Apple says the Midnight color finish featured on its latest M3-powered MacBook Air laptop leverages a special anodization seal to reduce fingerprints.
All Apple laptops are fingerprint magnets, some more so than the others. Generally, the darker the surface finish, the more visible the fingerprints.
The iPhone maker unveiled its refreshed M3-powered MacBook Air lineup today, writing in a press release that the Midnight color finish “features a breakthrough anodization seal to reduce fingerprints,” which sounds as if Apple utilized a never-before-utilized process to reduce the fingerings, but that’s hardly the case.
M3 MacBook Air: The Midnight color reduces fingerprints
All aluminum Apple products use an electrolytic passivation process known as anodization, which hardens the oxide layer on the metal surface to make it more resistant to scuffs and other damage. Apple calls this anodization seal “a breakthrough chemistry.” All you need to know is that it helps reduce fingerprints.
Apple uses the same “breakthrough anodization seal” for the chassis of the 2023 MacBook Pro in Space Black. As for its black keyboard, the company uses a double-anodized black well which “elegantly highlights the backlit glyphs on the keys.”
The new M3 MacBook Air is available to pre-order today on apple.com and the official Apple Store app ahead of retail availability which starts on Friday, March 8. The 13.6-inch model starts at $1099, and its 15.3-inch counterpart starts at $1299.
M3 MacBook Air supports two external displays
Compared with the M2 models, the M3 MacBook Air supports two external displays in clamshell laptop mode, Wi-Fi 6E and enhanced voice clarity in audio and video calls with the Voice Isolation and Wide Spectrum microphone modes.
The 3-nanometer M3 chip brings other perks compared with the M2-powered MacBook Air, including a souped-up GPU with hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shading, dynamic GPU caching, AV1 decoder and a fifteen percent faster Neural Engine for speeding up machine learning tasks.