As a professional photographer and video producer, I’ve been really impressed testing the new 15-inch Air.
Apple’s ultrathin MacBook Air range of laptops were originally designed mostly for lightweight office or school work on the go. But as Apple’s own M-series processors have become more capable, so too have the MacBooks they’re in. I’m a professional photographer and video producer, and I’ve spent the past couple of months with the latest 15-inch M2-equipped MacBook Air, testing it out on photo shoots, both in my studio and on location. I’m impressed, and here’s why.
For me, its 15-inch display is the perfect balance between size and portability. It’s big enough to comfortably edit photos in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop without needing a bigger monitor. It offers plenty of screen space for all my tools, as well as providing ample room for video timelines when working with video in Premiere, away from my desk.
But the narrow display bezel and the laptop’s 11.5mm thickness means it’ll still slip into the laptop pouch of even my smaller camera backpacks. Sure, it isn’t the lightest Air ever made, but its 1.5kg weight is an acceptable addition for my spine to cope with when I’m out on shoots. Though it feels every bit as well put together as most of Apple’s gear, I do worry that the nice, deep, dusky blue of my test model could easily get scratched and scuffed over months or years of photoshoots. Still, I managed to avoid any major blemishes during my time with it.
With Apple’s M2 chip and 16GB of RAM, my test model was extremely capable for most uses. It handled all my photo editing in Lightroom and Lightroom Classic, importing 1,000-plus batches of raw photos from my CFExpress cards extremely quickly and showing zero slowdown as I navigated the library and batch-applied editing presets.
