Apple MacBook Air 13-Inch (2024, M3) Review

The 13-inch Apple MacBook Air (starts at $1,099; $1,499 as tested) strikes back with more power than ever. Of course, this is as predictable as the seasons, since Apple routinely updates its Air laptops with its latest processors. That steady forward momentum has kept the Air at the forefront of the ultraportable-laptop crowd. This latest version, powered by the same M3 chip that drives the base model of the prosumer 14-inch Apple MacBook Pro, makes for a MacBook Air that does more and does it better than ever before—with some boosted gaming chops for good measure. (Apple has also released a new 15-inch MacBook Air with M3, which is equally impressive.) For Apple’s entry-level laptop, the 13-inch MacBook Air is an impressive system and another Editors’ Choice win for Apple’s crowded wall of trophies.

[Editors Note, March 8, 2024: We updated the review and charts with the final battery rundown test result. The overall rating and conclusions are unchanged.]

Apple MacBook Air 13-Inch Configuration Options

The 13-inch MacBook Air isn’t a machine with many options you can select from, but you’ll still find a few details you can configure to fit your needs.

The base MacBook Air unit is outfitted with the eight-core M3 processor, along with eight graphics cores, 8GB of unified memory, and a 256GB SSD for storage. It contains the same 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display and sturdy aluminum construction as the other configuration choices, and it does all of that for $1,099.

(Credit: Brian Westover)

However, Apple lets you bump up the number of GPU cores for an extra $100, increase the memory to 16GB ($200) or 24GB ($400), and boost the storage to 512GB ($200), 1TB ($400), or 2TB ($800). The numbers shift a bit depending on the combination of configuration options, but all told you can max out the 13-inch MacBook Air for a grand total of $2,299. Our review unit is a bit more modest than this top configuration, with a 10-core GPU, 16GB of memory, and the 512GB drive, ringing up at $1,499. (Like with the peak configuration, this $1,499 combo of parts tallies up $100 cheaper in Apple’s configurator than the a la carte options would suggest.)

If you want something larger, then Apple also now sells a 15-inch MacBook Air based on the M3 (starting at $1,299), or you can save a few bucks by getting the 13-inch model with the older Apple M2 processor for just $999. (Check out our parallel review of the M3-based MacBook Air 15-Inch, which has debuted alongside this model.)

While many of the observations about build quality, design, and feature set are applicable across all of these MacBook Air models, this review specifically deals with the 13-inch model, equipped with the M3 processor. Differences in airflow and battery size may lead to different performance between the 13-inch and 15-inch models, so be sure to check out that full review if you’re interested in the larger MacBook Air.

(Credit: Brian Westover)

Apple’s Familiar, Fantastic 13-Inch MacBook Air Design

Slim, lightweight, and as portable as they come, the 13-inch MacBook Air is an iconic piece of technology, even for a model line first introduced in 2008. Thanks to recent changes in the chassis and the technology inside, the MacBook Air isn’t just impressively slim, it’s also one of the best ultraportable laptops you can get, holding that title for several years running.

Compared with the 2022 redesign, the new M3-powered MacBook Air looks identical from the outside, but that’s far from a knock on it. After a full decade of tapered, wedge-shaped designs, the more recent MacBook Air uses an ultraslim chassis with a flatter profile. It has a consistent width from front to back, and it does not need to exaggerate its thinness. Weighing in at just 2.7 pounds, this is still a stunningly thin and light machine.

(Credit: Brian Westover)

The slim chassis is made of milled aluminum, retaining both the iconic Apple look and the surprisingly sturdy feel that makes the Air feel substantial despite its thinness. And, in keeping with the revamped design, it comes in several color finishes: Midnight black, Starlight gold, silver, and Space Gray. The Midnight color is what I received for testing, and it has an anodized finish that helps reduce fingerprints to almost nothing. Despite this, you’ll still encounter some smudging as you grab and move the little laptop, but it is significantly better than what we’ve seen on other all-metal laptop designs.

One of the other major improvements of the 2022 redesign was the move to a 13.6-inch display. This makes for a slightly taller screen, giving you more visual real estate for everything from typing up documents and browsing the web to streaming media and playing games. You won’t get the niceties of ProMotion variable refresh rates or the eye-popping brightness that the MacBook Pro features, but it’s still a gorgeous display with sharp, legible detail and vibrant colors.

The one potential complaint about the display is Apple’s notched design, which carves out a section of the top border of the display to make room for the 1080p FaceTime webcam. You’ll see the same thing on the MacBook Pro and the iPhone, making it a full-fledged part of Apple’s design ID in recent years, and as complaints go, it’s a minor one.

