Apple was up today on a down day for the markets. Maybe the new M3 MacBook Airs were why. I’ve had my M2 MacBook Air since last summer and I love it. I am not tempted by the new M3s, but it sounds like a great laptop.
MacRumors says that too.
Here are a few more links to first impression reviews.
I found it slightly odd that ZDNet is particularly touting the M3’s AI prowess. The article says the neural engine in the M3 is 60% faster than the one in the M2:
Neural engine to power through AI tasks: According to Apple’s internal tests, the neural engine in the M3 MacBook Air offers a 60% improvement in performance over the previous generation M2 MacBook Air. As you can see in my real-world AI test above using the Denoise feature in Adobe Lightroom, I didn’t see that kind of lift. Nevertheless, it’s possible the Adobe software isn’t optimized for M3 yet. And the overall benchmark improvements provide encouragement that this machine could be ready for more. A big test will be when Apple releases its own generative AI features later this year. It feels like this product is anticipating that, and could already be optimized for it.
But Apple itself said in their media even last fall that it was 60% faster than M1, but only 15% faster than M2:
