Apple announced the new MacBook Air with M3 chip. Available in two versions, 13 and 15 inches, it can be ordered starting today and will be available from Friday 8 March. “MacBook Air is our most popular and beloved Mac, and more customers are choosing it over any other laptop. And today it gets even better with the M3 chip and new capabilities,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing. “Perfect for college students, those who need to increase productivity at work, and anyone who wants an unrivaled mix of industry-leading performance, portability, and battery life, all in a fanless design, the new MacBook Air continues to to be the world‘s best thin and light laptop.”
Superfast
Built with industry-leading 3-nanometer technology, the M3 chip brings superior performance and new capabilities to the MacBook Air. Featuring an 8-core CPU, up to a 10-core GPU and support for up to 24GB of unified memory, the new MacBook Air is up to 60% faster than the M1 model, and up to 13 times faster than the M1 model. Faster MacBook Air with Intel processor. It is equipped with a battery that can reach 18 hours of battery life, which is up to 6 hours more than the MacBook Air with Intel. And thanks to the next-generation GPU of the M3 chip, MacBook Air supports hardware-accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing, capable of delivering more precise lighting effects, reflections and shadows, thus ensuring extremely realistic gaming experiences. It also includes the latest media engine with support for AV1 decoding, increasing efficiency and video quality when using streaming services. According to the company, games like No Man’s Sky are up to 60% faster than on the 13″ MacBook Air with M1 chip, while video editing in Final Cut Pro is up to 60% faster than on the 13″ model with M1 chip, and up to 13 times faster quick for those coming from a Mac without an Apple chip.
Designed for AI
The M3 chip includes a more efficient 16-core Neural Engine, and accelerators in the CPU and GPU perfect for on-device machine learning, making the MacBook Air – according to Apple – the best consumer laptop in the world for AI. It is the first time that the Cupertino company explicitly refers to artificial intelligence, calling it like all the other manufacturers. “By taking advantage of these AI performances, macOS is able to offer intelligent features that improve productivity and creativity; This way users can enable powerful camera features, real-time dictation, translation, predictive text, visual understanding, accessibility features, and much more,” the release notes read.
“Thanks to a broad ecosystem of apps with advanced AI features, users can for example check homework with AI Math Assistance in Goodnotes 6, automatically enhance photos in Pixelmator Pro, or remove background noise from a video using CapCut. Combined with the unified memory architecture of the Apple chip, MacBook Air can also run optimized AI models locally, including large language models (LLMs) and diffusion models for image generation.” And of course, MacBook Air also supports cloud-based solutions, so the user can use powerful work and creativity apps that harness the power of AI, such as Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365, Canva and Adobe Firefly; in this case the new Wi-Fi 6E can be useful, up to twice as fast as the previous model.
The new MacBook Air is Apple’s first product made with 50% recycled materials, including 100% recycled aluminum in the shell, 100% recycled rare earths in all magnets and 100% recycled copper in the logic board. MacBook Air meets Apple energy efficiency standards, and is free of mercury, brominated flame retardants and PVC. 99% of packaging is made up of fiber-based material, helping Apple move closer to its goal of eliminating plastic from all packaging by 2025.
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Prices and availability
MacBook Air 13″ with M3 chip is on sale starting from 1,349 euros (VAT included), and from 1,249 euros (VAT included) for the Education sector; MacBook Air 15″ with M3 chip is available starting from 1,649 euros (VAT included ) and from €1,519 (VAT included) for the Education sector. Both models are available in Midnight, Galaxy, Silver and Space Grey. The previous model with M2 chip remains available only in the 13-inch format, in the colors midnight, galaxy, silver and space gray, and now starts from 1,249 euros (VAT included), and from 1,129 euros (VAT included) for the Education sector.