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The new M2 MacBook Air will be available this week

By Nathan Drescher Updated July 6, 2022

If you’ve been waiting to snag yourself a new Apple MacBook Air with the M2 chip inside, this week is your chance. The new M2 MacBook Air will be available for order beginning Friday, July 8th, according to an Apple press release.

Apple said the M2 MacBook Air will be available beginning at 5 a.m. PT. Customers will start to receive their orders the following week, on July 15th.

A person holding the M2 MacBook Air in their hand.

There had been a lot of speculation about when Apple would make the new M2 machines available. The M2 MacBook Air was first revealed at WWDC 2022 in June, alongside a new 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro. But Apple only left us with a cryptic “available later this year” at that time. We did get an inadvertent clue as to the dates from YouTuber Marques Brownlee, who runs the MKBHD channel and the WaveForm podcast. Still, we waited for an official announcement from Apple, which arrived today.

The M2 MacBook Air has a slimmer design than the previous M1 MacBook Air yet is has a larger 13.6-inch liquid retina display. It also packs a 1080p camera and a MagSafe charging port along with two USB-C ports. The new MacBook Air also features the same controversial notch as last year’s MacBook Pros.

The M2 chip isn’t too different from 2020’s groundbreaking M1 chip. It still features the same eight-core CPU, although it is about 15% more power efficient. The chip is still a 5nm rather than a 3nm due to ongoing lockdowns and supply issues in China. The M2 also features a new 10-core integrated GPU, rather than the M1’s seven cores.

We’ll need to wait to get our hands on one of these new machines to test the M2 chip.

The M2 MacBook Air comes in four colors: midnight, starlight, silver, and space gray. It starts at $1,199 for the base model and goes up from there, depending on configuration. It will be available in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Japan, Taiwan, China, and Thailand.

There’s still no word about when then new 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro will be available.

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Nathan Drescher

Computing Writer

Nathan Drescher is a freelance journalist and writer from Ottawa, Canada. He's been writing about technology from around the…

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