Apple MacBook Air 15-Inch M3 Preview

Last week, Apple updated its 13- and 15-inch MacBook Air notebooks with the M3 chip, and had I not been in Mexico, I might have simply ordered one immediately. But I waited until I got home, giving me time to do a bit of research. And this morning, finally, I ordered one.

It’s been a while. I’ve owned many, many Macs over the years, mostly MacBook Airs, but also various iMac, Mac mini, PowerBook, and iBook models. I first used the original Mac in the 1980s at work, fascinated by its bitmapped grayscale graphics. But I didn’t get my own Mac until 2001, when I purchased the second-generation white iBook to test Mac OS X, which was at that time not even the default boot option.

My most recent Mac is a 2020 M1-based MacBook Pro, but that’s the older design, and it’s internally hampered a bit by a lackluster 8 GB of RAM. It’s worked well for testing purposes, mostly but not exclusively related to Parallels Desktop, and it is a point of both admiration and frustration that this Mac, which is the base configuration, has to date outperformed every Windows on Arm PC that’s passed through here.

But change is in the air (sorry). After years of development, Qualcomm announced its Snapdragon X Elite chips last October and PC makers will begin shipping the first devices sometime in the next quarter. The hype, for once, seems real: Qualcomm promises next-level performance and leading-edge AI acceleration, and we expect days of battery life and surprisingly-strong performance that, based on benchmarks, at least (I know, I know) rivals not only the latest AI-accelerated CPUs from Intel and AMD in the PC space but also the Apple Silicon M2 Pro. The race, at last, is on.

That said, the race is already over in some circles: With its historic shift to the Arm-based Apple Silicon chips, Apple has completed a seamless platform transition for the ages. And with three generations of M-series chipsets—plus a growing stable of offerings that now includes Pro and Max variants—behind it, one might argue that the battle for the PC architecture of the future is Apple’s to lose. And that even if it does lose, whatever that means given the heterogeneous nature of personal computing these days, it’s already left its mark. Today, AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm are all struggling to catch up in various ways, either architecturally or in performance, longevity, and compatibility. For those who care about the PC—and I included the Mac in that category—2024 will be a fascinating year. No matter which horse you back in this race.

The MacBook Air has always been special. Well, not always: Most think of the iconic second-generation 13-inch MacBook Air when they think of this product line, not the lackluster and overly expensive first-generation version that Steve Jobs pulled out of an interoffice envelope at its launch in 2008 (a moment so iconic that Apple memorialized it in a TV spot). That product lasted an incredible decade in the market, starting in 2010, without a single notable design change: Instead, Apple added a smaller 11-inch model and updated the internals and display over time.

When Apple announced the shift to its Apple Silicon hardware platform with the M1 chip in 2020, it started with the 13-inch MacBook Air and MacBook Pro and the Mac mini, but each arrived with the same physical design as its respective predecessor. So it wasn’t until mid-2022 that we saw a major design refresh of this product line that arrived with the second-generation M2 chipset. This design, which continues with today’s M3-based MacBook Airs, is perhaps not as iconic as before, and it looks strikingly similar to contemporary MacBook Pros. But modern MacBook Airs carry forward many of the characteristics that have long made the MacBook Air so compelling, including its light weight and fanless, noise-free operation. And there are, of course, new advantages too.

The new design is thinner than before, and lighter. It still ships with just two Thunderbolt/USB-C ports, both on the same side, but the 2023 MacBook Air also marked the return of MagSafe, the magnet charging port that inspired Microsoft’s Surface Connect, freeing up both USB-C ports for other uses. And in 2023, Apple expanded the MacBook Air with a second, bigger model with a 15-inch display and six-speaker (as opposed to four) sound. That was when I really started paying attention: 13.3-inch laptops are increasingly uninteresting to me, and in the portable PC space I very much prefer the larger 16:10 16-inch displays that are now common.

