The M2 MacBook Air was hailed as one of the best laptops, setting a high bar for the competition. With theM3 MacBook Air, Apple took an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach, focusing primarily on a chip upgrade. Other laptops within or under the MacBook Air’s price range might do a thing or two better, but as a total package, no other laptop beats the performance, battery, and portability of the Air.
Apple M3 MacBook Air (13-inch)
The Best Laptop for Most People
The M3 MacBook Air retains the design, display, camera, and speakers of the M2 model, focusing primarily on a chip upgrade. The new M3 chip provides marginal performance improvements, with a new media engine for more efficient video streaming and support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Most notably, the battery life remains impressive, with the ability to survive a full day of intense use. While the M3 MacBook Air may not offer substantial gains for users of previous Apple Silicon Macs, it excels as an entry point into macOS and continues to be the best-balanced combination of performance, battery life, and portability.
Price and Availability
The M3 MacBook Air goes on sale widely starting on August 13, 2025. You can grab the laptop starting at $1,099 in Midnight, Starlight, Space Gray, or Silver, and it’s sold through most electronics retailers, including directly from Apple.
Although we’re evaluating the 13-inch model in this review, know that overall performance will be almost identical to that of the 15-inch MacBook Air. Ports, specs, and basically everything under the hood are exactly the same. The only differences are the physical battery, screen, and trackpad sizes.
Specifications
What Remains the Same?
The M3 MacBook Air retains the same design, display, camera, and speakers as the M2 MacBook Air. It’s still a lightweight build, with a 13-inch Liquid Retina display and impressive speakers that support Dolby Atmos and Spatial Audio.
The design continues to be a standout feature, with the MacBook Air maintaining its reputation as one of the market’s lightest and most portable laptops. The laptop weighs only 1.24 kg and comes in at 1.13 cm.
The durable aluminum unibody enclosure is available in four colors: Starlight, Space Gray, Silver, and Midnight, with the Midnight variant featuring a new anodization seal that reduces fingerprints.
Having used the Midnight MacBook for the past couple of days, it does, unfortunately, still pick up on fingerprints and smudges easily; the new seal marginally reduces the appearance of fingerprints, but they’re still much more prominent than any of the other colorways available. If you pick this color, I highly recommend either applying a skin or having a microfiber cloth nearby.
The display also remains identical to the M2 model, with the Liquid Retina display offering P3 wide color support and the capability to display one billion colors. In general, content looks vibrant, and the text on web pages appears razor-sharp. Coming from the M1 Pro-powered MacBook Pro, the main difference here is the absence of ProMotion and MicroLED, which is expected, but that correlates to a slightly weaker viewing experience for media consumption, as the display doesn’t achieve the same contrast levels and deep blacks as the MicroLED panel.
The 13.6-inch screen size is great, though. It provides ample space for multitasking and content consumption. Plus, it’s decently bright.
In terms of camera and audio, the M3 MacBook Air continues to lead laptops in its class. The 1080p camera, coupled with a three-mic array, ensures that you’re getting a solid setup for online meetings, and when paired with an iPhone, the ability to use the handset’s camera as your webcam just enhances the overall experience.
The speakers deliver clear and balanced sound, with support for Dolby Atmos and Spatial Audio, providing an immersive audio experience. The 13-inch has four speakers under the keyboard that fire out onto the laptop’s hinge, which is different from the MacBook Pros, which have speaker cutouts on the sides of the keyboard. While my 14-inch MacBook Pro still sounds better, I was impressed with how well the 13-inch Air kept up, with no noticeable distortion at high volumes and a respectable amount of bass and separation in such a thin body.
The M3 MacBook Air is essentially the same laptop as the previous M2 variant. In fact, you can read ourM2 MacBook Air reviewif you want a more in-depth look at all the aspects covered so far. So, instead, let’s talk about what makes this year’s model different: performance, battery life, and connectivity, and what they enable.
Performance and Connectivity: Marginal Improvements
The most notable difference between the 2022 MacBook Air and this year’s model is the M3 chip. It’s less marginal than you might expect. Our review unit is equipped with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, and it absolutely flies.
Before we get to the M3 chip, we have to address the 8GB of RAM found on the base model. Frankly, I think for most casual users who primarily engage in tasks like web browsing, streaming video, and using productivity software like Office 365 or Notion, the base 8GB of RAM in the M3 MacBook Air is generally sufficient. These activities typically don’t require much memory, so you can expect smooth performance for everyday computing needs.
However, this base RAM configuration will eventually hinder the longevity of the laptop. As software updates become more demanding and new applications require more resources, the 8GB of memory will become a limiting factor in the future. For this reason, I recommend upgrading the base RAM to 16GB, though I do think the $200 surcharge to get it to 16GB is quite expensive.
The M3 features an 8-core CPU and up to a 10-core GPU, along with a 16-core Neural Engine, which provides a decent boost in processing power and efficiency. Still, you’ll likely not notice it compared to the M2 unless you’re doing very specific tasks.
