i’m a senior in college and for the past 3 years i’ve used a 2020 13” inch macbook pro. it was amazing and did everything i needed for university and then some. last year i spilled some water on it and it stopped working completely it made more financial sense to get a new computer than to pay the price they wanted to fix it. so it’s bricked essentially. i got a m2 macbook air as a replacement after hearing such good things about it. it is genuinely the worst machine i’ve ever used and it makes it near imposssible to do do work. nothing loads from webpages to programs and i can’t deal with it anymore. my course load requires using adobe suite and i can’t do that on here reliably. i’m at a crossroad because i spent $1700 on the computer and apple care for 3 years. i’m planning on selling the m2 air and fixing the pro but i’m really stuck and would love some advice. or does it make sense to invest in an m3 a pro as a method of future proofing. any advice would be greatly appreciated

  • Bed_Worship@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Sounds like there is something defective about your mac. Have you done a clean restore and tested it?

  • supenguin@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Something is seriously wrong with your MacBook Air M2. I’ve got one and can easily run Unity (a game development tool), Brave Browser with a bunch of tabs, Spotify, Discord, Visual Studio and a few other odds and ends. And this is only the 8GB model.

    I’d check Activity Monitor as others suggested and also check the Console app to see if it’s logging any errors from any software. Hopefully it’s as simple as finding what’s borking your system and addressing that issue. Maybe backup your data and doing a reinstall.

    If it’s still under warranty also take it to the Apple Store and have them check it out.

  • MasterBendu@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Question, how much disk space do you have left after installing everything? It may be the case that you left very little disk space for the OS and virtual memory to do its thing, and it’s just having a hard time having to compress and swap between disk and ram and CPU.

  • GermanK20@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I’ve only got 2 observations here a) my 13incher came back from the water-dead after 4 months in storage, with only the backlight dead and some screen discoloration b) my M2 is everything I wanted it to be, but I did invest in 24GB RAM

  • the-last_pharaoh@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    For everyone saying the computer has a fault, this just happened to me as well I couldn’t have safari, slack, and miro open doing a call on slack with screen share it froze up and got warm. Looks like a consistent flaw I’ve heard some say it just can’t handle multitasking even with 24gb ram. Also hearing what you’re saying that it’s a flawed device to go and get it checked. At this point honestly don’t know what the answer is. Anyone have an MBA that IS able to run heavier software and isn’t dealing with freezing?

  • daking999@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Personally I agree the newer Macbooks are a huge step down in quality. Fast/light isn’t worth much when it won’t connect to wifi 40% of the time without restarting. Yes I’ve updated everything.

  • writeyouruserhere@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Who installed your Adobe suite in your computer? To me it sounds that it’s an old version that it’s running in the compatibility layer rather than the apple silicon version .

  • BlackKnight08Jun@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I have M1 Macbook Air and I had it for two years now. It works really well and lasts me through the day with light work along with heavy use from day to day. Something doesn’t seem to be right with the M2 MBA. Better check it out before regretting it further.

  • ClickNormal5221@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    As someone who drives a M2 air for uni, I haven’t had any problems you’ve gotten, you should check it out

  • frogsenjoyer@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I used to run adobe photoshop and after effects along with study notes app and forgot to close Minecraft on the background and it runes flawlessly , and thats M1 Air 8gb ram

  • c_ostmo@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I recently upgraded from the M1 Pro max to the M3 pro Max, and I had some really weird issues as well—on particular with the Adobe Suite. I still don’t know what caused it, but I deleted all my apps and reinstalled them, and it fixed everything.