Apple unveils M3 chip editions of 13 & 15 inch MacBook Air laptops
The M3-powered 13-inch MacBook Air will start at $1,099, the 15-inch will start at $1,299, and both will begin shipping next week.
Apple has unveiled the latest wave of its MacBook Air laptops, powered by its latest Apple Silicon technology, the M3 chip. New 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Airs are available to order now and will begin shipping next week, bringing a new level of power and performance to Apple’s lightweight laptop design. We also learned about the pricing at which these new products will retail.
Apple shared the details of the new M3-powered MacBook Air laptops in a blog post on the Apple website this week. The new MacBook Airs are available to pre-order now on Apple’s online Store and will begin shipping (as well as being available at Apple retailers) starting on March 8, 2024. The 13-inch M3 MacBook Air will start at $1,099 with 8GB of unified memory and a 256GB SSD storage while the 15-inch M3 MacBook Air will start at $1,299 with similar memory and storage. They will be available in midnight, starlight, silver, and space gray colors.
Source: Apple
It’s been about 4 years since Apple began switching over to its new Apple Silicon chip designs in its newest products, and the M3 chip is said to be its strongest yet, reportedly operating 60 percent faster than the M1 chip-powered MacBook Air launched in 2020. In addition to that, the laptops are said to feature durable aluminum bodies, the latest Wi-Fi technology, powerful Liquid Retina displays, and around 18 hours of battery life on a single charge.
With the new M3 MacBook Airs set to launch next week, Apple fans won’t be waiting long to be able to get their hands on them. For more Apple news and updates, stay tuned to the topic as we cover the company’s latest reveals.
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replyTJ Denzer posted a new article, Apple unveils M3 chip editions of 13 & 15 inch MacBook Air laptops
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M3 MacBook Air's out
13" $100 cheaper
https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/04/apple-announces-new-13-inch-and-15-inch-macbook-air-models-with-m3-chip/
looks like great time to buy-
"Models with M3 support up to two external displays with the laptop lid closed."
https://www.apple.com/macbook-air/-
I can't believe they're still selling the base model with 8 gb of ram and 256 gb storage. Wtf. That's been the base model for quite a few years now, and it's getting more and more unacceptable for the price.
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We don't need to rehash this AGAIN - but the 8GB on the air is actually pretty decent.
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Does that make 5G Turkey Bacon?
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Even if that's true because of efficiencies with the architecture, 256 gb storage at this point is an absolute joke for a laptop.
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A joke - because 1 tb of storage costs maybe $100 for a consumer.
For anyone that does anything storage intensive, 256 is comical at this point. The ONLY reason to spec these systems in this way is to be able to upsell that storage at extreme prices. The upgrade from 256 to 1tb cost $400 dollars.
This is blatantly anti-consumer, and I'm flabbergasted that anyone would defend it.
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Most consumer electronic products are sold with many capabilities that the buyer doesn't 100% need. Being nickle and dimmed for storage is absurd.
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dimed*
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If a 'normal' person picks up a new hobby or interest that requires storage, suddenly they've got a brick that needs to be sold off so they can buy a new laptop with an absurd markup for the storage. This just isn't acceptable. If these units can be produced for nearly the same price with more capability, they should be. Doing anything else - as I've said - is designed to gouge money for upgrades.
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dude, this is the base configuration for their entry-level laptop, and it comes with more storage than a normal person would ever need. you are fully out of your mind over something that doesn't matter at all.
"if a normal person picks up a new hobby..." yeah no. these laptops are used to check facebook, and that's pretty much it.-
You can check facebook on a device that's worth less than 1000 dollars.
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Lots of people do light photo/video editting, gaming, etc. Most hobbyists aren't buying pros to mess around with this stuff. Although they might feel compelled when a 1tb hard drive costs $400 usd.
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If I go shopping for a laptop at my local big box store right now, I’ll have to go out of my way to find a PC that has less than 512 GB storage. That’s the standard for the cheap models (the ones that are half the price of a new M3 Air).
My Thinkpad has 1 TB of storage and I’m using around 300 GB of it.
There’s no reason to defend Apple here. “It’s more than most people need.” No, it’s Apple offering less than the bare minimum at twice price and charging you an arm and a leg for an upgrade. But it’s fine, because Apple is magic and their customers use their products as identity markers.
Seriously, my mid-range Android phone that came out a year ago has 256 gigs of storage.
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Lmao, my mom uses like 50GB, if that.
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I apologize for the lmao, it was uncalled for. What I meant was for a lot of normies, it's fine.
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If you don’t play games or edit video what is using your hard drive space these days?
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You buy your kid a macbook air. They are only interested in streaming videos. 6 months down the road, they get interested in games or video editing. This laptop, which could have been sold for damn near the same price with 1tb of storage, now needs to be sold to buy something with absurd markups on storage.
The choice to sell these with 256gb has nothing to do with 'what normal people need', and everything to do with 'what normal people will tolerate, while we gouging every last penny from consumers'. If we demanded better from apple, we would get better. If we weren't tolerant of being gouged, we wouldn't be gouged. Stop fucking making excuses for this god damn company.
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so to be clear your answer is 'yes most people do not need more than 256gb'
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Do you use every last bit of capability in every device you've ever purchased? Why isn't every device sold with capabilities pared down to the absolute minimum, and then gated behind hyper expensive upgrades? Most people won't use them, anyway!
