You shouldn’t be having noticable issues with a machine with these specs if everything is running correctly. It should be damn smooth and fast in fact. You might have a hung app or process running and chewing up resources. Have you opened activity monitor to check for anything eating up a lot of CPU or RAM? Have you tried the PRAM reset process? Do them both. Also shut down machine. Press and HOLD The power button until it says it’s booting into diagnostics mode , (can’t remember the exact verbiage) then when in that mode open disk utility from the menu bar… Run disk first aid in the actual SSD AND the volume. (Make sure in disk first aid that the pull down says show all volumes,). Hope this makes sense… If it doesn’t show it had issues and the PRAM reset process doesn’t help then take it to Apple because this machine should definitely not be feeling noticeably slow, even in light to medium Photoshop type stuff it should do pretty well. It sounds like something is stuck in memory or there’s a factory issue that needs resolved because wow this is not a workhorse machine, with that M2 processor you should still be able to do some pretty productive high to medium high type workload without it feeling super sluggish like you said it is. That definitely does not sound right at all. And you have AppleCare so it shouldn’t cost much if anything for Apple to diagnose it and fix it. At worst case maybe a small copay of 50 bucks or whatever but you should be able to run Photoshop and illustrator and whatnot on that M2 air just fine. Even some high-end work should be doable without feeling too much of a slowing down. Have you installed malwarebytes for Mac and ran it? Max can and do get malware quite often now so you could have some malware even so it wouldn’t hurt to try that either