Review: Apple’s efficient M3 MacBook Airs are just about as good as laptops get

Right off the bat, the M3 MacBook Airs aren't as interesting as the M2 models.

July 2022's M2 MacBook Air updated the design of the 13-inch laptop for the Apple Silicon era after the M1 Air's external design played it safe. And the first-ever 15-inch MacBook Air, released over a year later, was an appealing option for people who wanted a larger screen but didn't need the extra power or cost of a MacBook Pro. Together, they were a comprehensive rethink of Apple's approach to its mainstream laptops, modeled after the similarly dramatic Apple Silicon MacBook Pro redesigns.

The M3 Airs don't do any of that. They are laptop designs we've already seen, wrapped around a processor we've already seen. But they may end up being more important than the M2 Airs because of when they're being released—as the last of the Intel Macs slowly age and break and Apple winds down software support for them (if not in this year's macOS release, then almost certainly next year's). Between the faster chip and a couple of other feature updates, the new machines may also be the first ones that are truly worth a look for M1 Air early adopters who want an upgrade.

Apple left us a scant 48 hours to test and use this laptop, but here's what we've observed so far.

Does the design hold up?

The 13- and 15-inch MacBook Airs. Same design, but the 15-inch Air has a bigger screen and trackpad and better speakers, while the 13-inch Air is smaller and lighter. Note both the fingerprints on the Midnight finish and how the notch can be either more or less visible based on your settings.

Andrew Cunningham

The 13- and 15-inch MacBook Airs. Same design, but the 15-inch Air has a bigger screen and trackpad and better speakers, while the 13-inch Air is smaller and lighter. Note both the fingerprints on the Midnight finish and how the notch can be either more or less visible based on your settings. Andrew Cunningham

Air footprints compared: the 13-inch on top of the 15-inch.

Andrew Cunningham

Air footprints compared: the 13-inch on top of the 15-inch. Andrew Cunningham

The 13- and 15-inch MacBook Airs. Same design, but the 15-inch Air has a bigger screen and trackpad and better speakers, while the 13-inch Air is smaller and lighter. Note both the fingerprints on the Midnight finish and how the notch can be either more or less visible based on your settings. Andrew Cunningham

Air footprints compared: the 13-inch on top of the 15-inch. Andrew Cunningham

The M1 MacBook Air is still the one I use most days, and anyone coming from a 2018–2020 Intel MacBook Air will be familiar with the design. So the M2/M3-era MacBook Air design is still striking to me, despite being the better part of two years old.

By and large, I think the newer design holds up pretty well; I don't mind the loss of the taper, even if it makes the laptop look a bit more boxy and less sleek. The full-height function row and tweaked keyboard are both good, and I don't generally have issues with trackpad palm rejection on either the 13- or 15-inch models. It's nice to have MagSafe back, though in the end, I almost always charge the Air with one of the many USB-C chargers I have strategically tucked into most rooms in the house.

I'm also reminded anew just how much I like the 15-inch MacBook Air, as someone who likes a big screen but doesn't use a laptop for much gaming or anything heavier than Photoshop or Lightroom. 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, you do get used to it, and in typical desktop use (especially in dark mode and 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.

Sure, a 1080p webcam instead of a 720p webcam is nice, but I would choose a notch-less screen with more usable space every time if given the choice. (The strips of screen to either side of the notch can only really display the macOS menu bar; go into the Control Center area of the Settings and change "automatically hide and show the Menu Bar' to "Never" if you don't want those strips of screen to go totally wasted in full-screen mode).

The Midnight finish as seen on a 15-inch MacBook Air, freshly cleaned and pristine.

Andrew Cunningham

The Midnight finish as seen on a 15-inch MacBook Air, freshly cleaned and pristine. Andrew Cunningham

This is what the laptop looked like before I cleaned it. I've had it for two days. You'll definitely still see fingerprints.

