Apple Announces New MacBook Air Models With M3 Chip

[Mainsail]

It’s not clutching at anything. It’s called being aware of the market. They know most Mac users aren’t upgrading in the short term so are comparing to machines from a few years ago.

Exactly, Apple knows their customers, and very few M2 MBA owners are going to be in the market for a new laptop after just 1.5 years. Heck, Apple still sells the M2 MBA new. They are making comparisons to older models because those customers are more likely to upgrade.

 

[CarAnalogy]

Yeah, why not compare it to the M1? (Because Apple did, yet someone won’t bother reading it and complained anyway? At least they made an effort.)

“Apple says that the new MacBook Air is up to 60% faster than the M1 model and up to 13x faster than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Air.”

letyougooglethatforme.com

Yes thank you I realized that when another poster pointed it out. Still though.

What's the purpose of Apple's product marketing? To increase sales.

Who are most likely to upgrade to a new Mac? People with an old Mac. What does an old Mac run on? Intel CPUs.

How long are Apple product marketing going to do this? Until the market share of Intel Macs is pretty low. It's important for Apple from a resource and cost perspective to get rid of Intel as fast as possible. Having as few user's on Intel Macs helps in this regard.

Why not compare to a modern Intel CPU? People who bought Windows PCs after Apple debuted Apple Silicon, are probably the least likely people to switch to Macs. They're happy with Windows (or Linux). They have a new machine. Why waste marketing resources on them when it won't increase sales?

When you look at Apple as a company organised to make revenue and profit, what they do makes so much more sense. Or logic as you would call it.

Yes this is true. Still a strange thing to point out, in my personal and frequently wrong opinion.

Of the Mac users I meet in the wild, most of them have extremely old hand-me-downs. The ones that have more recent ones don't know or care what processor it has or even what a processor is, exactly.

The people who would be swayed by the Intel argument have already bought M series Macs. "Up to 13x faster in unspecified metrics" oh boy that's what I was waiting for!

And the people who do still have Intel Macs and know it, usually still have them for a reason. Like they're still using the thing Apple took away. Like support for the mainstream version of Windows, or video cards.

 

[hans1972]

$1,570 (taxes included) for the base model in Canada …

Tim hates hockey, maple syrup and flannel.

He loves curling, though.

 

[hans1972]

It's just gotten to the point of incompetence. It's like selling a Ferrari with $10,000 brakes and V12 engine, and then using wooden wagon wheels for tires. These laptops won't come anywhere close to their potential with 8 lousy gigs of RAM.

But that's not the purpose of these basic Macs. It doesn't matter to basic users if they get more powerful hardware than they need.

The M2 and M3 MacBook Airs are the cheapest MacBooks. That's their main purpose.

 

[hans1972]

SSD still soldered in logic board… DON’T BUY. Data loss disaster waiting to happen.

Which is solved much better with good backup and restore routines.

What if your MacBooks get stolen or lost?

 

[Mainsail]

True
I wonder how many people actually do backup?

I know a scary amount of folks who think iCloud is a true backup

Honest question: if all of my documents and photos are synced to iCloud, how are they not backed up if my SSD crashes or my computer is damaged/lost/stolen??? I mean, I can retrieve them on my iPhone and iPad. I can buy a new MacBook and sync and retrieve them. How are they lost?

 

[bousozoku]

My 2018 Intel MBA is NOT fast now, that’s for sure. Will be super-great to upgrade it soon to a new M3.
Re. trade in, it’s to Apple’s advantage, they pay a lot more for old Macs and devices than anywhere elsewhere. So in that case it’s worth it to buy and trade in old stuff with Apple as I see it.
98% of the case it's great services too.

Will buy 16/512 - have 16/256 on my old MBA. I could use a bit more space for the next 5-7 yrs,
But will sit with it a week or 2, in case I change my mind.
First I was drawn to Midnight, but Starlight it will be I think now.

Oh my goodness. You're one of those users the fanatics say don't exist.

I'm sure whichever machine you pick, it will be astonishing how much faster it is.

 

[Cape Dave]

Question: How much more does it cost the manufacturer of RAM to make a 16GB chip as opposed to a 8GB chip? I know apple wants us to believe it is $200 more, but I suspect it is like 10 cents more at the manufacturing level. Any thoughts?

