The thin and light notebook is a creature of sacrifice. It’s a reminder that freedom of movement means leaving things behind. It’s packing a single knapsack for a week-long trip, leaving your home unencumbered, but entirely aware that some of the things you might want – or even occasionally need – won’t be coming with you.
As technology advances, such sacrifices grow less common. Battery for one thing. Power for another. Thin and light laptops grow more capable as the years go by, and our expectation of what such machines can and should do grows along with them.
The first M2 MacBook Air was just such a device. When the line finally got a new design to match its chipset, it felt like a new class of portable MacBooks. At the time, I declared the Air the right MacBook for nearly everyone. While multiple systems have come along since, I firmly believe that to still be true.
There are still sac...