Andrew Cunningham

This is what the laptop looked like before I cleaned it. I've had it for two days. You'll definitely still see fingerprints. Andrew Cunningham

The Midnight finish as seen on a 15-inch MacBook Air, freshly cleaned and pristine. Andrew Cunningham

This is what the laptop looked like before I cleaned it. I've had it for two days. You'll definitely still see fingerprints. Andrew Cunningham

One design change that Apple has highlighted for the M3 Airs is a new coating for the Midnight (read: blue-tinted black) version of the Air that is said to reduce its fingerprint-y-ness. Apple did the same thing for the M3 version of the MacBook Pro last year.

The new finish looks a shade or two lighter than the old Midnight coating and does show fingerprints a bit less. But "less" isn't "none," and my Air was immediately, visibly fingerprint-y and skin-oily, both on the lid and in the palm rest area. It remains more noticeable than on either the Starlight finish of the 13-inch M3 Air or the space gray finish on my M1 Air. Choose your color finish accordingly.

Multi-monitor support

The new Airs can drive a pair of external displays as long as the lid is closed: one 6K screen at 60 Hz and one 5K screen at 60 Hz.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

There’s one more niche M3 MacBook Air feature that made a bit of news when it was announced: for the first time, an Apple Silicon MacBook Air can support a pair of external displays rather than being limited to just one external display.

The catch is that the laptop’s lid needs to be closed, as the total number of supported displays is still two. But for the M1 and the M2 Air, the M1 and the M2 MacBook Pro, and (for the last four months, at least) the M3 MacBook Pro, the internal display always counted toward the total, whether it was closed or not.

That’s not as good as supporting a larger number of external displays, which is still the purview of Apple's Pro, Max, and Ultra chips. But that extra bit of flexibility will be just enough to make the M3 Air more workable if you want to dock your laptop to multiple external monitors at your desk. No more specialty docks or signal splitters, no more kludgey workarounds.

What is a bit frustrating is how long it took Apple to offer this support. The M3 MacBook Pro will be able to do this after a software update, but if the hardware was capable of this all along, why not support it from the jump?

Even more bewilderingly, consider this message from Hector Martin of the Asahi Linux team. The Asahi Linux project is getting advanced enough that it's starting to make Apple’s hardware do things that Apple doesn’t let it do, and Martin says that with appropriate firmware, there’s nothing stopping Apple from adding the same two-monitors-with-the-lid-closed feature to the M2 Air as well. (The M1 is more limited in its display outputs because one of its two display outputs is functionally hardwired to the built-in screen.)

The M3 Air’s support for more flexible display configurations is welcome in a better-late-than-never kind of way; if Apple won't support more displays on its baseline chips, it can at least let you pick whatever pair of screens you want to use. It’s just too bad for M2 Air and M2 MacBook Pro owners or people who stepped up to a Pro/Max/Ultra chip specifically for better external display support.

Performance

The M3 is a few months old at this point, having premiered in the latest 24-inch iMac and a $1,599 entry-level MacBook Pro toward the end of 2023. Its performance isn't a mystery. But the M3 Airs have passive heatsinks with no cooling fans, the same as the M1 and M2 Airs before them. So this is our first chance to observe the M3 operating in a more constrained thermal environment where it needs to throttle its speeds more aggressively to avoid overheating.

The M1 and M2 generally performed the same for light and medium-sized tasks whether they had active cooling fans on them or not, and the M3 acts the same way.

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.

Delivering short bursts of performance like this is by far the most important thing for the M3 to be able to do since it's what most Air owners will observe the most frequently in day-to-day use. That being said, the M3's performance boosts come mainly from improved CPU and GPU architectures and higher clock speeds. Compare that to Apple's approach with the M3 Max, which can benefit from those things as well as increased CPU and GPU core counts, making it easier to post better generation-over-generation gains.

