this is the 13-in M3 MacBook Air the latest Mac from Apple and this might be the best MacBook money can buy not only is it the smallest most portable MacBook available but it also makes very few sacrifices in performance and using it for the past week it's got me wondering are we at a point now where it just makes more sense to get the MacBook error over the MacBook Pro today I want to go over why that might be the case and dive into what my experience has been like so far what's new with the M3 air the tests and the work that I've done and going over how much you can truly get out of this machine so if you're in the market for a new Macbook or you're just curious to know what the new m3r has to offer stick around and let's get into [Music] it hey everyone Kyle Erikson here out of all the new MacBooks that have been released since the M series chips showed up in them the airline up has been the one that I've had the most time with I used the recently retired M1 a for full-time software development for a year RP to that iconic wedge design but I also used the 13in M2 version when I switched to doing creative work fulltime and I always found the err to be more than capable for almost anything the last time that I used one of these as my primary machine was about a year ago I've since tested out a bunch of different Macs including the M3 Pro MacBook Pro that's been my main Mac for the last 5 months or so and now getting my hands on the new M3 Air I remember how much I love this design and the changes in the M3 version are impressive look looks wise it's identical to the M2 variant the same exact dimensions and weights same color choices but the M3 variant does differ a little bit in that it has this new anodization seal to reduce fingerprints which I do find does show Less on this midnight version that I have here but it still does show smudges and streaks somewhat easily which is quite similar to the space black MacBook Pro in that regard I forgot just how light and thin the 13-in air is compared to the 14-in Pro Models it's about 0.8 lb lighter and 4.2 mm thinner which might not seem like much but that is between 25 and 27% smaller and it's definitely noticeable it makes the air feel a little bit more portable but one thing that you do have to be careful of is with vertical stands if you have this at a desk a bunch of these stands don't accommodate for how thin this is but lucky for me the one that I use with my pro has changeable inserts that fits really well I'll link that below because it can be a pain to find something that works that's really the only thing that I've had to look out for and otherwise if I'm out in a boat or if I'm traveling at all I much prefer to carry around the air versus the pro part of what allows the air to be so thin is the fact that you've only got two USBC ports on the left side of the machine and a headphone jack on the other so no full-sized HDMI or SD card slot or anything which I'm honestly fine with even on my MacBook Pro I rarely ever connect anything outside of two USBC ports I usually just have one for my Thunderbolt do and the other for my studio display and you do have magsafe available in the event that you're using both ports and they don't have power delivery so it still leaves you room to charge this ports still have Thunderbolt and USB 4 specs but the big difference in the M3 over the M2 is that it will now support two external displays where previously it would only support one that does come with kind of a gotta though as it'll only work in clamshell mode so essentially you're just sacrificing the laptop display for a larger screen regardless if you're someone who likes to have dual monitors in a desk setup it's nice to have a little more flexibility speaking of the screen this hasn't changed at all and is still the same great 13.6 in liquid WR display with 500 nit Peak brightness the color looks outstanding and it's great for any color critical work or just for viewing content I've mentioned this before but the difference in brightness in SDR content versus the Pro Models is only 100 nits which is barely noticeable with them side by side almost all the content that we view in Mac OS is in SDR so while you do get a higher refresh rate slightly deeper blacks and better contrast on the mini LED displays in the Pro Models the air still looks great for an IPS panel without any local dimming it has very deep blacks and the measured contrast is just under 1,500 to1 which is fantastic the only thing that I'll say with this 13-in model is that with any apps where you've got a lot of panels open at once so pretty much any video editing software xcode blender those kind of apps if all you're going to use is the display on the laptop it's it's probably going to feel pretty cramped so you may want to upgrade to the 15in air if that is the case regardless if I do happen to be editing videos on here I can trust that what I'm going to see on the screen is going to look similar to other Apple devices like iPhones or iPads which is what you want to see and speaking of video editing that really leads into what's probably the most important aspect of this machine the performance this particular version that I have here has the M3 chip with an 8 core CPU and 10 core GPU has 16 gigs of RAM and a 512 gig SSD which is the exact same configuration I had in my 13in M2 air and I got to say I don't know how many people need much more than this first of all if all you're doing is basic productivity work using office software you can get by on a lot less than this you're never going to feel any slowness with that kind of stuff but beyond that there's not a lot that you can't do with the M3 air in my own testing with synthetic benchmarks I see about a 19% Improvement in single core performance and 21% in multi-core over the to error with xcode Benchmark running about 20 seconds faster as well in real world use if you're actually sitting down coding on this machine Everything feels super Snappy and just working on mobile and Web projects doesn't really feel any different for my Pro the M3 Pro does compile things marginally faster if you're working on a huge project that takes an absurd amount of time to build you will probably notice the performance difference there more but I rarely ever notice any perceivable slowness with the air over the M3 Pro one thing I will say is that if you start taxing that CPU it does get fairly warm which has been par for the course on these airs ever since they went with a fanless design if I run a 100% load on the CPU the temperature gets between about 102 and 105° C which will throttle performance but I found you have to have a lot going on for it to stay that warm for the most part with anything heavily CPU based this thing is going to have no trouble with it at all and even the M2 air didn't really have many issues in that regard but the GPU is probably the biggest upgrade that you're going to find on this Mac over the previous generation I've talked about this with my M3 Pro a little but the M3 series chips is here saw the introduction of Hardware enabled R tracing and dynamic caching