Here's the Thing about the M3 Macbook Air...

(Intro music) - That's crazy that the most interesting things about this new laptop are the reasons not to buy it. So the MacBook Air just got refreshed. It's a pretty simple update, maybe a boring one actually.

There's really only two things new. It has this new anodization on the outside, apparently a slightly more fingerprint resistant look to it. And it has the new M3 chip inside.

So the coating, I don't know, it barely makes a difference if I'm being honest. It still gets fingerprints if you handle it regularly without a skin or a case. I would much rather depend on something like a skin from channel sponsor Dbrand.

It lets you break out from one of the three really simple colors and it's gonna hide fingerprints a million times better than any metal treatment ever could. Plus these are real leather, so they have a nice plush texture and it'll patina over time. So I'll leave a link to this one below.

But the other new thing is this M3 chip inside. So we've seen this M3 chip before, this is what Apple does. They put the same chip everywhere.

This came out in October of last year and they immediately put it in the new iMac. And then we also got a new MacBook Pro that launched with this and the M3 PRO and the M3 Max. So okay, new M3 Apple silicon, third generation, great.

So now we're finally getting this new base M3 chip in the new MacBook Air, side note, why does it take so long? I don't know, it feels like Apple kind of staggers it probably on purpose, but like it's the same chip everywhere. They've done the iMac, they've done the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, but the Mac Mini just staying on M2, kind of weird.

Also the new iPad Pro still on M2. When's that gonna get it? Anyway, you already know that the MacBook Air is the most popular Mac for a reason.

This is the base like entry level Mac that most people are seeing as the way to get into the Mac world. And so the base MacBook Air has typically been one of the easiest to recommend laptops in the world by design. But this one, interestingly, for two reasons, isn't.

Now, this has nothing to do with performance of M3 or anything weird like that. Like it's the performance you were expecting. If you look at benchmarks, it's right around that 10 to 20% improvement over M2 depending on what you're doing.

Definitely leans heavier on graphics improvements this generation. And there's the rate tracing now finally. So any applications or rendering that are taken advantage of that, that's gonna be a noticeable improvement for M3.

And it's clearly a more capable chip. And also MacBook Airs, especially the 15 inch, just constantly get great battery life across the board. You also get now dual external display support with the lid closed, but one external display with the laptop open.

And it also appears that the base storage on M3 is much improved. So this was one of those concerns from, if you look back at M2, you know obviously Apple seeds reviewers with higher end MacBooks, so most of us aren't getting that. But if you look back at M2 the base 256 gig model used a single SSD module instead of two SSDs.

Long story short, that storage module was way slower than M1, like 50% slower on paper. Would you have noticed if nobody told you and had never benchmarked it? Maybe, possibly not, but obviously it's a bummer having way slower storage on a new M2 and that extra time transferring large files, that adds up over time.

So I'm happy to report that I've seen really good benchmarks on the base storage of the M3 Air. It appears that they fixed it, awesome. So what's the deal with this M3 Air then?

Why am I saying it's not necessarily the best recommendation? Well, historically, MacBook Air has been super easy to recommend, but with this M3, they also lowered the price of M2 by a hundred bucks and discontinued the M1. So now the lineup is M3 MacBook Air starts at 1099, then M2 MacBook Air starts at 999 and then M1, it's kind of gone from Apple, but you can still find stock that's left at like Walmart or Best Buy.

Now the thing about the MacBook Air being easy to recommend is we're talking about regular people, which it's very light, regular, normal usage like web browsing, listening to music, a bunch of tabs open, work stuff, occasionally compiling or rendering some small things, photo editing and chopping a video or two sometimes, but really very light. So these people, like type of people who would buy a laptop at Walmart would be totally fine with the cheaper identical looking MacBook Air with the slightly slower M2 chip and slower storage. I think they would be totally fine.

