Apple updates MacBook Air with M3 processor for AI power – starting at $1,799

Overnight Apple has revealed updates to it’s MacBook Air lineup with their most recent M3 Apple Silicon to offer greater performance with no compromise on Battery Life or design.

With an 18 hour battery life, Apple’s MacBook Air is a standout option at the price point, with often double the battery life of similarly priced PC Laptops.

This new M3 MacBook Air is up to 60 percent faster than the model that had an M1 chip in it, and 13 times faster than the Intel-Based MacBook Air.

Fascinatingly, Apple is highlighting performance as it relates to Artificial Intelligence for the first time I can recall, saying in the release “MacBook Air continues to be the world’s best consumer laptop for AI.“

The announcement goes on to say “With the transition to Apple silicon, every Mac is a great platform for AI. M3 includes a faster and more efficient 16-core Neural Engine, along with accelerators in the CPU and GPU to boost on-device machine learning, making MacBook Air the world’s best consumer laptop for AI. Leveraging this incredible AI performance, macOS delivers intelligent features that enhance productivity and creativity, so users can enable powerful camera features, real-time speech to text, translation, text predictions, visual understanding, accessibility features, and much more”.

“With a broad ecosystem of apps that deliver advanced AI features, users can do everything from checking their homework with AI Math Assistance in Goodnotes 6, to automatically enhancing photos in Pixelmator Pro, to removing background noise from a video using CapCut. Combined with the unified memory architecture of Apple silicon, MacBook Air can also run optimised AI models, including large language models (LLMs) and diffusion models for image generation locally with great performance. In addition to on-device performance, MacBook Air supports cloud-based solutions, enabling users to run powerful productivity and creative apps that tap into the power of AI, such as Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365, Canva, and Adobe Firefly.“

It’s a strong sign that AI will be a core feature of the Apple 2024 product range, and likely a core topic at their Worldwide Developers Conference in June.

Speaking of the new MacBook Air with M3, Greg Joswiak, Apple’s SVP of Worldwide Marketing says “MacBook Air is our most popular and loved Mac, with more customers choosing it over any other laptop. And today it gets even better with the M3 chip and new capabilities,”

“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, all in a fanless design, the new MacBook Air continues to be the world’s best thin and light laptop.”

You can use one external display with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz – or shut that MacBook Air lid to use a second external display with up to 5K resolution at 60Hz.

MacBook Air with M3 also supports WiFi 6E for better data transfer speeds.

For those with one eye on the environment and the other on performance, the new MacBook Air is also the first Apple product to be made with 50 Percent recycled content, including the use of 100% recycled aluminium in the body, 100% recycled rare earth elements in all the magnets and for Apple another first – with 100% recycled copper on the main logic board.

Orders for the new MacBook Air start today, with the product on-sale this Friday starting at $1,799 – a $200 premium over its M2 Processor enabled sibling.