They were so careful not to compare it to the M1 Pro!
I'm not on the super-power-user end, but imo the price/performance for the air, as well as the form factor seems to be a sweet spot.
It's not a great choice for gamers, but for people that only play games casually/occasionally it's a surprisingly good choice.
Only time I got any similar issues were when I was hitting the ram pretty hard, but MUCH better than my i9 32 Gb with the same problem on memory (FUCK YOU DOCKER!)
On the M1 air, I sometimes notice that the battery is draining a little bit quickly, and will check and see that I have like 10 Safari windows open and minimized, with over a hundred tabs in total, but I hadn't noticed any slowdown or performance issues.
I suggest you try wired before blaming the CPU.
The best tool is the one you have, not the one that doesn't exist. In September you could then wait for the M2 MAX coming in June. The in June wait for the M3 in September.
I can't imagine telling a client, "I'll get that video to you around Christmas. I'm waiting for another version of a computer that just came out to come out."
When it's raining, you want an umbrella, not to wait in the rain until someone builds a cafe to hide in.
If the M2 has 18% higher PPW, and keeps the same TDP / power draw, that's 18% higher performances (remains to be seen whether it's across the board for E-cores, or for P-cores) it's about 25% below the 6+2 M1 Pro, and about 70% below the 8+2 M1P. At least looking purely at the CPU.
The M1 Pro is a 6+2 configuration, so it will have a little bit of an edge in core configuration, but Apple claims 18% faster on this generation, which might cancel out that edge a little bit (I'm guessing slightly slower still, but close). The M1 Pro does have a 40% larger GPU, but the M2 is 35% faster (again, taking Apple at face value) so it should again be similar-ish in gpu performance, very slightly slower (135/140 = 96% as fast).
The big difference is still that M1 Pro gets support for much larger memory, and the 14" has a much better port configuration, the 13" is basically still the same old chassis with USB-C and the touch bar, just updated with a newer processor.
Taking Apple's 20% claim at face value:
Geekbench Single Core - M1, M1 Pro: 1700, M2: 2040
Geekbench Multi Core - M1: 7700, M1 Pro 8-core: 9000, M2: 9200, M1 Pro 10-core: 12400
Of course we'll see M2 Pro/Max sooner or later, which will presumably match M2 on single core just like the previous gen.
Which you shouldn't. They are, once again, using performance per watt. Nothing guarantees that it even runs at the same wattage.