But the other thing which I need to talk about is this whole base spec thing. This is not exactly new to the industry, but the base price and the base spec has almost become like this weird fallacy. Like I think it was Linus who did a video about how starting at is like the biggest lie in tech.

And he's right, it's not just tech, like the car industry does it all the time too. Starting at, you know, this super low price, but nobody actually gets it at that price. You're not gonna get a totally bare base model car.

The base price is really more to give you an idea of how much you're about to spend when you actually option it up the way you want to. And the issue with these is Apple's markup prices for above base spec is crazy high. Like Apple charges way too much for the most basic upgrades.

Obviously Apple Silicon computers are all a system on a chip, so they cannot be upgraded ever after you buy them, right? So once you buy it, you know, you're kind of incentivized if you're gonna keep it for a long time to splurge a little bit and give yourself some extra headroom and future proof it and bump up that spec. But Apple charges so much for bumping up that spec that the base price feels like kind of even more of a lie than usual.

So the MacBook Air starts in 2024, again, at eight gigs of shared RAM and 256 gigs of storage. Now, ignoring the fact that the phone I'm using also has more than eight gigs of RAM and 256 gigs of storage, if you want to upgrade to 16 gigs of memory, the first available RAM upgrade, that's $200. And if you wanna bump up to just the half a terabyte of storage, that's another 200 more dollars.

Compared to to how much that actually costs Apple, especially at the scale that they're operating, that is just crazy, brutal, ridiculous pricing. So even if you do just that, suddenly the MacBook Air M3 is $1,500. So either you're cool with knowing you're actually buying a 1500 plus dollars MacBook Air or the real question is, is the base spec in 2024 actually usable?

And my take is actually sometimes yes, sometimes yes. So again, if you're the people I talked about earlier, you're you're buying a laptop from the showcase at Walmart or Best Buy, you just need it to do the basic stuff I mentioned earlier, you actually can do that with eight gigs of shared memory, no problem. This might seem like a hot take, but I've spent a lot of time doing this stuff.

You rarely actually get close to hitting the max and hitting memory swap. And even when you do, it's very much still fine. It's when you get into the heavier stuff like media encoding or exporting or gaming that it's a whole nother story.

So if you're watching this video, you already know which group of people you're in. So for that massive group of people who are doing a lot of that normal, baseline computing stuff, don't buy the new M3 MacBook Air. You can very easily get an M2 MacBook Air and save your money.

Matter of fact, if you don't need the brighter display, the MagSafe, the external display support, which you probably don't at this rate, it's also a great idea to look into Best Buy or Walmart's like six, $700 M1 MacBook Airs that they're selling right now. I think Walmart first announced they would have it for 699 and then a few days later Best Buy announced that they'd sell it for 649, which is pretty sick. So clearly M3 is a much more capable overall chip and brings the floor of a laptop up.

But the way I see it, what Apple silicon has done to Apple's lineup is it's brought down the minimum level of machine that you can get away with doing your workflow. Does that make sense? So like me, I edit a lot of videos and so I need a powerful machine for Final Cut Pro and that sort of stuff, right?

So for the longest time I could only use an Apple Desktop, the highest end iMac Pro, the Mac Pro, and I still will, but I am now able to use Mac Studio and I can actually edit. I've had an M1 Max MacBook Pro for a while and I've been editing on the go with a laptop, which is a huge like enabler for me. And the same sort of thing applies if you're doing like gaming stuff or if you have a whole bunch of coding and heavy, maybe even just encoding photos or whatever you're doing at that level, you'd typically rely on a MacBook Pro.

But with these new chips and with Apple silicon, you can do that on a high-end MacBook Air, which is again, a pretty sweet enabler. So that's what the new M3 MacBook Air is. If you do that sort of stuff, it's an amazing computer.

It should be on your shortlist. Great all around, easy to recommend. But again, if you're doing the lightweight, normal stuff and you need a MacBook Air, don't get this one.

Get the cheaper one. Okay, that's it. Thanks for watching.

Catch you guys the next one, peace.