Apple’s new M3 MacBook Air models are better than ever – The Verge

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 last month 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.
The 13- and 15-inch MacBook Air both feature a strikingly thin and light design, up to 18 hours of battery life, 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.
Joanna Nelius for The Verge:
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The new MacBook Air M3 is a straightforward improvement over its predecessor, with the same sleek, Pro-like design with tucked-away speakers and four-color options. The trackpad is still smooth as a Zamboni’d ice rink. Combined with a few new quality-of-life features, the experience has only gotten more refined.
But the MacBook lineup is more crowded than ever, with the 13-inch Air, 15-inch Air, and base model 14-inch Pro jostling for space.
There are people like my mother for whom a base 13- or 15-inch MacBook Air M3 would be fine for now. She mostly writes emails and watches movies with her current MacBook, but since the memory can’t be upgraded later, it’s worth spending an extra $200 to extend its usable lifespan by several years. Most high school students and humanities majors can get by with the same, too, but again: anything less than 16GB of memory and 512GB of storage is not ideal, especially in the long term.
The MacBook Air is still one of the best laptops you can buy for general-purpose use, and since you can’t completely avoid Apple’s upgrade funnel, spending an extra $100 to get the M3 instead of the M2 is small potatoes compared to how far the upgrade funnel could take you. If you have an M1 Air or earlier and are fine giving up the wedge shape, you’re going to have a great time with the M3 Air, as long as you upgrade the memory. And maybe the storage. Or maybe spend even more to get the Pro instead.

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MacDailyNews Take: Apple is nothing if not a upgrade temptress with perfect pricing designed to lure buyers ever upwards, so figure out what you need in terms of display size, memory, storage, and ports before clicking that “Buy” button!
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