Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “New M3 MacBook Air 2024 Unboxing & Review!”.
What’S going on guys, it’s your aage consumer, and today we got the new M3 MacBook airs in the studio. So let’s give them a quick unboxing. Apple.Com should be able to answer that question. Well, thank you, Siri. Let’S check them out now. We’Ve got two versions of the air over here: we’ve got the 13in midnight version as well as the 15in in Starlight. Now I’ve got some questions about this midnight, so we’re going to unbox this guy Apple’s really perfected that all right so right here we’ve got the 13in M3 MacBook Air we’ll get to that in a second Inside the Box. We also have the braided cable. This is the mag safe, braided cable, so it’s got USBC on one end: mag safe on the other and over here we’ve also have a quick start guide safety, information and stickers, ah they’re in Midnight as well and last but not least, we have the charging brick.
Oh, this one has the Dual USBC ports, so it’s a 35 W brick with two USBC ports, so you can charge multiple devices at the same time, but all right. Let’S move these off to the side and check this out, and here we have it. This is the new 13in midnight now what’s different with this guy is that it went through an anodization sealing process, so there should be less fingerprints on the midnight that was the Heartbreaker with the original midnight it looked beautiful. This looks beautiful, but it got fingerprint so easily and we saw that reduction come to the new Macbook Pros in that new black. So hopefully we’re seeing it here as well. Now I got the original, so we’re going to do some comparisons all right, so we got the original and you guys can just you can you can see it for yourself right new one. So from what we’re seeing it looks like while it might still get fingerprints, it’s not going to completely eliminate it. If that’s what you’re looking for.
So it reduce the amount compared to the previous one, but now that we got this out the way going to spend some time with it and let’s talk about what it can do, all right, you guys so let’s get into these MacBook airs now. For me, I’m really familiar with the MacBook airs because they haven’t changed the design much they haven’t changed it at all. It’S exactly the same me personally, I’m 100 %. Okay with that, because I think the airs are in a really good place.
They look amazing. I love the form factor. I like the overall uniform design uh. We know that Mac come with amazing displays plenty bright. It’S a dark screen, but the screens get plenty bright. If you need to uh pump up the brightness at all, colors are accurate. We use them to edit all of our videos.
The keyboard typing experience is the same as with the previous air. So it’s all good things all around like just the standard stuff screen keyboard trackpad. All of it is solid, it’s portable because they’re, obviously the airs and even speakers sound, really good, considering the fact that they’re in such slim designs, so with all the typical user experiences that you get from a laptop, the air is in a really good place.
This design is one I hope that they keep for a while, because it’s really good, I mean even the 1080p webcam over here is solid and you guys can hear the mics that are built into the air. And honestly, I don’t know, maybe it’s all the lights, but I feel like like I look kind of kind of nice right now, but it might be the LIE now in terms of configurations. You have the 13 and 15in option. M3 is the only processor available if you’re looking at the M3 lineup and you get up to 24 gigs of RAM 8 gigs is available, but take my word for it.
Don’T go for that one and you also get up to 2 terab of storage. But now let’s talk about what is new and that’s the M3 chip, so M3 has been out for a little bit now on the MacBook Pros now they’ve come and made their way onto the airs. Now now I’m going to throw like the numbers up, so you guys can see them for yourselves, but to put it simply, you’re going to see the better performance jumps when you compare this to the M1 chip and like models before that, like the Intel models. So, on the performance side of things, unless you’re doing super crazy work, uh the air is a really really solid machine. Even I’ve been able to use the M2 air to get some of the stuff that I do in the studio here, like you know, a little bit of editing short form stuff and we’re just going to do a super.
Just quick export. You can see it runs through this like butter. This is like nothing to it. Uh we’re going to export this real quick, like I said, if you’re coming from an M2, don’t like don’t even look over here! All right like this is not for you, but if you’re coming from something like the M1 MacBook Air, that’s where you’re going to see the difference, the same project that we showed you exported in 3 minutes and 40 seconds on the M3. While on the M1, it took it 5 minutes and 5 Seconds for for a shorter video like this, which happens to be under 3 minutes, you’ll, probably see that with bigger projects, there’ll be an even larger Gap.
Now other benefits M3 brings to the table is Hardware accelerated, Ray tracing, so we’re now going to be able to see you know those lighting effects in certain games uh as well as other applications. So if you don’t necessarily want to invest in like a MacBook Pro, but you still want to have access to some of those features in software or games like that with the M3 air you’ll, now be able to access that, and I got to say on the Gaming side of things I’m just curious how many years we are away from serious AAA games coming over to the Mac. We’Ve been talking about this for a while now, but seeing real legit raate tracing on the system itself is dope being able to play a game like death stranding and have it at 120 frames per second with ra tracing. We’Ve actually got this thing running at so we actually got it at 2560 by 1440.
You know standard resolution at 120 frames per second graphics on very high. That’S the highest it’s offering and it runs really really well, and you can see that there’s just a lot going on with the rain there’s like rain droplets on the screen, you can see the detail on the actual character. I’M impressed this game that those are that’s higher frame in PS5 I have, which is not something anybody would expect right, but yeah as we get, I mean more serious titles on you know devices like this. You got to remember.
This is a super thin device with no fans and Meanwhile we’re playing huge titles and it runs super smoothly. If we’re not seeing Series aleaa titles on the Mac in 5 years, I’m going to be pretty disappointed, so definitely some great additions in terms of gaming. Now one other thing that we haven’t really talked about yet is the two USB ports on the sides.
The two Thunderbolt 3 ports can now actually display two external displays, which is awesome, but you can’t you can’t use three. You can’t use the max display at the same time, so it has to be closed. Jay was making a joke that this could actually just replace Mac minis, which kind of makes sense. You know it it’d be maybe a little bit more expensive, but you can have something completely portable whenever you want. The only thing about this setup right here is that you, you completely lose access to Thunderbolt ports.
You still get like USBC ports on the displays, but, like you just don’t have access to legit Thunderbolt when you’re using both of them. For this I mean you could also just not use two monitors and just use a single one, with the display on the air itself still have your Thunderbolt port, and you still have two displays now. If you’ve used a MacBook with apple silicon, you know the battery life is pretty legit and there’s like no real changes here. 18 hours of battery life, it lasts all day like unless you’re doing some like crazy work or maybe a ton of gaming between the M2 and M3 with regular usage.
It’S going to last you a couple days in my experience, and one last thing I’ll say about the anodized seal of the midnight version is that after handling it for a while, the fingerprints still rack up quite a bit now to be fair, I have pretty oily Skin, but compared to my space, Black Mac Pro that I daily you can see it’s quite a bit more visible, even though they’ve been through the same anodization process. Honestly, it just seems like a tough thing to beat for certain colors now. Is this a laptop worth? Picking up absolutely just get the right configuration, don’t go for the 8 gigs of RAM and everything else is just solid from a performance form factor and just overall quality perspective like this thing is absolutely awesome, like I said earlier, if you’ve got the M2, this is Not for you for everyone else, though it is a no-brainer of an upgrade even for M1. I feel like it’s going to move in the direction that iPhones move in where, if you have the previous generation chances, are you don’t really need to upgrade uh? But if you have anything a little bit further back chances are you’ll, probably see some nice improvements.
I mean I love the air, there’s a reason why it’s so popular. If I had to change anything I would say I you know, I wish it had more ports. I know it’s hard with a body this thin, but I definitely would like to see you know three Thunderbolt ports, not the a gig and just getting rid of the a gigs of r that that too, that and less fingerprints on the midnight and I’m sold .