and provided you're using apps that are optimized to take advantage of it you're going to see some pretty huge leaps in performance this M3 chip actually beats the M2 Pro in GPU benchmarks where there's about a 15% increase in cinebench 2024 scores with about three times higher scores than the M2 air and feel surprisingly performant in anything Graphics related in blender I can open up and work on a simple project and things feel very smooth and render times are much faster than the M2 air the M3 ran just under 3 minutes faster on the monster under the bed demo which is wild but it is still quite a bit slower than the M3 Pro that beat the M3 by just under a minute even with those gains in performance you're still not going to be able to throw together a super complex scene with a boatload of ass ass ETS the M3 Pro will get you a little bit further but I still think that you need a much more powerful machine for any heavy lifting but if all you're doing is learning or like I said working on simple projects as a hobby or for fun the M3 air will do you just fine when it comes to gaming anything in the Apple arcade is going to run completely fine on here most of those titles aren't overly demanding and are made for mobile so no surprise there but even games like no man's Sky rust and Resident Evil 4 everything is very smooth with acceptable frame rates at least acceptable for a Macbook I'm more so just tested that out because it seems like a lot of folks were curious about gaming but where the GPU is going to make the biggest difference for me personally is with creative apps that I use every day for me that's mostly Lightroom the Affinity suite and Final Cut Pro I edited last week's video on this machine and had zero issues with anything there granted there wasn't a ton of effects or anything like that I'm usually just working in a timeline with 4K h265 video where occasionally I'll have the aut resar heavy plugin dropped in but for the most part it's quite similar to my M3 Pro for making these videos the air does warm up on me a little bit but even when I've got this all running through my studio display at 5K resolution things are still pretty Snappy and render times are usually identical to the M3 Pro as this has the exact same encoding and decoding engines the only time where I see that drop down lower than the M3 Pro is when I start doing other resource heavy stuff where the heat rises and it'll start to throttle but honestly I think any of these M series machines are great for video editing provided you're not doing anything too crazy if you have huge raw files you're using After Effects a lot or you have a bunch of sfx you're probably going to feel this bogged down but I think in all likelihood for the majority of folks the M3 air is more than enough that being said I know how easy it can be to get hung up in specs with these machines just looking at the difference between each chip but looks like there's a pretty big disparity between them when in reality you're like never going to notice the M3 air has 100 GB pers second memory bandwidth which is down from 150 in the M3 Pro and 3 or 400 in the M3 Max I've never heard of this being a bottleneck and for context even the best PC builds are below 100 so the M3 still has a crazy amount of bandwidth similarly the speeds on this 512 gig SSD are the same as the M2 air and are much slower than the M3 pro drive but I've never actually noticed a perceivable difference in most uses with any modern Mac SSD speeds I'm sure there are some edge cases where it'll make a difference but I wouldn't be overly concerned about it on the flip side to that one feature I think doesn't get enough attention is to do with wireless connectivity the M3 a got bumped up from Wi-Fi 6 to 6E and provided you have a fast internet connection and Wi-Fi 6E capable router there's a pretty dramatic increase in network speed on my 1 GB connection I get almost 900 megabit per second download speed which is about 2 to 300 megab per second faster than regular Wi-Fi 6 and for many of us our network speed is probably the bottleneck that affects us the most so any big gains that we can get there can have a huge impact on productivity even more impactful for most of us is going to be the battery life and like the rest of the Mac lineup this is outstanding Apple says you're going to get up to 18 hours of battery life on the M3 air just like all the other MacBooks and in my own tests I've been super impressed I charged this machine on Sunday afternoon and with a combination of web browsing listening to music watching content and running benchmarks and renders I made it through two full days of use and didn't have to charge it until Tuesday afternoon just be aware that if you do run your system at Full Throttle it's not going to last nearly as long I'd say probably in the neighborhood of around half a day or so max but if you're using it normally with software development any kind of creative workflows or things where you're pushing the M3 chip a little bit without going all out you'll get a full day out of this no problem like I do with most of my Macs that show up on that Channel I will be using this as my primary machine for at least the next month or two so I'm going to follow up with a long-term review on this but so far I've been super impressed with the M3 air it does everything that I needed to from coding to productivity and more creative workflows and honestly I don't know that it makes a whole lot of sense to get the MacBook Pro over the air for most people the B M3 version is going to perform relatively the same given it is the same chip and even the M3 Pro variant only sees perceivable gains in very specific areas is given the air is a whopping $500 cheaper than the M3 Pro MacBook and $300 less than the MacBook Pro with the exact same configuration I think the airor has a better overall value and if it were me I'd probably just use the extra savings to put towards a nice Thunderbolt dock or some accessories to address some of the air shortcomings I know you don't get all the same features like the expanded Port selection and the promotion screen but for me using these interchangeably over the last week I don't know that I notice it enough for that to be a deal breaker and I much prefer the size and portability of the air over the other stuff I'm going to follow up with this video with more of a direct one-on-one comparison between the air in the Pro where I'll try and highlight more of the differences between these two including some of the stuff that wasn't mentioned like sound and mic quality so stay tuned for that but I am curious to know do you guys place a lot of value in anything that's in the Pro or the air that would make you sway one way or another let me know in the comments down below that's all I have for you today I hope you enjoyed this video if you did feel free to hit that like button if you want to see more related content or start a YouTube series where smartphones Go on blind dates based on their specs and features Please Subscribe thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next upload