The M3 does throttle fairly quickly in the passively cooled Air design, running at its maximum of 20–22 W for just a few seconds in our Handbrake video encoding test, gradually sliding down to around 11–12 W over the next minute and a half or so, and then dropping further into the 9 W range after about nine minutes on the job. The M3 was using 9 W when it completed the test (the encode took almost 13 minutes to complete, though there could be further fluctuations for even longer jobs).

The numbers speak for themselves, though—however fast it throttles, 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're probably leaving a bit of the M3's performance on the table relative to the same chip in the $1,599 MacBook Pro.

Power use

A caveat: We're using the built-in macOS powermetrics command-line tool to track CPU power usage in Apple's laptops, and energy use in different chip generations can be measured slightly differently. For Windows laptops, we use HWInfo, with the same caveat for comparing processors from different manufacturers.

Keeping that potential lack of precision in mind, the M3's power usage numbers do stack up well to the M1 and M2 in previous-generation MacBook Airs in our Handbrake encoding test. The M3's CPU uses about as much power as the M1 but accomplishes heavy tasks much more quickly, making it the more efficient chip by a sizable margin. For the M2 Air, the increase in performance was offset by slightly higher power use, making it a bit less efficient.

As for battery life, we've had a total of 48 hours with both of these laptops, not nearly enough to kick the tires on the batteries and run performance tests. But for the 15-inch Air, at least, it took about two hours of continuous mixed browsing and productivity use to make the battery drop from 93 percent to 83 percent.

Apple says the 13-inch Air will last 15 hours when browsing the Internet or 18 hours when watching video, the same numbers it gave for the M1 and M2 MacBook Airs. Like other Apple Silicon MacBook Airs, most people ought to make it through at least a day or two before they need to think about charging, and that's before you engage Low Power Mode to restrict the M3's power usage.

What about the M2 Air?

So what of the M2 MacBook Air, which is still hanging around in Apple’s entry-level $999 slot?

Before the M3 Airs, the choice was fairly clear-cut: buy the M1 Air if you need to save every dollar you can and you just want a reliable, functional laptop, and get the M2 Air if you care about the redesign or bigger screen. Now you have a pair of laptops that look identical, perform pretty similarly, and are separated by just a handful of actual features (some of which appear to be artificial in the first place).

Knowing what I do about Apple’s hardware support timelines, I’d probably spend the extra $100 to get the M3 Air, secure in the knowledge that I might be buying an extra year or two of macOS updates a few years down the line. Whether I used the laptop that whole time or decided to sell it, it would either have a longer useful life or retain more of its resale value.

The real appeal of the M2 Air isn’t the $999 starting price but the fact that refurbished prices for the M2 Air are now as low as $849. When they’re in stock, 16GB/512GB M2 Airs cost $1,189, a whopping $310 less than a brand-new M3 Air with the same specs. Depending on what you need from a laptop, there’s a strong case to be made for the last-gen model, as long as you can wait around a bit to get the exact laptop you want.

By the same token, the M1 Air now goes as low as $759 for a refurbished model, though at this point, I would probably skip the M1 model for the software support reasons listed above. Apple has historically based macOS end-of-support dates on when a Mac was introduced (late 2020) and not when it was discontinued (early 2024), so unless Apple changes the way it’s handled macOS updates for almost 25 years, you’re almost guaranteed to miss out on at least a year or two of extra software support.

Ain’t broke, don’t fix

Apple's M3 MacBook Airs.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The M3 MacBook Air is the laptop's first "boring" refresh in several years; the M1 Air kicked off the Apple Silicon era, and the M2 Air was a major design overhaul. The M3 version of the Air gets the 13- and 15-inch models on the same update schedule but otherwise doesn't rock the boat.

But that's fine, as it's a pretty good boat that doesn't need to be rocked. Even without active cooling, the M3 is a solid performer, handily beating the passively cooled versions of the M1 and M2 while using a little less power. The chip does throttle pretty quickly under heavy load, but not ridiculously so, and that's to be expected in a passively cooled design. The Air is not designed for heavy-duty workloads, though it's nice to know it's usable for them in a pinch.