It's nice when devices include capabilities that you MIGHT want to use, or that could be useful in the future if your needs change. This is especially true when the actual cost to the producer of the product is negligible in either configuration.
Again, you're excusing what is clearly behavior meant to gouge consumers. Why are you doing that?
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dude you can complain about their prices all you want, have at it. Apple is expensive, nobody is pretending they aren't
but
there is nothing wrong at all with having your entry level model come with 256gb of storage, no matter how much you seem to think it is. the vast majority of those laptops sold wont ever use even half of that. there's literally no real reason to provide more.-
It feels like you're talking past the points made in my post.
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I try to buy the device whose capabilities most match my expected uses so I'm not paying for functionality I will never use
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My god, man. Why are you being so obtuse? The whole point is that a 1tb hard drive should only cost $50 dollars more, but apple is charging $400. If you were given the choice between a 256 gb laptop and a 1tb laptop, would you choose the 256 gb version to save 50 dollars on a 1000+ dollar purchase?
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Which laptop manufacturer is offering an upgrade from 256gb to 1tb for $50? Even dell is charging twice that for only a 512gb upgrade. A computer manufacturer is not in the business of offering you part upgrades at cost.
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It's $400 fucking dollars, dude.
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Oh my god, I feel like I'm speaking to apple-programmed robots. You people are too much,
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bruh, you need to relax
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I spent way too much time yesterday trying to convince a right-wing fucking nutcase that urban design improvements in our cities are not a leftwing conspiracy to take away cars and turn western democracies into authoritarians states. It feels like I'm speaking to the same fucking nutcases, but about apple's shitty product. I'm properly burned out.
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But it’s not a shitty product. You can argue about the price and the HDD all day long, sure, but it’s not a shitty product, not even close. There’s not a single laptop on the market that comes anywhere near the quality and usability of MacBooks, flat out. Partly that’s because Windows is awful to use for the majority of casual users, but also because of smaller things, like the fact that every other trackpad is absolute garbage or that the keyboard simply feels nicer to use. The performance and specs and whatnot might be on par, but aesthetics matter, form matters, and no one does it better than Apple. For some people, that’ improved exterior is worth the extra price of the subpar innards.
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then don't spend $400 on it and buy an external NVMe SSD. It's better value by $/gb than any internal upgrade that Apple or Dell offers. For the same $100 Dell is charging for upgrading from 512gb to 1tb you could buy twice as much external storage.
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I feel like I'm speaking to a zombie.
It would cost apple virtually nothing to spec these with more storage. Giving consumers more for their money, even if they don't use every feature, is a pretty normal way to build products for consumers. We all have dozens of devices that have more features than we use, and but those features are often a selling point.
Apple is relying on their brand cache to blind people into accepting the lowest possible value when buying these machines, and also relying on people like you to come out of the word-work to defend their practices. Specing them with less is entirely to force the minority who need the extra storage to pay exorbitant prices, and nothing to do with 'what people need', but 'what people will accept'.
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It would cost them the lost revenue of people that upgrade. They're crushing for a reason.
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This is exactly why we're talking about it. People should be made aware of how much value apple is extracting from these units and refuse to buy them without upgraded storage as a baseline.
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I just told my wife and she did not care.
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Apathy is the second part of the problem, yes
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Yes, that ends up being the solution, unfortunately.
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i appreciate them keeping the 256GB option on the Mac Mini, at least, for the perverse reason that it's cheaper to then buy a big fat external USB drive. i'd never pay Apple's prices for the large amount of disk space i actually want. if you need mass data storage then 256->512 isn't good enough, and if you don't need a lot of storage then 256 is already more than you need for OS/apps. 512GB is a shitty in-between choice, it's too little or too much but never the right amount. at 256 nobody is kidding themselves about storing large data on there
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it's fine for now but it really hampers your ability to hold onto the laptop for a while. i get that a lot of people only use browsers and maybe the occasional excel spreadsheet or something, but i think pretty soon even that will require some more RAM, just because of expanded capabilities on the web and the OS itself requiring more RAM to operate. And 256gb is pretty small, a lot of apple owners have pretty large photo/video libraries and the amount of space the OS takes up, the amount it needs to update, plus the photos/videos means you're already taking up a lot of space.
i don't know, i don't think it's some egregious decision or something, but it would've been really nice to see one of the specs bumped up a bit by default just to increase the longevity of the machine, preferably the storage.-
Yep. 8GB is already barely hanging on. A single website page will break over 1.5gb. Add an open pdf and an office app and the os and you’re there. My 36gb is a notably smoother multitasker than when I had 16gb, but that 16-18 range should be fine for most people that don’t need/want a lag free experience.
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Apple says it's 60% faster than M1.
I have an M1 Air, and cannot imagine that.-
Any metric they bring up is alway useless. The new apu is a is a generational step forward (m2 to 3), it comes with a uplift of 200% (never tells you the scenario or how low the baseline was to begin with), with a significant price cut (was overpriced to begin with and they cripple it with 3mb ram and 10gb ssd)....
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Seriously, the M1 is still doing great. I'm not a heavy user, but it flies.
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Best Buy and Amazon both have the base M1 Air available for $749
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/macbook-air-13-3-laptop-apple-m1-chip-8gb-memory-256gb-ssd-space-gray-space-gray/5721600.p?skuId=5721600
https://www.amazon.com/Apple-MacBook-13-inch-256GB-Storage/dp/B08N5KWB9H/
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Yes, and only their Intel offerings supported eGPU
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