While the new MacBook Air certainly offers a big performance boost because of the M2 chip, the fanless design makes it impossible to control internal temperatures well in most situations. Based on real-world measurements of sustained workloads, the M2 MacBook Air loses 25 percent of its performance under high load compared to the M2 MacBook Pro.
According to a review video from The Verge, the M2 MacBook Air will automatically slow down once its internal temperature exceeds the recommended limit. While the M2 is more powerful than the M1 in terms of performance, it can’t perform without adequate cooling. This is confirmed by the results of real-world testing.
Using scoring software such as Cinebench R23 is usually not an accurate simulation of high load situations because their tests usually last only a few seconds and do not accurately reproduce CPU performance under high load. Therefore, The Verge ran a continuous 30-minute round-robin test in a multi-core test.
In the same test situation, the MacBook Pro with the same M2 chip (and one fan built-in) did not experience a slowdown, while the MacBook Air was unable to maintain the same high frequency as the other MacBook devices and lost 25 percent of its performance in the multi-core test.
Fortunately, M2 performance is higher compared to its predecessor, with the M1 MacBook Air losing 21 percent of its performance after running Cinebench R23 multicore scores for 30 minutes and the M2 MacBook Air losing just 13 percent.
