m1 pro.

[...] My MacBook M2 Air last two workdays before needing a charge, it’s light and silent. [...]

[...] refurbished MacBook Air M2 13"

[...] I had a MacBook Air M2 and the battery life was amazing, even when using VS Code w/ Docker. [...] I'd hate for there to be a situation where you cannot upgrade your Windows version because Qualcomm hasn't released updated binaries, like what happens on Android. [...]

I have the 15 inch Macbook Air M2 and would agree it may in fact be the perfect laptop, and I have had hundreds. [...]

[...] They tend to overheat. The hinge breaks- plastic. The display and audio quality is worse. Software support also sucks. [...] Way way back I used to have a desktop color Macintosh of some sort (I forget the model, a 68k, maybe IIci ?) and as PCs were getting tossed in the landfill for years while the Mac kept going and running most new software. I just bought my daughter a laptop and decided to go with the MacBook Air m2. Great value for money IMO. Not sure what's even close in terms of performance, build quality, battery life etc. This should easily last 10 years.

I run 8b on my Macbook air m2 with 16gb's of vram at decent speed of 12 t/s (mlx can probably get 15 t/s). I use the Q5KM GGUF, which is 99% the same as the original. I've seen tests that there is close to no divergence with these quantisations, but it rises steeply going lower:

Macbook Air M2, all over again. [...] I had a MacBook Pro Retina from 2012, which was replaced by a 2017 model through a warranty hack (though it worked flawlessly). The 2017 started losing keys on its 3rd keyboard replacement, but was really speedy still. Then I got a 2017 Macbook 12" which was perfect for backpacking. [...] ...so I got the M2. [...]

I think I'll have to watch one of these people who love the Mac touchpad work. [...] Even with max speed and acceleration my MacBook air m2 touchpad feel anemic, and cumbersome for selecting text. Fwiw I also have an apple mouse, and the touch based scroll feels unpredictable, and the mouse a bit slow too.

With the latest m2 macbook air's you actually get a significantly better laptop, for a lot less money, then a windows version I've found. [...] I got a DELL laptop from a client to be able to access their windows applications. I used it for coding for a bit, it was so painfully slow, so I switched back to my macbook air m2. I thought the Dell was just a cheap laptop, found out the retail price was a few 100 euros higher then my m2. I was dumbfounded a shitty laptop would go for those prices. (granted I have a 13 inch, 15 inch are around the same price) The new macbook air's are really fairly priced and are sufficient for most professionals.

this was the first year that i didn't partake in upgrading my iPhone in many years because the iPhone 13 mini was discontinued without a replacement. [...] i ended up combining the two by getting a macbook air m2. [...]

[...] - My Macbook Air M2 to replace my 12" Macbook. [...]

I'm personally considering pulling the trigger on the 15' Macbook Air M2 to replace my current 15' Macbook Pro Intel I made this jump when the M2 MBA came out. [...] This year, I bought some GaN bricks and USB-C cables. Prices were somewhat better than normal but not amazing. [...]