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The tech giant said these new laptops are up to 60pc faster than those with M1 chips and feature long battery life and support for two external displays.
Apple has revealed an upgraded version of its MacBook Air laptops, which come with the more powerful M3 series chips and various new features.
The 3-nanometre M3 chip series was revealed last year as the highlight of the ‘Scary Fast’ event. It was pitched as Apple’s most advanced chips for a personal computer, offering faster speeds and a more seamless display to users.
The company said its new MacBook Air versions are up to 60pc faster than the M1 chip models and up to 13 times faster than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Air. The new laptops come in 13-inch and 15-inch variants.
These new laptops are designed to be sleek and thin, while boasting up to 18 hours of battery life. Some of the new capabilities include the ability to support two external displays, along with double the Wi-Fi speed compared to the previous generation.
Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior VP of worldwide marketing, said the MacBook Air is the company’s “most popular and loved Mac” and that it has new capabilities with the M3 chip upgrade.
“From college students pursuing their degrees to business users who need powerful productivity, or anyone who simply wants the unmatched combination of performance, portability and industry-leading battery life … the new MacBook Air continues to be the world’s best thin and light laptop,” Joswiak said.
Apple said the new laptop comes with an eight-core CPU, up to a 10-core GPU and can support up to 24GB of unified memory. The M3 also boosts its gaming capabilities, with features such as hardware-accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing for more realistic gaming scenes.
The speed improvements also benefit various tasks such as image enhancing, video editing or working on Excel spreadsheets.
Of course, no product can be launched these days without a mention of artificial intelligence, so Apple claims the MacBook Air is the “world’s best consumer laptop for AI” thanks to the M3 chip’s capabilities.
Besides using AI-powered apps, Apple said the MacBook Air can also run optimised AI models, including large language models and diffusion models for image generation.
The tech giant also said the MacBook Air is the company’s first product to be made with 50pc recycled content. But Apple’s sustainability claims have come under fire in the past, as its “carbon neutral” smartwatch claim last year was labelled as misleading by some groups.
Customers can order the new MacBook Air models with the M3 chip, which start at $1,099 for the 13-inch model and $1,299 for the 15-inch model, along with small discounts for education purchases.
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