First Apple MacBook Air M3 benchmarks show 20% more performance
Apple introduced the M3 series chipsets at its “Scary Fast” event in October. We’ve already seen them in various products like the MacBook Pro and the iMac. But yesterday Apple introduced the new MacBook Air models with M3 chip in sizes 13 and 15 inches. What’s special about it is that the chip uses a passive cooling solution, which leads to a different performance profile.
So how fast is the Apple M3 chipset? The first results have already appeared in the Geekbench database and show that the single and multi-core tests have increased by around 20% compared to the Apple MacBook Air M2. Compared to the original MacBook Air M1, the difference is between 30 and 40%.
However, the main improvement of the M3 generation is in the graphics performance of the GPU. And that’s something Geekbench doesn’t test for. However, the Apple MacBook Air M3 also lacks the active cooling of a MacBook Pro. For the short duration of the Geekbench test, the difference isn’t big, at least compared to the same base M3 chip. However, under continuous load such as video editing or 3D rendering, the performance curves will quickly diverge significantly.
In addition, the Pro models are also available with the M3 Pro and M3 Max chipsets if you need even more processing power.
The Apple MacBook Air M3 starts at €1,299.00 / $1,099 for the 13-inch model and €1,599.00 / $1,299 for the 15-inch model. In both cases, an 8-core CPU with 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage is installed. The GPU is different, though – 8 cores on the 13 inch model and 10 cores on the 15 inch model. For comparison: The 13-inch Air with M2 processor costs €1,199.00 / $999 with an 8-core CPU and GPU and 8/256 GB of memory.