 

[turbineseaplane]

Question: How much more does it cost the manufacturer of RAM to make a 16GB chip as opposed to a 8GB chip? I know apple wants us to believe it is $200 more, but I suspect it is like 10 cents more at the manufacturing level. Any thoughts?

I think if we ever learned how much the true overcharge is … we’d be shocked…irate…livid

I’d venture that its nearly pure profit for Apple.

They are wedded to it philosophically in a way that tells me it’s PURE GRAVY

 

[boak]

Question: How much more does it cost the manufacturer of RAM to make a 16GB chip as opposed to a 8GB chip? I know apple wants us to believe it is $200 more, but I suspect it is like 10 cents more at the manufacturing level. Any thoughts?

Nope. $200 is the additional price consumers are willing and able to pay for the additional RAM. Apple is not going to sell you a component at the marginal cost.

 

[bgillander]

letyougooglethatforme.com

Yes thank you I realized that when another poster pointed it out. Still though.


Yes this is true. Still a strange thing to point out, in my personal and frequently wrong opinion.

Of the Mac users I meet in the wild, most of them have extremely old hand-me-downs. The ones that have more recent ones don't know or care what processor it has or even what a processor is, exactly.

The people who would be swayed by the Intel argument have already bought M series Macs. "Up to 13x faster in unspecified metrics" oh boy that's what I was waiting for!

And the people who do still have Intel Macs and know it, usually still have them for a reason. Like they're still using the thing Apple took away. Like support for the mainstream version of Windows, or video cards.

Now you are starting to sound like you don't think Apple should even bother mentioning their new models at all.

Comparing to the Intel Air seems reasonble to me, as I still have a 2019 Intel Air and it is practically unusable compared to M1 Air I have. In the scenario you describe where the users don't know or care about the processor, that is actually the kind of person that Apple needs to appeal to, since if the 2019 Intel Air had been my only exposure to Mac, it wasn't exactly a great experience. 13X does give some context of just how dramatic the difference is for those people, despite your opinion that everyone that cares has already upgraded.

 

[omenatarhuri]

Looks fine, could be a good travel buddy to complement the main work horse (M2 Studio)

 

[dgdosen]

Apple MBA:

Price US: $1099
Price EU(France): 1299€ / $1411

Dell XPS 13:

Price US: $1399
Price EU(France): 1291€ / $1400 ( currently discounted at 1099€/ $1194)

WTH is going on with Apple prices??
They are basically stealing us.

It's almost like Apple plays currency risk as "Heads I win, tails you lose"

 

[CarAnalogy]

Now you are starting to sound like you don't think Apple should even bother mentioning their new models at all.

Comparing to the Intel Air seems reasonble to me, as I still have a 2019 Intel Air and it is practically unusable compared to M1 Air I have. In the scenario you describe where the users don't know or care about the processor, that is actually the kind of person that Apple needs to appeal to, since if the 2019 Intel Air had been my only exposure to Mac, it wasn't exactly a great experience. 13X does give some context of just how dramatic the difference is for those people, despite your opinion that everyone that cares has already upgraded.

Obviously I'm not a marketing genius. It's just what jumped out at me. And now that I'm reading more on it I see Gruber calls out an entire section they devoted to AI, which is clearly just marketing fluff.

They tailored this press release to hit every buzzword and every marketing point they wanted to make. Whether any of it is particularly relevant or not, it was a well crafted press release.

World’s Best Consumer Laptop for AI

With the transition to Apple silicon, every Mac is a great platform for AI. M3 includes a faster and more efficient 16-core Neural Engine, along with accelerators in the CPU and GPU to boost on-device machine learning, making MacBook Air the world’s best consumer laptop for AI. Leveraging this incredible AI performance, macOS delivers intelligent features that enhance productivity and creativity, so users can enable powerful camera features, real-time speech to text, translation, text predictions, visual understanding, accessibility features, and much more.

