M2 MacBook Air is hot stuff
Some reviewers have claimed the laptop overheats in use
The M2 MacBook Pro has had its fair share of criticism due to the base model’s slow SSD performance. And now, the M2 MacBook Air has also come under fire, this time for its apparently poor heat regulation.
Numerous reviewers have picked up on the issue, stating the MacBook Air is prone to overheating in certain situations. It’s not always disastrous – T3’s review found it was warm but did not slow down performance, for example. But others have suffered thermal throttling under demanding workloads, such as exporting video files.
The situation is not helped by the fact the MacBook Air is completely fanless. However, this was never an issue in the M1 MacBook Air, so clearly something has changed this time. And in actuality, two things have changed: the M2 model lacks any kind of heat spreader (unlike the M1 version), and its new, thinner design compared to the M1 MacBook Air gives components less room to breathe. When put together, this is a recipe for one hot MacBook.
That said, many of the overheating issues stem from heavy workloads that the laptop wasn’t really designed to handle. If you want to use the M2 MacBook Air for the day-to-day tasks it was intended for, you’ll probably be just fine.