Apple launches new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air powered by M3

Apple has announced new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air laptop computers which now contain the company’s latest and most powerful M3 chip.

Available from Friday March 8, the new MacBook Air models are up to 60 per cent faster than the M1 models and up to 13x faster than the fastest Intel based MacBook Air.

“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,” says Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing.

“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.”

Both the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air models have an impressively thin and light design and can run for up to 18 hours on a single charge.

Each has stunning Liquid Retina display (13.6-inch and 15.3-inch to be precise) with support for up to two external displays.

On the performance side the M3 chip offers improved performance and even more capabilities to MacBook Air.

The M3 chip has a powerful 8-core CPU, up to a 10-core GPU and can support up to 24GB of unified memory.

Customers will see the improvement with the faster speeds of M3 which will improve their everyday productivity and power through other demanding tasks like photo and video editing.

Apple says the transition to its own silicon across its line-up makes the Mac an excellent platform for AI.

The M3 has a faster and more efficient 16 core neural engine along with CPU and GPU accelerators to boost on device machine learning.

This means macOS can leverage incredible AI performance and deliver features to enhance productivity and creativity as well as enabling powerful camera features, real time speech to text, translation, text predictions, visual understanding, accessibility features and a whole range more.

This new MacBook Air is the first Apple product made with 50 per cent recycled content which includes 100 per cent recycled aluminium in the enclosure.

The new MacBook Air with M3 is available to order from today and will go on sale on Friday, March 8.

The 13-inch MacBook Air with M3 starts at $1,799 and the 15-inch MacBook Air with M3 starts at $2,199.

Both are available in four colours: midnight, starlight, silver and space grey.

Customers can still purchase the 13-inch MacBook Air with M2 starting at $1,599.