(Credit: Brian Westover)

The keyboard design is also unchanged, with Apple’s Magic Keyboard presenting flat, square-shaped tiled keys. The backlighting is bright, and the included Touch ID fingerprint reader built into the power button has become standard for Apple products, but it’s still welcome on Apple’s most budget-conscious laptops. The keyboard itself is fine, if nothing new. Its keystrokes are shallow, but the springy feedback of each key makes it comfortable enough for a laptop in this price range. However, if you’re looking to write the next great novel, invest in a proper mechanical keyboard—your hands and wrists will thank you.

The large Force Touch trackpad is comfortably spacious, giving you plenty of room to swipe and tap. The contextual input provided by Force Touch, which lets you use click pressure and depth along with multi-finger gestures, does present the most intuitive collection of controls and menus I’ve seen in a touchpad.

Using the 13-Inch MacBook Air: Same Minimal Ports, More Displays

The slim MacBook Air does not devote much space to physical connectivity, but what was added is as effective as possible. Whether for a display, a dock, or a single wired peripheral, the MacBook Air uses dual Thunderbolt 4 / USB-C ports, complete with support for charging, DisplayPort over USB for external displays, and 40Gbps peak data transfer. Aside from these dual ports, you have a 3.5 mm audio jack for headphones and headsets.

(Credit: Brian Westover)

(Credit: Brian Westover)

You also get a MagSafe charging port, complete with a color-matched cable. The MagSafe plug perfectly matches the anodized finish of the Air, but the other end and plug-in brick do not, opting for standard Apple white. (I’d at least like a black option to complement the Midnight laptop.)

Wireless connectivity sees an upgrade this time around, as the MacBook Air now has Wi-Fi 6E networking along with Bluetooth 5.3.

We’ve already touched on the Air’s 13.6-inch display, but the new M3-powered model does far more than that. It’s the first MacBook Air that can drive dual external 5K displays with 60Hz refresh rates. That monitor support can be used for almost any display, but it specifically means that you can set up your work desk with two Apple Studio Display monitors, and run them both with the MacBook Air connected but closed.

(Credit: Brian Westover)

Note the last detail about the closed laptop. You can run two displays while the laptop is closed, or you can open the laptop and cut the external displays down to one. It’s all a step up from past models, which supported only a single external display, but it’s an irritating limitation nonetheless that highlights the M3 processor’s performance ceiling. The M3 Pro and M3 Max MacBook Pro models do not suffer this limitation.

Testing the 13-Inch MacBook Air: M3 Delivers Performance to Go

Our Apple MacBook Air 13-inch is outfitted with an M3 processor, the same one seen in the entry-level 14-Inch MacBook Pro. It’s a step up from the previous M2-powered MacBook Air, so we compared it with both of those Apple models.

But Apple isn’t the only name in ultraportable laptops, so we also looked at how the new 13-inch Air’s performance matched up against Windows-based systems, like the Acer Swift Go 14, the Asus Zenbook 14X OLED (Q420), the Dell XPS 13 Plus, and the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen 3. All of these are impressively thin and lightweight laptops, driving excellent power for productivity and entertainment, along with long-lasting battery life.

We use several tests in our evaluations, which are designed to measure everything from peak processing power to battery life. You can get a decent idea of what we’re running on our test bench in our guide to how we test laptops, but Apple machines use a slightly different mix of software than we use on Windows machines. Because some of our usual tests are Windows-only, and several of the best Apple-silicon-friendly tests aren’t available on PC laptops, we’re left to mix and match tests to compare Apples with Apples and Apples with Windows.

Productivity and Content Creation Tests 

We start with a trio of cross-platform tests: HandBrake, Cinebench, and Geekbench Pro. In our HandBrake video transcoding test, we use the open-source video utility to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Next up is Cinebench R23, which uses Maxon’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, to test multi-core and multi-threaded processing. Another processor-intensive test we run is Geekbench Pro by Primate Labs, which simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning.

Finally, we run Adobe Photoshop running in Rosetta 2. While Photoshop does run natively on M3-based Macs, we used the same PugetBench for Photoshop test (by workstation maker Puget Systems) that we use to test everything from workstation beasts to kid-friendly laptops. But here we’re running it in the Rosetta 2 emulation layer, less as a pure indication of media-processing capability, and more as a test for how well the system can handle older software designed originally for Intel-powered Macs.

