Ars Technica: ‘Apple’s efficient M3 MacBook Airs are just about as good as laptops get’

The new 13- and 15-inch MacBook Air soars with the powerful M3 chip, featuring a super-portable design, power-efficient performance, and all-day battery life.
Apple on Monday announced the new MacBook Air with the powerful M3 chip, taking its incredible combination of power-efficient performance and portability to a new level. With M3, MacBook Air is up to 60 percent faster than the model with the M1 chip and up to 13x faster than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Air.1 And with a faster and more efficient Neural Engine in M3, MacBook Air continues to be the world’s best consumer laptop for AI. The 13- and 15-inch MacBook Air both feature a strikingly thin and light design, up to 18 hours of battery life,1 a stunning Liquid Retina display, and new capabilities, including support for up to two external displays and up to 2x faster Wi-Fi than the previous generation. With its durable aluminum unibody enclosure that’s built to last, the new MacBook Air is available in four gorgeous colors: midnight, which features a breakthrough anodization seal to reduce fingerprints; starlight; space gray; and silver. Combined with its world-class camera, mics, and speakers; MagSafe charging; its silent, fanless design; and macOS, MacBook Air delivers an unrivaled experience — making the 13-inch model the world’s bestselling laptop and the 15-inch model the world’s bestselling 15-inch laptop. Customers started ordering on Monday, with availability beginning Friday, March 8th.
Andrew Cunningham for Ars Technica:
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The combination of size and weight really is close to ideal, and though the 15-inch Air is unmistakably larger and heavier than the 13-inch model, the difference isn’t so large in daily use that I spend a lot of time thinking about it. The improved speaker setup is also nice to have when you’re playing music or using that bigger screen to watch something.
The biggest downside of the design remains the display notch. As we and others have noted multiple times, it’s not that you don’t get used to it, and in typical desktop use (especially in dark mode, especially with a dark wallpaper), you can often forget it’s there. But in the absence of FaceID or some major other functional addition, it feels like a lot of space to take up for not a lot of user-visible benefit…

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MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s Stupid Notch is the only real blot on the MacBook Air (and MacBook Pro).
“We couldn’t figure out how to do it elegantly (read: right), so we’ll spread it everywhere to make it look intentional” is hardly a winning design philosophy.
Or any design philosophy. It’s just bad marketing. “Unapologetically plastic,” as it were. — MacDailyNews, October 19, 2021

Compared to the M1, a fully enabled M3 with eight CPU cores and 10 GPU cores running some typical benchmarks has roughly 25 to 30 percent faster single-core CPU performance, 35 to 40 percent faster multi-core performance, and between 45 and 65 percent better graphics performance, depending on the test. Improvements compared to the M2 are still notable but more modest, with roughly 20 percent better single- and multi-core CPU performance and GPU performance that was also around 20 percent faster in the 3DMark test but between 5 to 8 percent faster in most others…
[A] passively cooled M3 runs faster than an M1 or M2, and it stands up well against modern actively cooled laptops with Intel and AMD CPUs inside. But if you regularly stress the CPU and GPU, you are still probably leaving a bit of the M3’s performance on the table relative to the same chip in the $1,599 MacBook Pro…
For anyone with an aging Intel MacBook Air or 12-inch MacBook, the M3 model is the best one yet, and the improvements to battery life and performance will be immediately noticeable. If your M1 Air is heavily used and starting to show a bit of age, it’s easier to justify stepping up to the M3 than it was to the M2.

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MacDailyNews Take: A good, strong review for Apple’s second best-selling Mac!
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