Apple 13-inch MacBook Air with M3 chip review: Still the best MacBook for most people

Note: This review was first published on 7 March 2024.

We’ve been expecting you

Apple has updated its 13 and 15-inch MacBook Airs. We knew these notebooks were coming ever since Apple unveiled its new M3 processors last year. Unsurprisingly, these new MacBook Airs are mostly a spec-bump update. This is also to be expected seeing that the MacBook Air was given a thorough refresh in 2022. As a result, the latest MacBook Airs have new chips and better connectivity, but the hardware is unchanged. Let’s cut to the chase and get straight to what’s new.

The TL;DR version: 



Highly capable and portable, these are the ideal MacBooks for most people. Pity they only come with 8GB of memory as standard.



Note: You can find it on Lazada, Shopee, and the Apple Online Store.

Faster chips, better productivity

As I mentioned, the hardware is mostly unchanged. This means the display, keyboard, trackpad, dimensions, and weight, are all the same. This is no bad thing since the display, keyboard, trackpad, and even the speakers are all very good. Colour options are identical too, and that means there's Midnight, Starlight, Space Grey, and Silver. To find out more about these aspects of the MacBook Air, head over to my review of the 2022 M2 MacBook Air.

So here’s what's new with the latest 13 and 15-inch MacBook Airs.

• New M3 chip
• Wi-Fi 6E
• Support for up to two external displays (only with the lid closed)

The big update to the MacBook Air is on the inside. They get Apple’s newest M3 chips. I’ve covered these new chips in greater detail in my 14-inch MacBook Pro review, so if you want to know the details, head over there. But in a nutshell, these chips are built on a 3nm process and feature significantly better GPUs with support for hardware-accelerated mesh and ray-tracing, as well as a new tech called Dynamic Caching, which intelligently allocates system memory to the GPU in real-time based on its demands.

The unit I'm testing is the most basic model that has an M3 chip with 8 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores, 8GB of memory and a 256GB SSD, and it performs like you’d expect a MacBook with an M3 chip too. If you need more graphics performance, the M3 chip is available with 10 GPU cores too, but I think those extra cores will be largely wasted because this isn't a machine designed for sustained workloads (it doesn't have a fan).

Anyway, if you pore through the performance charts on the next page, you’ll see that there’s little difference between an M3-powered MacBook Air and an M3-powered 14-inch MacBook Pro. The MacBook Pro only pulls ahead on longer workloads when throttling becomes an issue on the MacBook Air (since it has no fan to cool its processor). 

In the real world and for the majority of users, the MacBook Air will have more than sufficient performance. This has been true for all MacBook Airs ever since Apple transitioned to its own M-series chips and it’s true here too – even if the model I’m testing is the base model. If all you ever going to do is check your emails, work on spreadsheets, edit photos, and cut the occasional videos, the MacBook Air has got you covered.

Battery life is stupendous too. Apple claims up to 18 hours of battery life and that’s entirely believable. I could easily get through an entire day of work and with battery life to spare. 

What’s also nice to have is support for two external displays. But there’s a caveat, you can only drive two external displays if you keep the lid of the MacBook Air shut. Apparently this is a limitation of the M3 chip – it can only drive two displays. Still, it’s a helpful improvement especially for productivity because it now means you can use two external monitors, instead of just one and relying on the MacBook Air’s built-in display for the other. Having used dual 27-inch displays on my desk for the past couple of years, I cannot tell you just how much more productive it has allowed me to be.

The last noteworthy update is support for Wi-Fi 6E, which is nice to have if you have a compatible Wi-Fi 6E router, but it isn’t something I’m too excited about given that Wi-Fi 7 routers are already available in Singapore. And no, please don’t get a Wi-Fi 6E router just to maximise the wireless performance of this notebook. Wi-Fi 6E isn’t worth it and I’ve explained why here.

Still the best MacBook for most people

Putting the newest M3 chips into Apple’s most popular MacBooks and adding support for dual external displays and Wi-Fi 6E hasn’t really changed the Mac landscape or my buying advice. The latest 13 and 15-inch MacBook Airs are still the best MacBooks for most people. However, that also means that their shortcomings remain. 

To start, the base model still comes with a measly 8GB of memory and a 256GB SSD. Considering prices start at S$1,599 and we are now in 2024, that’s a little stingy. Could you make do with just 8GB of memory is a question I often get asked, and I suppose you could, but it’s not ideal. Since my unit only has 8GB of memory, I’m going to try and use it extensively over the next couple of weeks and report back.

Crucially, remember that MacBooks cannot be upgraded, so if you intend to maximise their longevity, it’s best to stomach the upgrade fees and go for the spec you really want. I feel that the ideal spec is the one with 16GB of memory and 512GB storage which will set you back at least S$2,199 for the 13-inch model and S$2,499 for the 15-inch model. In other words, the MacBook Air probably isn’t as cheap as you might think it is.

If you are really on a budget, Apple continues to sell the M2-powered 13-inch MacBook Air. And to be honest, that’s still a very good option. For S$200 less, it delivers most of the performance of the newer model and really only lacks its successor’s ability to drive two external displays and Wi-Fi 6E connectivity. If funds are tight and those features don't matter to you, an M2 MacBook Air is still an excellent machine to have.

Some other minor niggles remain, like the lack of an SD card reader, only two USB-C ports, and throttling during longer more intensive workloads can be quite severe. But these aren’t dealbreakers. Because the two USB-C ports support Thunderbolt 3, you can easily get around the SD card and ports issue with USB-C or Thunderbolt hubs. And if you aren’t doing any rendering, 3D graphics, or playing demanding games, throttling shouldn’t be too big of an issue either. If you do any of the abovementioned things, you really should be shopping for a MacBook Pro instead.

So happily, the miserly amount of memory and storage is really the MacBook Air’s only grievous shortcoming. The fact is, these are well-built, highly portable notebooks with great displays, performance, and battery life. Simply put, it delivers everything that most people would ever want and need from a notebook. Just make sure you upgrade its memory and storage.

Note: You can find the new MacBook Air with M3 chip on  Amazon, Lazada, Shopee, and the Apple Online Store.

Benchmarking results

Here are the results of the 13-inch M3 MacBook Air. To recap, the unit I’m testing is the most basic one with 8 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores, 8GB of memory, and 256GB SSD. Despite its humble specs, it proved to be really capable performer. Its CPU performance is clearly markedly better than an M2 MacBook Air. On bursty benchmarks like Geekbench 6, it was as much as 20% faster. But on longer workloads where throttling comes into play like Cinebench, that advantage drops to around 8%. 

Throttling on long workloads can be quite significant. In our video transcode test, the MacBook Air took nearly 50% longer to complete as compared to the 14-inch MacBook Pro, which also has an 8-core CPU M3 chip. But despite that, it still managed to transcode the video quicker than a recent high-end Meteor Lake PC notebook that we tested. This demonstrates the sheer power of Apple’s M3 chips.

GPU performance is harder to gauge because this unit has 8 GPU cores, whereas the M3 14-inch MacBook Pro has 10 and so does the M2 13 and 15-inch MacBook Airs that I previously tested. Even so, we can see that its GPU performance is competitive.

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