Buying a MacBook this holiday season? Avoid this one!

Now that Apple has made 16GB of RAM the standard for all their Macs, there will be plenty of sales and deals for the 8GB models to get them out of companies’ warehouses.

Amazon has already started discounting the M2 MacBook Air base model which has 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD storage for $699.

Yes $699.

That sounds like a great deal, but it is a trap.

Do not buy this MacBook, even at that price.

The base M2 Air model was crippled with slow hard drive speeds, making them unsuitable for most people who do or plan to do even basic creative workloads. This includes middle schoolers all the way to professionals.

The minute you start doing something demanding, your laptop will noticeably slow down. This problem was known well enough in the tech community that others started writing about it and making videos to show how the previous generation M1 MacBook Air was superior.

Here’s what Dan Seifert said from The Verge:

…slower storage speeds can impact a number of tasks, including file transfers, and can also slow down overall performance since Macs use SSD space as temporary memory (swap memory) when their onboard RAM is used up.

That said, will these particular differences impact you? People the Air is marketed to will likely not see a life-changing contrast between the 256GB and 512GB models when it comes to everyday performance. I ran two 4K YouTube videos over 25 open Chrome tabs for 30 minutes on both machines without either needing to dip into swap memory.

This sounds fast enough for web browsing if that’s all you plan on doing, but Max Tech has shown in multiple videos how the slow SSD hard drive on the base model can slow down a computer while doing one performance task, such as photo editing while browsing the web. 

The slow SSDs were such a problem that Apple fixed the issue when the M3 models came out a year and a half later.

The base M2 MacBook Air finds itself in a weird situation because it doesn’t really have a target market. 

If you just want a cheap laptop that performs well and better than the $699 M2 Air, you can get the M1 Air brand new for $50 cheaper at Walmart at $649. How does it perform better? It has a better heat sink and dual SSD channels allowing faster hard drive speeds. You will get faster data transfers and also better performance when the computer uses the SSD as RAM for multitasking.

If you want a lot of performance out of your laptop, the base M2 Air is not even on your radar.

When you include Apple Intelligence and how much resources it will eventually use up, the base M2 Air will age poorly in performance and will cost you more money in the long run.