With a broad ecosystem of apps that deliver advanced AI features, users can do everything from checking their homework with AI Math Assistance in Goodnotes 6, to automatically enhancing photos in Pixelmator Pro, to removing background noise from a video using CapCut. Combined with the unified memory architecture of Apple silicon, MacBook Air can also run optimized AI models, including large language models (LLMs) and diffusion models for image generation locally with great performance. In addition to on-device performance, MacBook Air supports cloud-based solutions, enabling users to run powerful productivity and creative apps that tap into the power of AI, such as Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365, Canva, and Adobe Firefly.

 

[Lioness~]

Oh my goodness. You're one of those users the fanatics say don't exist.

I'm sure whichever machine you pick, it will be astonishing how much faster it is.

I know, I went through that transformation not so long ago when I bought my MacStudio. So I look forward to it.
Had an old 2013 iMac before the MacStudio, that was crawling and hardly breathing comparing to what the Studio did and still do.

 

[sir_timbit]

Question: How much more does it cost the manufacturer of RAM to make a 16GB chip as opposed to a 8GB chip? I know apple wants us to believe it is $200 more, but I suspect it is like 10 cents more at the manufacturing level. Any thoughts?

Apple and upgrades are like HP and printer cartridges. They will charge as much as they believe the market will bear. turbineseaplane mentioned some deals on Thinkpads with Ryzen CPUs and OLED displays. I looked them up. It's a whopping $80 to upgrade from 32 GB to 64 GB RAM.

 

[adrianlondon]

Apple uses good exchange rate and reduces prices:
people: *buy laptop**

Apple uses bad exchange rate and makes prices outside of the US very expensive:
people: *moan on forums then buy laptops anyway*

 

[hajime]

Apple increased the price of the base model of MacBook Pro 16" M3 Pro but they gave us more RAM. Have they also increased the price of MacBook Air 15" but the RAM is still 8GB and SSD still 256GB? The number of cores is also ******. Isn‘t this a bad deal?

Also why don’t they have 16GB 256GB SSD pre-configured model? Knowing that people would need more RAM so they made it a customizable upgrade?

 

[bousozoku]

I know, I went through that transformation not so long ago when I bought my MacStudio. So I look forward to it.
Had an old 2013 iMac before the MacStudio, that was crawling and hardly breathing comparing to what the Studio did and still do.

I replaced my mid-2012 MacBook Pro quad-core i7 with GeForce 650M with an M1 MacBook Air, fully loaded. The MacBook Pro is not slower than it was but the difference surprises me every day. Four generations of Intel quad-core i7 processors just weren't that different.

 

[turbineseaplane]

It's a whopping $80 to upgrade from 32 GB to 64 GB RAM.

And Lenovo are still making money on that $80 upgrade I'm sure ...
Think how much Apple is making when they charge $400 for that general scale of RAM upgrade

 

[Lioness~]

Apple uses good exchange rate and reduces prices:
people: *buy laptop**

Apple uses bad exchange rate and makes prices outside of the US very expensive:
people: *moan on forums then buy laptops anyway*

Apple pay 'a lot' for the old trade-ins machines comparing to other places where you can buy Appple devices. Then Apple of course charge more for the new machines as well.
But it always feel better to get a good price for an old pal you've hanged with a long time. so we forget the higher price for the new machines 😌

 

[profcutter]

I’d be quite surprised if apple paid any more than this, and probably significantly less given the quantities we’re talking about: 1 8GB BGA RAM Chip x2 for 16 GB: $5.80

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Folks have done the upgrade themselves, they’re in the best position to tell you the cost of the parts. DOSdude1 comes to mind.

I think if we ever learned how much the true overcharge is … we’d be shocked…irate…livid

I’d venture that its nearly pure profit for Apple.

They are wedded to it philosophically in a way that tells me it’s PURE GRAVY

 

[kaycrystal626]

If you have to close your laptop lids to have two monitors. That doesn’t count.

 

[turbineseaplane]

I’d be quite surprised if apple paid any more than this, and probably significantly less given the quantities we’re talking about: 1 8GB BGA RAM Chip x2 for 16 GB: $5.80

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Folks have done the upgrade themselves, they’re in the best position to tell you the cost of the parts. DOSdude1 comes to mind.

So basically pure profit for Apple?
(or thereabouts)

 

[bgillander]

So basically pure profit for Apple?

Yeah, those chips are made out of sand, and that stuff is free at my local beach! What a scam! /s