The M3 chip also features a GPU with a next-generation architecture that includes hardware-accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing. This means that the M3 MacBook Air should provide better performance in graphics-intensive tasks and applications that utilize ray tracing, such as certain video games and 3D rendering software. When gaming, the laptop performs quite well on low-to-medium settings, but I would temper my expectations if you plan on playing anything more than what’s found on Apple Arcade.
The M3 chip also means the laptop now supports up to two external displays with the laptop lid closed, which previously wasn’t supported on the base Apple Silicon chips for MacBooks. If you’re the type to dock your laptop on your desk, this new addition is great, but it does mean you’ll need to buy peripherals as you won’t be able to use your laptop’s keyboard and trackpad while supplying two external monitors.
Apple highlighted the new M3 MacBook Air as being “the best consumer laptop for AI,” which, let’s face it, no one’s going to notice or know what that means quantifiably because every Apple Silicon Mac since the M1 has had a 16-core Neural Engine. But I will say AI tasks and programs like Adobe’s Generative Fill or Generative Expand work well on this laptop.
The final new addition to the laptop’s hardware is the introduction of Wi-Fi 6E, which offers up to twice as fast network speeds compared to Wi-Fi 6.
In terms of benchmarks, this base M3 beats out my M1 Pro MacBook Pro on GeekBench 6, scoring about 29% higher on single-core and 13% higher on multi-core, scoring 3,119 and 12,030 on single-core and multi-core, respectively.
When compared to an M2 13-inch MacBook Air, the gains are fairly decent from our testing, with the M3 Air scoring 18% higher on single-core and 24% on multi-core.
These scores translate fairly well to what my usage experience has been, which is to say, you’ll see a marginal improvement in day-to-day tasks like browsing the web, running Office applications, and some light photo editing on Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. And in testing, I saw a negligible difference in these specific tasks.
Where I did notice an improvement with the new M3 was when I ran a PyGame program from a previous assignment that generated over a million vertices as a visualization through PyCharm. This program was a good indicator of how well this chip handles itself because even with my MacBook Pro, it can cause the system to spin up the fans, but even with the Air’s fan-less design, it handled the program very well but did get warm to the touch.
This also means the M3 Air’s battery drains a bit more than my M1 Pro laptop under sustained loads like this one. But the sub-5 % difference in battery percentage is more or less negligible.
Overall, if you’re coming from any of the previous Apple Silicon laptops, even going back to the original M1, I doubt you’ll notice any substantial performance gains with the M3 MacBook Air. However, I wouldn’t automatically dismiss them as incremental. When you consider the enhancements in efficiency and connectivity, as well as the addition of features like hardware-accelerated ray tracing, the M3 MacBook Air future-proofs consistent performance and software support for much longer.
Insane Battery Life
In terms of battery life, I was pleasantly surprised to see the M3 MacBook Air can survive a full day of continuous use in such a small footprint. For context, I charged the laptop to 100%, and on battery power, I migrated from my MacBook Pro, had a 30-minute Zoom meeting, ran a couple of benchmarks, edited the photos for this review on Lightroom and Photoshop, and I could only drain it to about 65%.
So then I took it to my university campus, used PyCharm to complete a programming assignment, used Notion to begin drafting this review, and to end the day off, I watched Oppenheimer with the speakers and brightness at maximum. Auto-brightness was on the entire time, and I still had around 15% left. My screen-on-time was just under eight hours at that point.
This particular day was the most intense day anyone buying this laptop will likely ever have unless they add in 4K video editing or gaming into the mix, but to get just eight hours of screen-on time without needing to plug in is insane. On more typical days with fewer creativity-focused tasks, this laptop’s battery life can easily spill over to the next day.
All this to say, the battery life is rock solid, and if you opt for the larger 15-inch, you’ll feel confident getting through an intense day of work without worrying about whether you’ll run out of charge.
Should You Buy the M3 MacBook Air?
If you’re currently using a previous Apple Silicon Mac, upgrading to theM3 MacBook Airmight be a hard sell. The performance gains are marginal and may not be substantial enough to warrant an immediate upgrade, especially if your current laptop still serves you well. The M3 MacBook Air retains much of what made its predecessors great, with some incremental improvements in performance and connectivity.
However, I think the M3 MacBook Air shines as an entry point into macOS and the Apple ecosystem. For those looking to switch from Windows or upgrade from an older Intel-based MacBook, this laptop offers a compelling package, one that embodies Apple’s new design language, insanely long battery life, and general quality-of-life improvements across the board with faster Wi-Fi and storage.
As a student, one of the biggest draws for me was this balance between performance, battery life, and portability, and frankly, this new M3 model ensures all those fundamentals are still met. I want to reiterate this point: There isn’t another laptop within this category that matches the M3 Air in these categories besides the previous M2 model. Frankly, that M2 laptop, which is staying in the lineup, is worth also considering as it’s slightly cheaper, raising the value proposition.
Overall, the Apple M3 MacBook Air, as incremental as it is, continues to be the best laptop for 95% of people.
