Apple has been developing a successor to the 15-inch MacBook Air that will run the company’s upcoming M3 chip and arrive sometime in 2024.
- According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is working on a future 15-inch MacBook Air laptop powered by its upcoming M3 chip.
- The M3 should be manufactured using TSMC’s 3nm process, yielding improved power efficiency and significant speed increases.
- The MacBook Air comes in 13 and 15-inch flavors, powered by the M2 chip. Apple also offers the entry-level $999 model powered by the M1.
Apple working on the next MacBook Air with M3
According to the latest edition of Mark Gurman’s Power On newsletter for Bloomberg, he expects an M3 MacBook Air to launch sometime in 2024.
The current 13-incher was last updated in June 2022 with the M2 chip, a larger 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display, 1080p HD camera, MagSafe charging and more.
Gurman also reiterated that Apple will offer more computers with the upcoming M3 chip, including the 24-inch iMac and 13-inch MacBook Pro.
The iMac overdue for an update
It’s one of Apple’s first computers to swap Intel chips for Apple silicon. It hasn’t been refreshed since and still runs the M1 chip. The new model, Gurman claims, should retain the same colorful design of the current iMac and launch in early 2024.
15-inch MacBook Air a great value
The 15-inch Air was unveiled at WWDC23 in June, with the baseline model with 8 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores and 8GB of unified memory starting at $1299.
The laptop offers a larger display and six-speaker sound system versus its smaller brother’s 13-inch display and four-speaker sound system. Apple accepts pre-orders before the computer’s launch on Thursday, June 15.
According to early reviews, the 15-inch MacBook Air has hit a sweet spot for performance, size and value, with Monica Chin over at The Verge praising the new speaker system and Brian Heater of TechCrunch impressed with power efficiency as he was able to squeeze 19 hours of video playback out of a single charge.
The M2 first appeared in Macs in June 2022. The M2, built on TSMC’s 5nm process, offers four high-performance cores and four energy-efficient ones, an eight- or ten-core GPU and up to 24 gigabytes of unified memory.