MacBook Air M3: Speed, Power, and the Future of Apple Laptops

to kick us off with the MacBook Air getting a huge update, huge, huge update Griffin

Sure, so the MacBook Air is getting the speedy M3 chip. In spring 2024 the M3 made its debut

just a few months ago on the MacBook Pro and the iMac. The Apple M3 processor will make its way

to the MacBook Air line in March 2024 according to a trusted source of insider info. Both the 13-inch

and 15-inch versions of the laptop will receive the chip upgrade. As we know when the MacBook Air

was redesigned and moved to M2 it came like a full year before they debuted the 15-inch model

Apparently like the story there was that the 15-inch model like that Apple had troublesourcing

the displays for them but supposedly now you know indefinitely they're going they're going to update

these computers both at the same time in lockstep. The first Apple Silicon, first Apple Silicon for

Mac the M1 launched back in 2020. It was replaced by the M2 in 2022. This is a fairly modest

improvement over the original version but the M3 that Apple announced in fall 2023 brings more of a

boost. Their performance cores in the new chips are up to 30% faster than M1 and the efficiency

cores up to 50% faster according to Apple. And as we were covering a little bit like the

even on the base model M3 the improvements in graphics are significant you know you have

hardware accelerated ray tracing and uh what's what's the other one mesh mesh shading something

like that. If you plan on doing any kind of gaming on your Mac which we might talk about

again later in the show even the base model MacBook Air is going to do a pretty competent

job of that. So no other details like pricing were revealed about the 2024 MacBook Air so it's likely

the processor upgrade will be the only significant change to the notebook's design

and that'll be pretty typical like the the new MacBook Pros didn't have any any hardware any like physical changes on the exterior whatsoever. We can assume the things

same things can happen with the MacBook Air and you know comparable models didn't go up in price

so we can assume that the prices are probably going to be the same too. So just a just a spec

bump but a welcome one. Can I just real fast here Griffin? Yeah. I could have anticipated that we

would have been getting these soon just from the way that Apple is liquidating the M1 MacBook Airs

like they have been dropping the prices on those like crazy. I got one I got the base M1 MacBook

Air for my wife recently it was $750. $750. I mean in fact I just saw that was it Costco or maybe

Amazon was offering the same price again and I was like dude that is super cheap for an M1 MacBook

Air. It seems like they're trying to clear these out. I mean usually when they do that it means

that they have another newer model coming in and then the M2 will become the older model anyway

That is the kind of the arguably the more interesting part of the story is what's

how are they going to trickle down the rest of the computers because Apple really likes I think Apple knows that keeping a MacBook Air of any kind at $999 is really important

for their sales numbers so I guess the question is like are they going to drop the M2 MacBook Air

to $999 will they be able to reach that price point because that's that's a I think if they

do that then they're not going to sell very many M3 MacBook Airs because they're going to have two

computers that arguably aren't that different that have the same design. One of them costs a thousand

dollars one of them costs $1,200. Well I don't think Apple will do it but but they'll use their

proxies this is the way they always do it man like the people who shop directly at Apple pay the

highest prices but they liquidate computers like crazy through Best Buy through B&H through Adorama

through there is a military exchange website called AAFES I think shopmyexchange.com they

liquidate them through them so they have all these partners that will get computers from Apple and

you see this on eBay a lot too and Apple will just use these proxies to liquidate stuff at

super cheap prices they wouldn't do it themselves because they don't want to devalue their brand

but if Best Buy does it then Apple it Apple doesn't have to worry about their brand being

devalued because they're not the ones doing it it's Best Buy doing it they're they're going to be the the cut rate retailer right like Apple would never do that to themselves so I think

you will start seeing big discounts on the M2