Four months after Apple launched its M3 processors alongside refreshed MacBook Pros, the chips have finally arrived in iGiant's fanless ultra-lite laptops.
M3 MacBook Air Teardown – Apple FIXED MacBook Air!
Apple updated its 13- and 15-inch MacBook Airs on Monday, adding support for base M3 silicon, but if you want the more powerful M3 Pro or Max chips, you'll have to step up to something with active cooling – as well as faster Wi -Fi 6E and support for more screens.
The laptop itself hasn't changed much since its M2 design refresh in 2022. We took a look at that machine not too long ago and were particularly impressed with its battery life. The M3 Air still claims the same 18-hour battery life, dual Thunderbolt 3/USB 4 ports, and can be had in four shades of anodized aluminum. Apple says the midnight color now has a "groundbreaking anodization seal" that should help ward off fingerprints — a common complaint with the previous model.
So, apart from being less dirty, most of the improvements are under the hood. Digging into the specs, we see that the base $1,099 13-inch model is equipped with eight CPU and GPU cores, 256GB of flash storage, and an anemic 8GB of unified memory. But if you buy Apple's claims, it's equivalent to 16GB on a Windows computer because efficiency.
