New M3 MacBook Air: Breaking Down the Specs and What It Means for You

The new m3 Mac book air

Not as airy as that hair, but it does rhyme and maybe that's why he wanted to do this story

I don't know. Let's say you Griffin I actually ended up writing this up because Apple dropped this without warning just unexpectedly on Monday

Ed wasn't awake to write it up So I was like well I'll give him 15 minutes while I you know get dressed let the dogs out and all that you know

I ended up writing it up before Ed was I think even awake now. We know who let the dogs out now

We finally know I was just thinking that it was Griffin The mystery has been solved

Anyways new m3 MacBook Air gets big specs boost with same awesome battery life

The 2024 MacBook Air lineup launched Monday by Apple runs on the company's m3 chip bringing a significant performance boost to the laptop

This comes in the same size as 13 inches and 15 inches and the same four colors

Although now if you get the midnight one it has the same fingerprint proof

Anodization process that the space black MacBook Pro from last year has so it'll be slightly less fingerprint II

the new laptop runs quote up to 60% Faster than the model with the m1 chip and up to 13 times faster than the fastest Intel based MacBook Air the company said

Apple also claims it's twice as fast as the best-selling 15-inch Intel core i7 PC laptop

But they don't specify what it is, but we'll just have to take their word for it

It now supports two external displays out of the box Each display will run at 60 Hertz with a billion colors one at 5k resolution and one at 6k

You know previously the MacBook Air was limited to only one external monitor a small snag

However, is that when you plug in two monitors the lid of the Mac has to be closed

So you still only get two displays in total not three, you know, but you do have to consider

Well, if you're plugging in a studio display You'll still get more screen space overall

The 14 the 14 inch 2023 MacBook Pro will gain this feature as well by a software update

It has Wi-Fi 6e which is twice as fast The m3 chip has hardware ray tracing and messaging for better graphics

and this is an important one that not a lot of people talk about but the media engine inside the chip now has an AV 1 decoder for

future online video AV 1 is the new open format that a lot of

Companies are probably going to be switching to like, you know on YouTube and Netflix or YouTube already uses it

We're broadcasting AV 1 as you speak Well, if you're watching that's why our picture looks so much better than talk show or nine-to-five or any of those other

lesser popular shows So you don't have the capabilities livestream on the new m3 MacBook Pro. You'll get slightly better battery life

I Where was I Apple boldly introduced it as quote the world's best consumer laptop for AI

Thanks to the 16 corner allows you run LLM and image generation tools on device

Which is it which is important being able to run it on devices is pretty awesome

Like that's what I do on my Mac mini because I don't want to you know Give open AI any money and I don't want to you know, pay for any image generation tools. They're open source projects

Download that'll let you do that do that stuff on device I don't know if a lot of do a lot of other people do that though

I I feel like I'm the odd one out not well use the cloud-based stuff

I mean for the most part it's the cloud-based stuff that is available and everyone wants you to use the cloud-based stuff

I mean a it's faster and I would imagine way more powerful than running it on the neural engine on your MacBook air, but also

Although there are open source projects. I Don't think they're easy to install or configure

maybe you could speak to that because I didn't actually know that was even something that you could do because the only ones that I've

Seen are running on cloud, you know huge Nvidia, you know software farms or

GPU farms, which by the way Holy moly, dude Nvidia might become the most valuable company in the world the next in the next six months. I think they're in third place currently

Every day that I look at Nvidia their stock goes up like

3% it's up 4% today. It was up 3% yesterday in the last month. It's up 31% in the last three months

It's up a hundred percent like Everyone is buying Nvidia stuff to power the future of AI and their stock is going bonkers

that's just an aside for those of you who are interested, but I've even considered liquidating all my Apple stock and buying Nvidia because

Apple stock has kind of been flat for a while now Maybe they'll be able to

Have some big new product like vision Pro that will eventually boost revenues enough for them to start going up again

But video is going absolutely bonkers. Yeah, Apple could just put AI and all of the press releases now

Maybe that would help. Yeah, just do that. Yeah Or they've already started. Yeah

Saying that a MacBook Air is the best consumer laptop for AI for running You can do from any laptop, which is hilarious because I

Mean before you said that was possible. I was like, that's not even possible I don't think you can do that at least that with nothing that I've seen

Nobody is running it locally on their laptop. Are they am I wrong about that? I don't think so

everyone is using open AI or one of the other mid journey like one of the other platforms and they're all cloud-based like I

Like the fact that you would run this on your laptop instead of having

10,000 in a video 4090s doing it for you. I Don't know how well that works. I think the future is running it maybe locally

That would be cool because I don't want to pay for credits either or have a subscription to open AI or mid journey or something

But I imagine it's gonna be wildly less powerful if you run it on the neural engine. I forget the name of

What what the app is called because it okay GPT for all GPT number four

all a LL is is the app that I use to run like a You know text generation on my Mac and I mostly just use it for

This is incredibly nerdy. So I apologize to all the ordinary people listening I just use it to like figure out FFmpeg commands

Like if I need to convert a whole folder full of video files from like MKV to MOV

I just like tell it tell that hey write a script that'll use FFmpeg to convert all these and then I just pasted in terminal

But you're right. That is incredibly nerdy and your apologies accepted anyways

The 13-inch m2 MacBook Air is still available for $999 or in the education store for 899 which I think is a stellar price

Like if you think about it the the m2 MacBook Air launched at I think 1299 and now you can get it for as little

As 899 that's an incredible deal Oh my my my the the the price hike is complete Apple's

Psychological maneuver to have us all justifying their price hike on the m2 is now complete because now they discount it back to the normal

Price it's like oh, that's a great deal Yeah, it's a great computer. You know, it's it's

If you don't need a computer that's like, you know 30% as fast as the m3 then, you know

It's it's a great deal at it at a much better price The 15-inch m2 model is gone

You can only buy the m2 MacBook Air in the 13-inch size and the m1 MacBook Air

With its wedge shapes design and rectangular screen has been discontinued Yeah, they were worn out for that great computer

They've been they've been discounting the m1 MacBook Air for months and months and months now and they've been selling it for 750 my guess is you'll see it for even lower

Now like Apple will discontinue it on their website, but it's not gonna go anywhere. It's still gonna be available would be my guess from

third-party resellers Because they're still selling the m1 MacBook Pro I mean, there's that that computer is so hugely discounted now on sites like B&H

I saw like the maxed out version with four terabytes of SSD and

I think it had like 64 128 gigabytes of RAM I forget what the max was on that computer and they were selling it for like $3,100, but they're still selling it

So you'll see the m1 MacBook Air Discounted heavily available, especially during the holidays and that computer is an absolute beast

I mean that really is still all you would need for just a general computing machine

you know the m3 is significantly faster than the m2 and The m1 and I would love to see some

benchmarks of the m3 MacBook Air over the m1 MacBook Pro to be honest with you

I bet you there are some tests where the where the MacBook Air now wins and

You know, of course you get all that great portability