M2 MacBook Air For Programming - Real World Review!

Thank you Coding Dojo for sponsoring today's video. So later this month, I can give you all a full review on how this has been performing. You guys see this? I started coding at like, I don't know, 830. The whole little project that I have built right here, that one right there, and the computer is currently at 33%. I'm not going to lie, the temperatures do get quite hot and the whole chassis gets hot, but we're going to talk about the whole thing. I think a lot of us right now are confused as to what laptop would you pick for development, and what I've done in this video is very much try to talk some sense out of this new MacBook. Don't get me wrong, the M2 MacBook Air is a fantastic piece of hardware, with some limitations. It's been my daily driver for everyday tasks, except for when it comes to making content, and it's been the laptop I've been using for 99% of my programming work. I've done some Python work, messed around with some benchmarks, tried Flutter for a little while, and worked on deploying a server on Linode so I can use my Node apps, and it's been fun. But definitely not $200 funner than the M1 MacBook Air, and let me explain why. I think the biggest thing that came to mind for this review when doing dev work was the keyboard. Look, for the past like 2-3 years, keyboards realistically haven't changed all that much. I think after a couple of months of using this, I do feel like there is slightly a different feel compared to the M1 MacBook Air. I feel like there's a tiny bit more travel, and the actuation force is better. I find myself making less spelling mistakes and writing code a bit faster, and with the new full height function keys, it makes my experience a bit more efficient when it comes to actuating these. It's just convenient for when I'm working, for like small and simple things like, I don't know, turning the brightness up, popping spotlight with one stroke instead of a combination, toggling do not disturb to focus on coding, those little changes do make the keyboard efficiency better compared to having half height function keys. Plus, whenever I put this thing down to work and open the lid, I don't find myself missing that little fingerprint ID button the M1 Air had. I however do miss the elevation the keyboard had on the M1 Air, I do feel like it can make your typing faster at times, but I'm willing to give that up and stick to these slightly modified keys they seem to put in here. Also, below the keyboard, the trackpad on the M2 Air also got slightly wider, and I knew I wasn't crazy, but I do feel like the haptic on the M2 is different. Different bad, different good, I just think it comes down to preference, but for me, I've finally concluded that I like this smoother, bassier haptic feedback. It's definitely satisfying double clicking on code and deleting words. I will say the larger trackpad is definitely better since I do feel like I had a bit more runway when dragging files and highlighting code. I know trackpad sensitivity can fix this, but I like my sensitivity as it is. When I was writing code in JS, I also realized I can just use both my fingers to extend the cursor, but it can be a bit of a hassle. Okay, so the screen. I cannot neglect and will not neglect that it is in fact an improvement over the M1 Air. It's slightly larger, which helps me fit more code on single lines, and it has a thinner top bezel which I love giving me more room for core editors on full screen. However, the notch does take a bit of space, and if you have a lot of helper apps combined with something like Android Studio, things get cramped, and you might end up losing some of the apps you need. However, personally, I will always take all the screen real estate I can get. I pick my battles wisely for my use, and so I rather just have the notch, and I'm talking from experience. That notch also incorporates a new 1080p camera which might make your team scrums more enjoyable, and this is a really big might. What I can guarantee you though is that this new display does emit a noticeable extra 100 nits of brightness, which I completely love. I do think it would have been awesome getting that mini LED display with a high refresh rate for when we scroll code infinitely. I also think it would have been super clutch for front end developers who refer back and forth to designs. Now, the thing I most hate about this laptop, definitely the inability to rock dual monitors. When I was filming myself, turns out that I was rocking my PC for the tutorials and the laptop for coding, mainly due to the fact that, you know, I wanted to properly test battery life. But throughout the weeks, I found it such a hassle to code on a regular monitor. In fact, to be honest, I never did. I either rocked my ultrawide or used my satechi hub to be able to simulate dual monitors. But out of the box, just like the M1 Air, we do not get dual monitor support. One thing you should do out of the box is maybe getting some nice dbrand decals. I didn't for the sake of our reviews, but you can totally see that the sides don't age too well. Ports are definitely getting more and more scratched, but the rest of the body seems to be doing pretty fine. However, if I were you, I wouldn't take any chances. I also must say, the keyboard gets super greasy and the trackpad too. I pretty much use this laptop everywhere and anywhere I go, and so that's something to be expected with this new colorway. Except for the keyboard, expect that all across the board. Other than that, the rest is holding up super nicely. As a programmer, I don't think you'll be disappointed at how sturdy this thicker body feels. I do feel safe throwing it in a bag and know that the chassis will hold up very well. As for the elephant in the room, the SSD slowdown. Definitely something that was noticeable, especially when I was figuring out Flutter. When running emulators on a 8GB model, the RAM and SSD interact with each other to allocate memory when it needs to. But because we are now running on one single NAND chip, you can definitely see the struggle at times when reading and writing when developing on Flutter. It tends to lag, especially if you have a bunch of things open like I did, so not only do you need to keep in mind the shortage of NAND chips, but also the amount of RAM you get. Now, I'm about to dive deep into some development, and if some of the concepts you will find in this video are new to you, I recommend you start learning some code through a bootcamp like Coding Dojo. Coding Dojo is a global technology education company that offers coding bootcamps to help you do so. This not only includes a web development bootcamp, but they also have a curriculum for data science, cyber security, and UI UX design. The curriculum is very well designed to make this your first and last bootcamp you'll ever attend, so you can start tackling projects and truthfully learn even more by doing. If it's of interest to you, you can