2024-03-18 M3* Macbooks

Since I got my first macOS machine, a 2020 Macbook Air with M1 CPU, I have been very impressed by its quality, speed and energy efficiency.

Thus I have been closely watching the progress of Apple Silicon…

From M1 to M2 to M3

2020-11: Start of the Apple Silicon revolution with the M1 Macbook Air (MBA) announcement. TSMC 5nm process, fast, cool. Intel CPUs started looking even worse than before.
2022-07: M2 was only a small step ahead compared to M1 (as expected). Also it seemed a bit hotter (still at 5nm, but with higher clock rate than M1).
2023-10: Apple announced Macbook Pro (MBP) models with M3, M3 Pro, M3 Max CPUs. Again, they only were another small step ahead from previous M2 generation, but now manufactured using TSMC’s N3B 3nm process, thus a bit more energy efficient than M2 and still faster. Also, Apple did major changes to the GPU and added raytracing hardware.
2024-03: New MBA models with M3.

Considering Apple hardware isn’t cheap, I had a tough decision to make for my next machine.

Design: I like that my current M1 MBA is rose-gold color and wedge-shaped.
For the M3 MBA, Apple doesn’t offer that color any more.
Starting with the MBA M2, Apple dropped the wedge-shape and now uses a flatter design as they already had for the MBP since longer.
Passive cooling is completely silent, has no moving parts, no wear, nothing shuffling dust into the machine. But: the machine can’t sustain maximum performance for longer times, it has to throttle after a while to avoid getting too hot.
The M3 CPU would give a nice boost over the M1. But currently it looks like they use same M3 CPU as found in the MBP M3: using the N3B process (with a focus on performance), not N3E yet, with would have a focus on energy efficiency and would be perfect for the MBA.
Better camera, WiFi 6E, slightly brighter screen would be nice upgrades.
Pricing for RAM (8 → 16GB) and SSD (256 → 512 or 1024GB) upgrades is ridiculously expensive, as ever with Apple. 😡 Thus, even the MBA is expensive, when choosing a non-crappy configuration: about 1700 EUR for M3, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD.