New MacBook Air with M2 offers almost 20% multi-core performance gain over Apple M1-based predecessor on Geekbench

The new MacBook Air has been spotted on Geekbench revealing how well it performs with its Apple M2 silicon. While the CPU performance results are not exactly mind-blowing, they are a decent step-up from those of the late 2020 Apple MacBook Air with M1 chip. It’s worth reminding prospective buyers that Apple seemingly focused more on enhancing the GPU part of the M2 chip, with the latest M-series SoC promising higher theoretical performance (in TFLOPS) and a faster clock rate than the M1 chip found in the late 2020 MacBook Air.

It appears the appropriately named “Mr. Macintosh” was one of the first to find a Geekbench 5 record for the 2022 M2 MacBook Air, and at the time of writing there were well over a dozen entries to sift through that used the same model identifier of “Mac 14,2” along with the “Apple M2” CPU name. There also seem to be some records that possibly reflect energy-efficient performance, so for the sake of this comparison, they have not been included in the current average scores. The Apple MacBook Air with M2 has so far churned out an average of 1,904 points in the single-core test and 8,838 points in the multi-core benchmark.

In terms of percentage difference, this places the 2022 MacBook Air at +11.61% (single) and +19.11% (multi) ahead of Geekbench’s average scores for the MacBook Air (Late 2020) with M1 chip. In addition, the new Apple MacBook Air is on a similar level to our test scores for the M2 MacBook Pro (1,937 – single; 8,962 – multi), which is to be expected as they use the same Apple silicon. However, the new MacBook Pro should offer a better cooling system than the M2 MacBook Air, so these results by the latter show a lot of promise if the performance can be maintained. The new MacBook Air can be ordered now and has a starting price of US$1,199 with shipping taking 3-4 weeks.

Pre-order the 2022 Apple MacBook Air with M2 on Amazon