Here’s the 13-inch MacBook Air M3, Apple’s latest Mac and perhaps the best MacBook money can buy. Not only is it the smallest and most portable MacBook available, but it also makes very few sacrifices in terms of performance.
Using it over the past week has made us wonder if we’ve reached a point where it makes more sense to choose the MacBook Air over the MacBook Pro. We want to discuss why that might be the case and review our experience so far.
What’s new with the M3 Air, the tests we’ve conducted, and how much you can get out of this machine. So, if you’re looking for a new MacBook or just want to know what the M3 Air has to offer, stick with us and let’s dive in.
Hey everyone, Kyle Erikson here from History With The MacBook Air. Of all the new MacBooks released since the M series chips arrived, the Air line is the one we’ve used the most. We used the M1 Air, which just retired, for full-time software development for a year.
RIP to that iconic wedge design. We also used the 13-inch M2 version when we switched to full-time creative work and always found the Air more than capable for almost anything.
The last time we used one of these as our main machine was about a year ago. Since then, we’ve tested various different Macs, including the MacBook Pro M3 Pro, which has been our primary Mac for about the past five months. Now, with the new M3 Air in hand, we remember how much we love this design, and the changes in the M3 version are very impressive.
Design
In terms of appearance, it’s identical to the M2 variant: the exact same dimensions and weight, the same color options, but the M3 variant has a slight difference with a new anodized coating to reduce fingerprints, which we find shows less on the midnight version we have here, but still shows smudges and streaks easily, similar to the space black MacBook Pro in that regard.
We forgot how light and thin the 13-inch Air is compared to the 14-inch Pro model. It’s about 0.8 pounds lighter and 4.2 mm thinner, which may not seem like much, but that’s between 25 and 27% smaller and it’s very noticeable.
This makes the Air feel a bit more portable, but one thing we have to be cautious of is vertical stands if we place it on a desk.
Many of these stands cannot accommodate how thin it is, but fortunately, the stand we use with our Pro has interchangeable inserts that fit perfectly. We’ll provide a link below as it can be hard to find something that fits.
That’s the only thing we need to watch out for and besides that, if we’re traveling or commuting, we prefer to carry the Air over the Pro.
Ports
One of the reasons why the Air can be so thin is because it only has two USB-C ports on the left side of the machine and a headphone jack on the other side. So, no full HDMI or SD card slot or anything, which honestly we’re okay with.
Even on our MacBook Pro, we rarely connect anything beyond two USB-C ports. We usually just use one for Thunderbolt and the other for our studio display. You also have MagSafe if you’re using both ports and they’re not powered, so there’s still room for charging.
These ports still have Thunderbolt and USB 4 specifications, but the big difference in the M3 compared to the M2 is that it now supports two external displays, whereas previously it only supported one.
However, this only works in clamshell mode, so you’re essentially sacrificing the laptop screen for larger displays. If you’re someone who likes having two monitors in a desk setup, this gives a bit more flexibility.
Display
The display hasn’t changed at all and is still the same 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display with a peak brightness of 500 nits. The colors look amazing and are great for color-critical work or just watching content.
We’ve mentioned before that the brightness difference in SDR content compared to the Pro models is only 100 nits which is hardly noticeable when side by side.
Almost all the content we see in macOS is in SDR, so while you get higher refresh rates, slightly deeper blacks, and better contrast on the mini LED display on the Pro models, the Air still looks great for an IPS panel without local dimming. It has very deep blacks and a measured contrast below 1,500:1 which is fantastic.
The only thing we’d say with this 13-inch model is that with any application where you have many panels open simultaneously like video editing software, Xcode, Blender, if all you’re using is this laptop screen, it might feel quite cramped so you might want to upgrade to the 15-inch Air if that’s the case.
However, if we’re editing videos here, we can be sure that what we see on the screen will look similar on other Apple devices like iPhones or iPads, which is what you want.
Performance
The specific version we have here has the M3 chip with an 8-core CPU and a 10-core GPU, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD, which is the exact same configuration we had in our 13-inch M2 Air. We have to say, we don’t know how many people need more than this. Firstly, if all you do is basic productivity work using office software, you can get by with much less than this, you’ll never feel slow with that kind of work. But beyond that, there’s not much you can’t do with the M3 Air.
In our synthetic benchmarks, we saw about a 19% increase in single-core performance and 21% in multi-core compared to the M2 Air with the Xcode benchmark running about 20 seconds faster too. In real-world use, if you’re actually sitting coding on this machine, everything feels very fast and just working on mobile and web projects doesn’t really feel different from our Pro.
The M3 Pro does compile things a bit faster; if you’re working on large projects that take a very long time to build, you might notice more of a performance difference there, but we rarely feel the Air is slow compared to the M3 Pro. One thing we’d say is that if you start loading the CPU, it will get quite hot, which has been standard on the Air since they switched to the fanless design. If we run a 100% load on the CPU, temperatures hit between about 102 and 105°C which will throttle performance, but we find you’d have to have a lot going on to keep it that hot.
For the most part, with anything that’s CPU-heavy, this won’t have any issues at all and even the M2 Air didn’t really have many issues in that regard, but the GPU is probably the biggest improvement you’ll find in this Mac compared to previous generations. We’ve talked about it with our M3 Pro a bit, but the M3 series chips here introduce hardware-enabled ray tracing and dynamic caching and as long as you’re using apps optimized to take advantage of it, you’ll see a big performance boost. This M3 chip actually beats the M2 Pro in GPU benchmarks where there’s about a 15% increase in the Cinebench 2024 score with a score around three times higher than the M2 Air and feels very fast for anything graphics-related.
In Blender, we can open and work on simple projects and everything feels very smooth and render times are much faster than the M2 Air. The M3 ran almost 3 minutes faster on the Monster Under the Bed demo, which is amazing, but still slower compared to the M3 Pro which beats the M3 by almost a minute. Even with those performance increases, you still won’t be able to render very complex scenes with lots of assets. The M3 Pro will get you a bit further, but we still think you’d need a much more powerful machine for any heavy-duty tasks. But if all you’re doing is learning or working on simple projects as a hobby or for fun, the M3 Air will be fine. When it comes to gaming, anything on Apple Arcade will run very well here.
Most of those titles aren’t very demanding and are made for mobile devices, so no surprises there. But even games like No Man’s Sky, Rust, and Resident Evil 4 all run very smoothly with acceptable frame rates, at least acceptable for a MacBook.
We tested that more because it seems a lot of people are curious about gaming, but where the GPU will make the biggest difference for us personally is with the creative apps we use daily. For us, that’s mostly Lightroom, Affinity suite, and Final Cut Pro. We edited video last week on this machine and had no issues at all there. (*)
