To get the basics out of the way first: Apple’s new MacBook Airs, which began shipping on March 7, are what computer nerds call a speed bump update. Available in 13-inch and 15-inch versions, they’re nearly the same laptops as their immediate predecessors, with Apple’s faster M3 chip swapped in for the previous generation’s M2. They also support the new Wi-Fi 6E wireless networking standard and, when closed, can drive two external displays.
If you already own a recent MacBook Air—or even one dating to the first model to use an Apple-designed chip in 2020—you almost certainly don’t have an urgent need to buy a new one right now. Even Apple obliquely acknowledges this in its marketing materials by mostly comparing the new Airs to generations-old versions based on Intel processors. If, on the other hand, you are still clinging to an Intel MacBook Air that’s showing its years, you should find its 2024 descendants totally worth the price of admission. (That begins at $1,099 for the 13-inch version and $1,299 for 15-inch; Apple provided me with samples of each for review.)
Still, even if the new MacBook Airs are incremental upgrades to what were already fabulous laptops, they’re arriving at an intriguing time. It’s been years since PC makers benefited from an epoch-shifting, sales-boosting moment akin to the advent of multimedia and the World Wide Web in the 1990s, and in the current mania for AI, they sense a similar moment in the making. HP, for example, is bragging that it just introduced “the industry’s largest portfolio of AI PCs.” Longtime chipmaking rivals Intel and AMD have also been talking up the AI PC concept, as has Qualcomm, whose first really serious PC processor is due to show up in laptops in mid-2024.
Among those obviously excited by the opportunity is Apple, whose press release about its new MacBook Air models mentions “AI” 10 times and calls the Air “the world’s best consumer laptop for AI.” (I’m pretty sure I know its pick as the best professional laptop for AI.) The references are a striking departure from the company’s past preference for machine learning, a more precise term that helped it avoid sounding like it was merely hopping aboard an industry bandwagon.
The fact that Apple is only now warming up to talking about AI belies its long-standing commitment to the technology. Way back in 2017, for example, the iPhone X introduced the neural engine, a new processor optimized for AI tasks. In 2020, when Macs started using Apple-designed M1 chips, they got the neural engine, too. The company says the version in the new MacBook Air’s M3 chip is 60% faster than the M1 original. Other aspects of the M3 chip, such as its 8-core CPU and 10-core GPU (8-core in the base $1,099 13-inch Air), also provide the kind of computational muscle required for AI.
When Apple touts the benefits of its AI-forward hardware, it often cites examples that aren’t all that in-your-face. AI, for instance, enables the Pixelmator Pro image editor to preserve crisp detail in a photo even if you dramatically bump up its resolution. Lots of other examples quietly add up to a meaningful part of the modern Mac experience.
At some point, AI could lead to the Mac—and other personal computing devices—making a bigger break with the past akin to the original 1984 Mac’s mainstreaming of the graphical interface. But for now, AI is unlikely to disrupt many of the fundamental elements that make a MacBook Air a MacBook Air.
