Introduction:
That's crazy that the most interesting things about this new laptop are the reasons not to buy it. So the MacBook Air just got refreshed. It's a pretty simple update, maybe a boring one, actually. There's really only two things new: it has this new anodization on the outside, apparently a slightly more fingerprint-resistant look to it, and it has the new M3 chip inside.
So the coating, I don't know, it barely makes a difference if I'm being honest. It still gets fingerprints if you handle it regularly without a skin or a case. I would much rather depend on something like a skin from a Channel sponsor brand. It lets you break out from one of the three really simple colors, and it's going to hide fingerprints a million times better than any metal treatment ever could.
Plus, these are real leather, so they have a nice plush texture and a little patina over time. So I'll leave a link to this one below. But the other new thing is this M3 chip inside. So we've seen this M3 chip before. This is what Apple does: they put the same chip everywhere.
This came out in October of last year, and they immediately put it in the new iMac, and then we also got a new MacBook Pro that launched with this and the M3 Pro and the M3 Max. So okay, new M3 Apple Silicon, third generation, great. So now we're finally getting this new base M3 chip in the new MacBook Air. Side note, why does it take so long? I don't know.
It feels like Apple kind of staggers it, probably on purpose. But, like, it's the same chip everywhere. They've done the iMac, they've done the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, but the Mac Mini just staying on M2? Kind of weird. Also, the new iPad Pro, still on M2. When's that going to get it? Anyway, you already know that the MacBook Air is the most popular Mac for a reason. This is the base like.
Basic:
The Mac that most people are seeing as the way to get into the Mac world, the base MacBook Air, has typically been one of the easiest to recommend laptops in the world by design. But this one, interestingly, for two reasons, isn't now.
This has nothing to do with the performance of the M3 or anything weird like that; it's the performance we're expecting. If you look at benchmarks, it's right around that 10 to 20% improvement over the M2, depending on what you're doing.
It definitely leans heavier on graphics improvements this generation, and there's ray tracing now, finally. So, any applications or rendering that are taking advantage of that will show a noticeable improvement for the M3, and it's clearly a more capable chip.
Also, MacBook Airs, especially the 15-inch, just constantly get great battery life across the board. You also get now dual external display support with the lid closed, but one external display with the laptop open. And it also appears that the base storage on the M3 is much improved.
This was one of those concerns from the M2. If you look back at the M2, you know, obviously Apple seeds reviewers with higher-end MacBooks, so most of us aren't getting that, but if you look back at the M2, the base 256-gig model used a single SSD module instead of two SSDs.
Long story short, that storage module was way slower than the M1—like 50% slower on paper. Would you have noticed if nobody told you? And it never benchmarked worse? Maybe, possibly not, but obviously, it's a bummer having way slower storage on a new M2, and that extra time transferring large files adds up over time.
So I'm happy to report that I've seen perfect benchmarks on the base storage of the M3 Air; it appears that they fixed it. Awesome. So what's the deal with this M3 Air, then? Why am I saying it's not necessarily the best recommendation? Well.
Features:
Historically, the MacBook Air has been super easy to recommend, but with this M3, they also lowered the price of the M2 by 100 bucks and discontinued the M1. So now the lineup is: the M3 MacBook Air starts at $1099, the M2 MacBook Air starts at $999, and the M1 is kind of gone from Apple, though you can still find stock left at places like Walmart or Best Buy.
Now, the thing about the MacBook Air being easy to recommend is that we're talking about regular people—those who do very light, normal usage like web browsing, listening to music, having a bunch of tabs open, work stuff occasionally, compiling or rendering some small things, photo editing, and chopping a video or two sometimes.
These types of people, the ones who would buy a laptop at Walmart, would be totally fine with the cheaper, identical-looking MacBook Air with the slightly slower M2 chip and slower storage. I think they would be totally fine. But the other thing, which I need to talk about, is this whole base spec thing. This is not exactly new to the industry, but the base price and the base spec have almost become like this weird fallacy.
I think it was Louis who did a Post about how “starting at” is like the biggest lie in tech, and he's right. It's not just tech; the car industry does it all the time too. Starting at this super low price, but nobody actually gets it at that price.
You're not going to get a totally bare base model car. The base price is really more to give you an idea of how much you're about to spend when you actually option it up the way you want to. The issue with these is Apple's markup prices for above-base specs are crazy high. Apple charges way too much for the most basic upgrades.
Obviously, Apple Silicon computers are all a system on a chip, so they cannot be upgraded ever after you buy them, right? So once you buy it, you're kind of incentivized, if you're going to keep it for a long time, to splurge a little bit and give yourself some extra headroom and future-proof it by bumping up that spec. But Apple charges so much for bumping up that spec that the base price feels like kind of even more of a lie than usual. So, the MacBook Air starts in 2024, again, at 8 gigs of shared RAM and 256 gigs of storage. Now, ignoring the fact.
Conclusion:
The phone I'm using also has more than 8 gigs of RAM and 256 gigs of storage. If you want to upgrade to 16 gigs of memory, the first available RAM upgrade is $200, and if you want to bump up to just half a terabyte of storage, that's another $200 more. Compared to how much that actually costs Apple, especially at the scale that they're operating, that is just crazy, brutal, ridiculous pricing. So even if you do just that, suddenly the MacBook Air M3 is $1,500.
So either you're cool with knowing you're actually buying a $1,500-plus MacBook Air, or the real question is, is the base spec in 2024 actually usable? My take is, actually, sometimes yes, sometimes yes. So again, if you're the people I talked about earlier, you're buying a laptop from the showcase at Walmart or Best Buy, you just needed to do the basic stuff I mentioned earlier—you actually can do that with 8 gigs of shared memory, no problem.
This might seem like a hot take, but I've spent a lot of time doing this stuff, and you rarely actually get close to hitting the max and hitting memory swap. Even when you do, it's very much still fine. It's when you get into the heavier stuff, like media encoding or recording or gaming, that it's a whole other story. So if you're reading this Post, you already know which group of people you're in.
So for that massive group of people who are doing a lot of that normal baseline computing stuff, don't buy the new M3 MacBook Air. You can very easily get an M2 MacBook Air and save your money. Matter of fact, if you don't need the brighter display, the MagSafe, the external display support, which you probably don't at this rate, it's also a great idea to look into Best Buy or Walmart's $600-$700 M1 MacBook Airs that they're selling right now. I think Walmart first announced they would.