The new generation MacBook Airs offer the same design as before, in the same colors and basic configurations. And the timing of this upgrade is roughly the same, with the M1- and M2-based MacBook Airs both being in-market roughly 18 months (though the 15-inch MacBook Air M2, which was new at the time, arrived just 8 or 9 months ago). The only major functional additions this time around are both display-based. The M3 supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing and customers can now connect two external displays, albeit only with the Air’s display lid is closed. This is not particularly interesting to me; indeed, it seems like a curious limitation.

As with previous Apple Silicon-based Macs, the MacBook Air M3 uses integrated RAM, and the RAM and storage is not upgradeable, so you will always be stuck with whatever configuration you order. In this age of right to repair, that seems anachronistic, if not antagonistic. But there’s nothing to be done there, so you have to balance your expected needs in the future with your budget. It can be challenging.

A base 15-inch MacBook Air M3 provides an 8-core CPU with 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores, a 10-core GPU, a 16-core Neural Engine (NPU), 8 GB of unified RAM, and 256 GB of SSD storage, and costs $1299. Even Apple’s biggest fans would agree that 8 GB of RAM is untenable in 2024, so I will argue that the real baseline here is $1499, as the upgrade to 16 GB of RAM adds $200 to the price. This is firmly in the premium PC space from a pricing perspective.

There are no processor upgrades to be had: If you buy a new MacBook Air, you’re getting an M3 with the same integrated CPU, GPU, and NPU. But after a bit of back and forth, I decided to upgrade the RAM and storage, to 24 GB and 512 GB, respectively, for a total cost of $1899 (gulp). I also swapped out Apple’s goofy 35-watt dual USB-C charger for a more traditional 70-watt USB-C charger (with no change in the price). And I chose the Starlight color, which is a sort of champagne.

There are likewise no display upgrades to be had: The MacBook Air provides a 15.3-inch IPS display panel with an ideal 16:10 aspect ratio and a resolution of 2880 x 1864 (224 pixels per inch). It throws off 500 nits of brightness, fully supports the P3 color space, and uses Apple’s True Tone technology to adapt color correctness on the fly.

Expansion is limited to those two Thunderbolt/USB4 USB-C ports, plus MagSafe 3, but there’s a headphone/microphone combo jack at least. The webcam is 1080p, which is good, but there’s no Face ID sign-in and a large notch intrudes into the display. There is a Touch ID sensor on the keyboard, as with my current MacBook Pro. And Apple provides Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 for connectivity.

The hybrid work and audio-video capabilities seem solid with that 6-speaker audio configuration—it supports Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos—and a three-microphone array.

Battery life is rated at 15 hours for productivity work, and the 70-watt power supply I chose supports fast charging. In the PC world, these battery life estimates range from humorous to ludicrous, and I generally expect to get about half the promised life, but Apple’s estimates are allegedly on the accurate side. I am curious.

The sticking point here, for me, is macOS.

When I bought that iBook back in early, Apple was fighting to come back under Steve Job’s leadership, and its only major product line at the time was the Mac. Back then, the biggest draw was Mac OS X, and it offered compelling advantages over Windows XP, including the hardware-accelerated graphics display that Microsoft wouldn’t duplicate until Vista in 2006. In the intervening years, Apple aggressively updated OS X each year, exceeding Windows in many ways, embarrassing Microsoft many times along the way. That was an incredible time.

Since then, Apple has obviously shifted its focus to mobile devices, starting with the iPod but even more successfully with the iPhone and iPad. And while macOS, as this platform is now called, is now mature and full-featured, it’s also less interesting to me and, perhaps more importantly, less usable to me than is Windows. Part of the issue just boils down to experience, as I use Windows all day every day across a wide variety of PCs. But the macOS is also limited in some key ways that impact my productivity. For example, where Windows is fully usable with just a keyboard, macOS is not, and many controls across various windows and other interfaces are unreachable without a mouse or trackpad. I will try to adapt.

I will also need to wait: My MacBook Air won’t arrive until the end of March or maybe even early April. We’ll see: Apple tends to under-promise and over-deliver when it comes to this kind of thing. That alone is a nice change of pace from what I usually get from Windows, in particular, these days.

More soon.