15-inch M3 MacBook Air hands-on: Pretty, pretty, pretty good

Apple announced the new M3 MacBook Air last Monday and it’s available to pre-order now, with shipments and Apple Store retail arrival on Friday, March 8. We got our hands on the new laptop, and before we publish our full review next week, we have some first impressions.

We got a Starlight 15-inch MacBook Air. We didn’t get a Midnight laptop, so we can’t check out the “breakthrough anodization seal” Apple has developed to reduce fingerprints, which was one of the criticisms of the M2 model.

15-inch M3 MacBook Air unboxing slideshow

15-inch M3 MacBook Air photo gallery

15-inch M3 MacBook Air: Preliminary benchmarks

To start with testing, we ran Geekbench 6.2.2 and Cinebench 2024. We’ve seen the M3 in the 14-inch MacBook Pro (and the iMac) and it looks like the M3 MacBook Air numbers are what we expected. We’ll post more test results in our full review coming soon.

Geekbench 6.2.2 benchmarks

In both the Geekbench Multi-Core and Single-Core tests, the M3 MacBook Air was 20 percent faster than the M2 MacBook Air. We saw a 20 percent increase from the M1 to the M2, so the increase here is in line with what we expected.

Cinebench 2024 benchmarks

In Cinebench 2024, the difference between the M3 and M2 in the CPU Multi Core is practically the same as Geekbench, 21 percent. One difference that stands out is the one between the M3 in the MacBook Air and the M3 in the MacBook Pro–it’s only 5 percent, which isn’t really much. But it’s there, most likely because the fanless MacBook Air has to slow down a tiny bit to maintain a proper operating temperature. If you look at the CPU Single Core results, you see that two M3 laptops posted the same score.

We’re just getting started with the M3 MacBook Air. Look for our full, in-depth review of the M3 MacBook Air coming soon.