One trick afforded by the M3 is the new Air’s ability to connect to two external displays at once. Ever since the M1, this is something that has only been possible with MacBook Pros featuring more powerful versions of the chips, and it will be appreciated by those with a home office setup or for businesses with hot desks. You do need to close the lid on the laptop for both screens to activate. M3 also supports Wi-Fi 6E, which means it can connect to 6GHz wireless networks – another win for high-tech office scenarios.

The new M3 is a fast and powerful laptop which may have some thinking twice about whether they need to pay extra for the Pro. Compared with the new Air, the heavier, entry-level 14-inch Pro (which also uses the standard M3) has a fan for better-sustained performance, a much nicer and brighter HDR screen, plus full HDMI and SD card slots. But it also costs $900 more, which makes the Air look pretty good. More performant Pros with the M3 Max or M3 Ultra can cost thousands more.

The M3 also has a significantly more capable graphics processor than the M2, which will be useful for 3D modelling and rendering or playing video games.

Apple’s dynamic caching makes graphics more efficient and allows system resources to be shared more effectively, while support for mesh shading and hardware-accelerated ray tracing makes it easier for complex games to be ported over from Windows. Current games like Lies of P, Resident Evil 4 and Death Stranding run confidently on the new Air, and thanks to Apple’s MetalFX AI scaling, you can push them to decently high frame rates by console standards.

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Speaking of AI, Apple used the term several times in revealing its new Air laptops, but that’s more a capitulation to the current chatbot hype cycle than any new direction the company is taking. Apple has used “machine learning” in its hardware and software for years, and all of its chips since the M1 have had silicon dedicated to its “Neural Engine”, which are both terms Apple has preferred over AI until now.

The expanded neural tech in the M3 means that AI tasks running locally – enhancing an image in Photomator, working with large language or diffusion models – is faster. But Apple still doesn’t have its own Chat-GPT competitor, and cloud-based AI like Microsoft’s co-pilot won’t benefit much from local capabilities, so anyone who isn’t a creative professional or developer might not notice.

Aside from the iterative upgrades of the M3, the main thing the new MacBook Air brings is a sense of equilibrium to Apple’s overall laptop lineup. It now has two options – the Air for portability and the Pro for performance – with each coming in two different sizes and all featuring variants of the M3.

For a budget option, and currently the least expensive computer with a built-in screen that Apple sells, there’s a 13-inch M2 Air starting at $1600. And they all share a consistent square-edged look; the iconic wedge-shaped MacBook Air has, finally, been retired.

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