HandBrake results may be among the purest measures of raw multicore processing power, completing a timed processing task that has real-world application. In this case, the M3 Air served up a decent 6 minutes and 37 seconds. That puts it right between the older M2-powered MacBook Air and the more performance-focused MacBook Pro 14-Inch with the same M3 processor. The MacBook Pro reported not only a better time in this singular test, but it should also serve up better performance on most tasks, especially over longer periods. The MacBook Air’s passive cooling will pump out similar performance in short bursts, but the fan-cooled MacBook Pro will drive better sustained performance for longer tasks, even with the same chip inside.

Regardless, the MacBook Air puts its M3 chip to excellent use, presenting competitive performance in tests like Cinebench R23 and Geekbench 5, easily beating other ultraportable systems like the Dell XPS 13 Plus (2023) and the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen 3.

Graphics and Gaming Tests

For an Apple-specific graphics test, we use 3DMark’s Wild Life Extreme, running in Unlimited mode. Unlike our usual 3DMark tests, Wild Life runs natively on Apple Silicon, letting us measure graphics performance between different Mac systems. The higher the score, the better the overall graphics performance.

For cross-platform testing, we use a version of the standard GFXBench test, here running on Apple’s Metal graphics API. It stress-tests both low-level routines, like texturing, and high-level, game-like image rendering. We run two subtests, Aztec Ruins (1440p), which relies on the OpenGL application programming interface (API), and Car Chase (1080p), which uses hardware tessellation. We record the results in frames per second (fps); higher numbers are better.

Finally, in Rise of the Tomb Raider, our only “true” gaming test, we get a sense of the system’s actual high-end gaming capabilities. Yes, it’s an older game, but it’s one of the few in the Steam library that both runs on Mac and uses a built-in benchmark utility. We record the average fps at different detail settings. Higher numbers are better.

Graphics and game performance further illustrate the differences and similarities between the M3-powered Air and the MacBook Pro 14-Inch with the same chip. Both use the 10-core GPU option and, in tests like 3DMark Wild Life Extreme and GFXBench, the results are nearly identical.

Fire up a more demanding gaming test, however, and the difference is pronounced. In Rise of the Tomb Raider, the 13-inch Air produced consistently lower frame rates—playable frame rates, which was impressive enough, given the system we’re discussing—but with a difference of 10 to 14 frames per second at high and medium detail presets.

The difference was more pronounced at the lowest detail settings, where the GPU can push frames the fastest. The M3 Air cranked out an average of 69fps, but the fan-cooled MacBook Pro 14-inch delivered 94fps in the same test, using identical GPU hardware.

But the other thing illuminated by these test results is the fact that the MacBook Air (yes, the Air!) is adequate for light gaming and media work. Sure, it’s not going to match the aptly named Pro models for speed and capability, but it’s more than enough for the student or casual photographer, and it does so with zero compromise in portability.

Battery and Display Tests 

We test each laptop’s battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software to measure a laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

We expected all-day battery life from the MacBook Air, but we didn’t anticipate just how long-lasting the M3 model would be. In our video playback test, it lasted nearly 22 hours, putting it within spitting distance of the MacBook Pro, which contains a larger battery. With truly all-day battery life, you can simply leave the charger at home, whether you’re using the Air for a short errand or an all-day event.

The display quality is another point of differentiation between the portable and fairly affordable MacBook Air and the more premium MacBook Pro. This model’s color quality is quite similar to the Air version that came before, with 100% sRGB color, but it fell short of the promised 100% DCI-P3 color that Apple lists in marketing materials in our testing. This is also an area where Windows shoppers have more options within the same budget. You can get better color on many ultraportables, and even a superior OLED display, often for the same money or less.

But brightness is another matter. In our tests, the brightest we could coax the Air to shine at was 363 nits. That’s well below the 500 nits quoted on Apple’s product page, but it also is a ways behind the previous model Air from 2022, which delivered 500-plus nits in the same test.

Regardless, it’s not out of line compared with other ultraportables. The Acer Swift Go 14 and Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen 3 both contained brighter screens, but the Asus Zenbook 14X OLED and the Dell XPS 13 Plus were extremely similar.

Verdict: A Predictable Update, But No Less Exciting

As we said at the outset of this review, the iterative progress of Apple’s MacBook Air is predictable but consistently impressive. With the same ultraportable design and a compelling boost in performance and features, the 13-inch MacBook Air is a compelling choice for ultraportable-laptop shoppers. The newest model gains productivity performance, expanded monitor support, and a GPU that can even handle some light gaming, all in a package that’s feathery enough to carry home from the office, pack alongside textbooks, or use on a cross-country flight. Yeah, we still dislike the screen notch, and the limitations to the monitor support (different, this time) are still real, but one thing is true above all: If you want a Mac that’s exceptionally portable, and capable enough for daily life, the latest 13-inch Apple MacBook Air is our new favorite.