The MacBook Air has been far and away my favourite laptop of the last few years. It was revolutionary when it was introduced all those years ago, but felt like it was held back by Intel’s chipsets, not realising its full potential until Apple Silicon was introduced, and has never looked back since the change was made.
After the first 15-inch model was introduced last year, the M3 chip comes to both the 13-inch and 15-inch models at the same time, which is a nice change-up that gives consumers choice in picking a size whist still being able to take advantage of the latest chipset.
From a design point of view, there’s not a lot of newness looking at the laptops, although the midnight colour that was extremely popular but had its fair share of issues with fingerprints get the same anodised process that the M3 Pro/Max MacBook Pro Space Black version got earlier this year which should show less fingerprints over time.
After a brief amount of time with the devices, I definitely came away with the sense that fingerprints would be less prominent, but obviously, it won’t be 100% fingerprint proof, but it’s great to see Apple trying to improve this as I still prefer midnight.
There’s some other improvements with the M3 MacBook Airs as well. It now has Wi-Fi 6E support which is a welcome improvement as Wi-Fi over 6E offers serious improvements over 5ghz, so to now have this locked to the Pro line is a big win for the range.
If there was one limitation when it comes to the standard M1/2 line of chips was that you were limited to using one external display in addition to the screen in your laptop, and this has changed with the M3 Airs. They can now utilise two external displays with the lid shut, so in essence it’s still two displays, but you’ve now got the option to place the laptop at a workstation with two monitors which will be how a lot of people work (me included). Apple says that this is rolling out to the M3 MacBook Pro as well, so if you’re using that device, that’ll be a nice update.
The M3 chip should hopefully offer up a decent performance boost with Apple saying that it’s a 60% increase from the M1 chip and no doubt would be a huge increase on any Intel powered MacBook Air devices. In reality, the M2 was already a beast in terms of performance considering the size of the device, but any performance increase should make this portable powerhouse even more of a no-brainer for most people.
The two other big factors, price and battery life also haven’t moved both the 13-inch and 15-inch models starting at the same prices and the units offering up to 18 hours of battery life, which still blows my mind every time I take the M2 version out of the house.
All-in-all, I’m excited to spend some time with the M3 MacBook Air. I can’t see a world where this won’t cement the MacBook Air as the best laptop on the market for 98% of people. The M3 MacBook Air launches on March 8th. You can grab pre-order it HERE.
