The biggest question I have is whether it has WiFi 6E or just WiFi 6 (2x2 80 MHz like the original M1 MacBook Air).
That's the one thing that's kind of gimped it for me—if I could get more WiFi bandwidth, especially with the ProRes decoding built into the M2, I might be able to edit 4K video over my network wirelessly for the first time. Would be amazing.
To be clear, I still think the M1 Air was the best portable laptop Apple made since the 11" Air before it was discontinued. I just think it being so 'wireless-first', it should have the best wireless speed possible.
>edit 4K video over my network wirelessly for the first time.
Good lord, to think of not that many years ago still needing to be firmly attached to an array of spinning rust to get performance for that. Now, we want to (nearly can) do it wirelessly. Just another set of gear adding to the pile of boat anchors I've been collecting
> the best portable laptop Apple made since the 11" Air before it was discontinued
I used to have an 11" Air as a daily driver. The portability was nice but I'd never go back to a computer that small. Too cramped, too little screen real estate, too small a battery. It doesn't surprise me that 11" laptops are rare these days.
I've gone back and forth over the years. Part of me would like a smaller system for travel but 1.) I always end up wondering if the tradeoff is worth it given how relatively small and light 13" laptops can be and 2.) I probably will never again travel to the degree I was doing it at peak. So I probably wouldn't actually buy an 11" MacBook Air even if I could.
A modern 13" laptop with narrow bezels is pretty much the same size as the old 11" laptops with huge bezels. I have a Dell XPS 13 9310 (2021 model), and I absolutely love how small it is.
This; the 11" had massive bezels, comparatively. That was the only real downside IMO. But the compact footprint was amazing for travel. I plugged it into my dock if I was at the desk.
I used four generations of the MBA, including the 11" 2015. That was definitely the pinnacle of value / performance in Apple's laptop line until the M1.
However, for 2020 & 2021 models is nothing out of ordinary: 2x2 ax, max 80 MHz wide channels. Basically what every other vendor at the market offers.
During 2019, they went a step backwards: from 3x3 MIMO to 2x2 MIMO. Granted, many APs do not support more than 2x2, but there are models on the market that do, and those who care about these things had a choice. Now, it is join the averages.
I've been looking for replacement home networking gear the last few days - I still don't understand Wifi 6 vs 6E, but mostly what I wanted to say was when the Wifi4,5,.. naming came out a few years back my response was "ugh, stupid marketing" and now that I was actually having to look for hardware the difference in actually comparing functionality with linearly increasing numbers is so wonderful :D
That said, what exactly does E imply? I was really trying to distinguish devices using separate 6ghz backplane, and that was annoyingly opaque to me as a person who writes does code but aggressively avoids anything networking :D
E implies the ability to use additional channels at the 6 GHz frequencies. With 5 GHz there are some problems, almost everyone uses the lower ones, leading to congestion and ignoring the upper ones due to DFS (radar detection; people are not fond of their wifi randomly not working).
And contrary to yours opinion, I consider that both 4 (-n) and 5 (-ac) brought very nice things (like support for new frequencies, wider channels or multiple streams). I happened to own 3x3 MIMO ac router at the time and together with 2015 MBP, I saw what it was not necessary to provide ethernet port anymore.
You miss understand - I thought the naming change from 802.11[a-z]+ was marketing BS, but now I actually had to look for hardware, a sane linearly increasing version number scheme makes life so much better :)
If you do a compare against the original M1 MacBook Air, they don't say anything about the network is different. It just says "802.11ax Wi-Fi 6". Same for the MacBook Pro M2.
So I'm guessing it's the same as the M1 MacBook Air.
What do you use for an ethernet adapter? I can hardly tell the difference with a RT8153 adapter, then the increase in CPU usage renders it largely pointless.
That's the one thing that's kind of gimped it for me—if I could get more WiFi bandwidth, especially with the ProRes decoding built into the M2, I might be able to edit 4K video over my network wirelessly for the first time. Would be amazing.
To be clear, I still think the M1 Air was the best portable laptop Apple made since the 11" Air before it was discontinued. I just think it being so 'wireless-first', it should have the best wireless speed possible.