Design and hardware
The 15-inch MacBook Air M3 weighs 1.49kg (3.3 pounds) and is 11.43mm (0.45 inches) thick. While this isn’t particularly light or thin compared to many laptops on the market, it is a welcome downsize from the 16-inch MacBook Pro.
And because the MacBook Air is powered by Apple’s critically acclaimed M3 silicon, it’s the most powerful laptop in this weight class.
My unit comes in the new Midnight – dark grey – colour scheme. Apple markets this colour as a “breakthrough” with anodisation coating to reduce fingerprints.
From my experience, this does not seem to work at all – my laptop lid was covered with smudges after an hour of use.
As is the case with all MacBook Air models, the ports are lacking. There are just a pair of USB-C ports, a headphone jack and a MagSafe charging port. The two USB-C ports are Thunderbolt 4 and so have high data transfer speeds and enable output to two external monitors. The six-speaker set-up, keyboard and trackpad are all excellent.
This laptop is all about the M3 chip, which is the first Apple silicon produced on 3-nanometre architecture and continues the M-series run of unrivalled energy efficiency.
Software and features
Like every tech company, Apple is marketing its new machine as an AI laptop, and while the 16-core neural engine of the M3 chip does allow the software to run some generative AI tasks on device, the reality is older M-series MacBooks can run those same large language models, just at a slower speed.
Performance and battery life
The M3 is the latest iteration of Apple’s self-developed silicon that turned the industry on its head with its energy efficiency.
The M3 continues that by jumping to 3-nanometre architecture (meaning the chip can house more transistors than 5-nanometre chips), and brings a 20 per cent CPU and GPU performance boost over the M2 chip. The M3 model is 65 per cent faster than the M1.
These numbers are mostly backed up by both benchmark scores and real life performance metrics. I exported a few 4K videos on Apple’s Final Cut Pro and found the M3 export times faster than those of older MacBook Air models by an amount that reflected those percentages.
The new MacBook Air is noticeably more efficient than most Windows laptops running on Intel processors.
In terms of raw power, the latest Intel processors can keep up with Apple silicon, if not surpass it. But they’re significantly more power hungry and see a major performance dip when the laptop is running on battery power.
Apple boosts iMessage encryption to thwart quantum computing attacks
Apple boosts iMessage encryption to thwart quantum computing attacks
The beauty of the M chip is that you can use the laptop unplugged and performance remains at near peak level.
If your work consists of just typing and reading words, there’s absolutely nothing you can throw at this MacBook to slow it down. And you’ll get up to 15 hours of battery life on a single charge, too.
A heavy user like me – who edits 4K videos and plays console-quality video games such as NBA 2K24 – can occasionally get the machine to stutter, but not enough for it to be bothersome. That a two-hour video editing session only drains about 55 per cent of the battery shows tremendous efficiency.
Conclusion
Apple’s MacBook Air line has already won over the masses. I travel often and enjoy going to coffee shops; from Hong Kong to Los Angeles, Barcelona to Bangkok, the bulk of laptops I see are MacBook Air.
I think this 15-inch model has a good chance of overtaking the 13-inch as the most popular model, because once you see the larger screen, you don’t want to go back.
The 15-inch M3 MacBook Air’s price starts at HK$13,499 in Hong Kong and US$1,299 in the United States.