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Apple’s M2 MacBook Air is ZDNet’s ‘Product of the Year’

Apple’s M2 MacBook Air has been named ZDNet’s “Product of the Year.”

Here’s why Editor-in-Chief Jason Hiner says the magazine gave the laptop the honors: “One of the other common criticisms of this product when it was first released was that it’s now a bit of a tweener in the Mac product line — with the very-capable M1 MacBook Air still on sale and now serving as the entry-level, under-$1,000 Mac laptop and the robust MacBook Pro line being the go-to option for professionals and creators who need more oomph. 

But, a longer look at the M2 MacBook Air allowed me to throw a lot of power-hungry tasks at it and wait for it to buckle. I transferred monstrously large files, built multimedia-intense PowerPoints, rendered and compressed video files, and loaded up my three favorite Adobe Creative Cloud apps — Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and Lightroom.

I was very surprised to find that the machine never blinked. 

My work laptop is a 16-inch MacBook Pro (2021) running the M1 Pro chip. That machine is an absolute beast that delivers jaw-dropping desktop-class performance. In testing the M2 MacBook Air, what shocked me was how close it came to matching my MacBook Pro for most tasks.

My conclusion: The M2 MacBook Air can now handle about 75% of what you used to need a MacBook Pro to do.

That can potentially save you $500-$1,000. The M2 MacBook Air I tested included the 10-core GPU and 16 GB of RAM and retails for $1,700. But, a comparable MacBook Pro is going to run you at least $2,000-$2,500.

The Apple Watch Ultra was given an Honorable Mention in ZDNet’s “Products of the Year,” as was the Google Pixel 7 and Insta360 Link.

Dennis Sellers
the authorDennis Sellers
Dennis Sellers is the editor/publisher of Apple World Today. He’s been an “Apple journalist” since 1995 (starting with the first big Apple news site, MacCentral). He loves to read, run, play sports, and watch movies.