The 15-inch MacBook Air was first unveiled in July 2023 with the Apple M2 chip, and it was subsequently updated – alongside the more compact 13-inch model – with the newer M3 chip in March this year. While the changes are minimal, the M3 chip does bring some upgrades, including improved performance, faster WiFi, and support for two display outputs.

So it’s no surprise that the updated 15-inch MacBook Air is still an excellent productivity laptop with a large display and remarkable battery life. But it still shares the same shortcomings as its predecessor as well; most notably, the memory and storage configuration of the base model that don’t match the premium price tag of the laptop.

That being said, there’s no denying that the 15-inch MacBook Air is still a solid, very refined productivity laptop with plenty of features to love.

What It Is

Compared to the previous generation M2 model, the new M3 MacBook Air can now output to two external displays even with the lid closed. Thanks to the addition of WiFi 6E, the new laptop features twice as fast WiFi too. Of course, to take advantage of the faster speeds, your WiFi connection has to meet that standard first.

Beyond that, other specifications of the new MacBook Air remain the same. The 15.3-inch 2880 x 1864 Liquid Retina IPS display remains as bright as ever, there’s support for MagSafe 3 charging with two Thunderbolt ports, and it can still provide up to 18 hours of battery life on a single charge (when streaming movies via the Apple TV app) despite packing the more powerful M3 chip. More on these further down the review.

Pricing wise, the 15-inch MacBook Air with the new M3 chip starts at RM6,199 in Malaysia, which features 8GB unified memory and 256GB of SSD storage. This is the very configuration I am reviewing here, and while it’s good enough for my particular use – a ton of word processing, web browsing, and light photo editing – I highly recommend picking up higher-end configurations of the laptop.

Take the RM6,999 variant of the 15-inch MacBook Air, which upgrades the SSD to 512GB. But to me personally, the most ideal configuration with a good balance of cost and performance is the RM7,799 model, which gets you 16GB memory and a 512GB SSD.

The Good Stuff

I’ve been using the M3 MacBook Air as my daily driver for about a month now, and for the most part, it feels just as fast and zippy as the much more powerful M3 Max MacBook Pro. To be fair, my workloads don’t exactly make full use of the M3 Max, so it’s no surprise that my experience with the two laptops are relatively similar.

Granted, the M3 MacBook Air does take slightly longer to process some tasks, especially if it involves some form of sustained workload. Honestly, coming into this review, I wasn’t sure if the 8GB memory is enough to provide a good user experience, and I’m pleasantly surprised that the Air can actually still perform quite well. However, I still highly recommend getting more memory and storage if budget permits, given that there’s no way to upgrade these two hardware after the purchase.

What about gaming? How well can the M3 chip run AAA games on the 15-inch MacBook Air? Well, it’s great! I tested Death Stranding and Resident Evil 4 on the laptop, and it can run these two games at 1080p resolution with very playable, stable frame rates above 30fps. The most impressive part is the fact that I can play these games on battery power without sacrificing performance.

Unlike Windows gaming laptops, I don’t need to connect the M3 Air to the charger to unlock the full potential of the M3 chip.

That is a good segue to the battery life of the M3 MacBook Air, which is as excellent as ever. Apple quotes up to 15 hours of battery life with the 15-inch MacBook Air for web surfing, and I can say with confidence this claim holds water. More often that not, I can effortlessly get a full day (or two) worth of use out of the laptop on a typical workday.

And then there’s the system noise of the M3 MacBook Air, which is…well, absent. After all, this is a completely silent laptop as it uses a fanless design. While this does limit the performance of the chip in heavy, sustained workloads, I personally didn’t notice any major throttling throughout the review period. Granted, as I’ve mentioned before, my workloads – outside of gaming, anyway – aren’t particularly demanding.

When it comes to display, the M3 MacBook Air’s 15.3-inch 2880 x 1864 Liquid Retina IPS panel is a pleasant screen to look at with bright colours and wide viewing angles. While it doesn’t get a mini-LED display with fast 120Hz ProMotion technology like its Pro siblings, this is still a very well-calibrated, high quality screen that befits a premium laptop.

Despite sporting a slim, lightweight chassis – it weighs 1.51kg with a thin 11.5mm side profile – the 15-inch MacBook Air still has incredibly good audio quality. Not only does the six-speaker system have a wide soundstage with clear separation of the left and right channels, there’s also a good amount of bass with full mids and crisp highs.

The Bad Stuff

As I’ve said a couple of times now, the memory and storage configuration of the 15-inch MacBook Air’s base model isn’t reflective of the premium pricing. To get only 8GB memory and a 256GB SSD for RM6,199 is…well, not exactly great value proposition, even if the overall feature set of the laptop is excellent. At the minimum I would recommend upgrading the SSD to 512GB, which is a RM800 add-on, bringing up the price of the laptop to RM6,999.

At that price point, it’s very close to the starting price of the 14-inch MacBook Pro M3 already, which costs RM7,499 for the same memory and SSD configuration, albeit with a smaller display in a slightly heavier, thicker form factor.

But the MacBook Pro does have more robust connectivity options, which is quite limited on the M3 MacBook Air. The latter only has two Thunderbolt ports, while the Pro model has an HDMI output and an SDXC card reader.

Is It Worth It?

After all is said and done, the 15-inch MacBook Air M3 is still the default MacBook for folks who don’t quite need the power of the Pro model, but still want a laptop with a large display (and excellent battery life) in a thin, lightweight form factor. It just gets tricky if you do decide to fork out more money to upgrade the memory and storage of the Air, as you’d be creeping closer to the starting price of the (technically) higher-end MacBook Pro.

Nonetheless, for folks who are willing to spend on upgrading the memory and storage of the MacBook Air M3, I’m confident it will serve as an excellent, reliable productivity laptop that can last for years to come. I for one thoroughly enjoy using the Air as my daily driver over the past one month, and its lightweight, thin chassis makes it that much easier to lug around in my backpack.