MacBook Air (M2, 2022)

The wedge is gone. After fourteen years Apple squared off the Air into a flat slab of uniform thickness, echoing the M1 Pro MacBook Pro from the year before. MagSafe came back, which freed one of the two Thunderbolt ports for something other than power. A notch arrived holding a 1080p webcam, well overdue. The screen grew to 13.6 inches and got brighter, and four speakers went in that sound considerably better than a fanless laptop this thin has any right to. M2 was a real but modest step past M1. Around 18 percent more CPU, a substantially better GPU, more memory bandwidth and up to 24GB of unified memory, still with no fan at all. Midnight and Starlight joined the colors, and Midnight collects fingerprints exactly as you would expect. Reviewers called it close to a perfect everyday laptop. They also noted that Apple kept the cheaper M1 Air on sale beside it, and that the M1 remained excellent value, which complicated the recommendation. Under long sustained loads the fanless M2 throttles slightly more than the actively cooled 13-inch Pro, and for almost everything people actually do it does not come up.