download any of their course packets and check out exactly what you will be learning. A while back, I personally attended a class and they truly deliver hands-on and structured teaching which will help you develop your coding or design skills a lot quicker. I honestly think that their online learning platform was far more effective compared to my online computer science classes at university. Oh, and don't worry though, if you can't attend full-time, you also have the ability to do it part-time if it's a career change you're thinking of. Plus, after graduation, Coding Dojo ensures that they're always there for you by being able to reach out to your career services managers to reorient you and find the most suitable career in the industry. Look, I've learned a lot by doing, but I've also realized you need the proper guidance to grow into self-sufficiency so you can learn how to be a developer. I think you guys should check out Coding Dojo in the link in the description down below. Look, I spent hours upon hours installing Flutter a month ago and hours upon hours figuring out how to use it with Apple Silicon, and so, the only issues I've faced with Flutter were mainly RAM related, causing slowdowns, especially when compiling for the first time and other small things related to connecting my app to Firebase. Their documentation seems super outdated because every time I follow it and do something on the terminal or write code to fix issues, I always get weird errors nobody seems to have figured out. It's almost like it could be Android and SDK related when deploying to their emulators. I will say, VS Code works really well when only doing UI work. It's the application I used when developing the little YouTube homepage you guys saw and I had absolutely no issues with it. Just know it takes ages to compile a Flutter project for the first time, so be patient. But, the IDE is super quick when it comes to IntelliSense, even when using some of the prefill helper methods of Flutter. However, no matter what IDE you use, your computer will feel like it's on fire. I reached maximum temperatures of 105 degrees when I was first compiling and I think I was averaging about 85-90 degrees throughout my development process. I'm not quite sure how much these thermal pads are helping us out. Look, overall, for Flutter, things are very finicky. Nothing ever goes smooth and you need to be ready to troubleshoot outside your project scope, which just delays your development time since you are trying to figure out other things unrelated to your coding. Developing with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD is doable and this never stopped me from compiling, but I heavily recommend that if you want to do any sort of mobile development, don't buy anything less than 16GB of RAM. A couple of emulators with a bunch of tabs like I had and your IDE will just throw you RAM errors everywhere, which is something I never ever experienced when I was writing Javascript. Look, I'm sort of fed up of showing you guys the usual benchmarks like Speedometer, the Javascript Mandel algorithm or even Docker Speeds. The new M2 does it well and a bit better than the old M1. What I truly wanted to test though was going from easy, simple code to a heavy Javascript project with complex and tons of calculations, something that would push my temperatures gradually for a long period of time and so I found a really cool tutorial on how to self-drive a car with Javascript. Basically, I played with graphics, neural networks and machine learning to test this laptop out. It took me like a good 3 hours to build this out, but it was super fun. I never really encountered lag and noticed that I had my code editor opened, multiple tabs within Brave and even some of the other apps running in the background. I kept averaging 75-85 degrees towards the end of the project. However, as time went by and the project got a lot more complex, you could definitely tell that the temperatures were rising and the chassis was getting hotter. I also took a look at how Brave performed compared to Chrome while running this project and honestly, I'm impressed that things seem to be pretty stable in both browsers. I did notice Brave eating less RAM compared to Chrome, but that was totally expected. What I did not expect was the fact that Chrome eats 6 times more CPU resources than Brave does, so keep that in mind. Honestly, for any type of Javascript coding, this will definitely deliver, especially if you work with React, UJS, Angular or you just deploy server and build APIs. I really wouldn't worry about that, I even think you're better off with the M1 Air if you don't care about the new features. And the same thing can be said about Python. Python was extremely enjoyable to use, especially when I know my virtual environments run super well and I can control and install Django the way I want to. So yeah, I actually spent the weekend learning Django and it's so much more intuitive compared to Node and Express. I actually really liked it, everything was super smooth from using manage.py to RAM consumption, the numbers made total sense. I will say, I alternated between PyCharm and VS Code when following my crash course and I noticed that PyCharm does eat a lot more battery compared to VS Code. It's not that big of a deal, but it's worth pointing out. In my opinion, VS Code is way better for Django, mainly because hot reload on PyCharm really takes quite some time. It took forever to reflect some of the changes when I was writing code. The second biggest elephant in the room, battery life. I don't even know if that's a saying, but you get it. Battery life within my 3 workflows was great, great compared to other laptops of course. In 3 hours of writing code with Django and having a bunch of tabs opened, I saw a drop of around 30% which is really really good, but Django was the least heavy project I made. In contrast to Monday morning where I wrote a whole UI flutter interface and in 3 hours we dropped from 100% to about 35%. It really all depends on what you're doing with this laptop, so you won't get the same results across the board. So keep in mind that mobile development is definitely heavier and makes me almost want to recommend the 14-inch MacBook Pro for this type of work instead. It really took me a long time to put this whole video together. I built 3 projects, went through hell and back with Flutter, learned Python and even wrote machine learning code with JavaScript, all to properly showcase what this new Air is capable of doing. I'm actually really happy with my tests and the amount of time I've put into them. I really think it's going to be one of those reviews that helps you guys choose whether or not this laptop is the one. I hope you guys enjoyed and I hope you guys are here to stay. I'll try to make more of these as time goes. I know we really need a review of the MacBook Pro 14-inch versus the M2 MacBook Air. I'll see what I can do. I'm signing out guys, take care.