Apple MacBook Air 15 (2024) Laptop Review

The Apple MacBook Air M3 is available in four colors: Space Gray, Silver, Midnight, and Starlight. See the bottom of the laptop here.

The Apple MacBook Air M3's build quality is outstanding. It has a full-aluminum chassis that feels solid and hefty. The display doesn't twist when manipulating it, and the lid and keyboard deck have little to no flex. The finish is fairly scratch-and-smudge-resistant; you'll get more fingerprints on the Midnight model, though not as much as the M2 MacBook Air, thanks to a new coating. The feet feel solid and stick firmly to the bottom of the laptop.

It's worth noting that many MacBook users have commented on how quickly the keycaps pick up smudges and develop a permanent 'shine' (often seen on keyboards with cheap ABS keycaps), which is disappointing for such a premium laptop, as it makes it look dirty and used. This isn't a grease build-up, and regular cleaning doesn't help much in preventing it. There are third-party solutions to protect the keycaps, like keyboard covers and stickers, but they may alter the typing experience.

The hinge is outstanding. It feels smooth when opening and closing the laptop, and it has just enough resistance to keep the screen in place without feeling overly stiff, so it's easy to open with one hand and adjust to your preferred position. The screen only wobbles a little bit when typing heavily.

The Apple MacBook Air M3's serviceability is bad. To access the internals, you need to remove four P5 screws and unclip the bottom panel. Some of the clips are hard to undo and require care, as the bottom panel can bend. Unfortunately, the only replaceable part is the battery since everything else is soldered onto the motherboard.

• 35W dual USB-C power adapter
• USB-C to MagSafe charging cable (color-matched)
• Documentation
• Apple stickers

Note: When purchasing through Apple, you can choose between 35W dual USB-C or a 70W single USB-C charger.

The 15-inch Apple MacBook Air M3's display looks exactly like the 13-inch in terms of sharpness, as they have the same pixel density. The increase from 13.6-inch to 15.3-inch isn't huge; it makes split-screen multitasking a little more comfortable, as side-by-side windows can feel cramped on the 13.6-inch display. See the comparison (in the 'more space' scaling) here. You can hide the notch if it bothers you, but you'll lose some screen space and have a thicker bezel at the top.

The Apple MacBook Air M3 is only available with a 60Hz display. Its slow response time causes noticeable ghosting, which isn't ideal for viewing fast-moving content or gaming.

The display's contrast ratio is good and within the typical range of most IPS panels. However, it's relatively low compared to other display technologies like VA and OLED. This contrast level makes blacks look gray in dim settings.

The display is bright enough for use in most settings, even outdoors in broad daylight. However, you may have trouble seeing some content in direct sunlight, especially with dark-colored content. It gets very dim at the lowest brightness setting, which is great for dark room viewing as it causes less eye strain.

The display's reflection handling is outstanding. Its glossy finish does a good job of reducing the intensity of direct, mirror-like reflections and indirect reflections from bright ambient lighting. You can still see some reflections when viewing bright-color content with the screen at max brightness, but they aren't overly distracting.

The display's horizontal viewing angle is okay. The image dims and washes out fairly quickly when moving to the side. The picture quality is still good enough to share text documents and other casual content with someone else, but it isn't ideal for work that requires perfect accuracy.

The vertical viewing angle is okay. Again, the image looks dimmer and more washed out from above or below. You need to look at the screen more or less straight on to see an accurate image.

The Apple MacBook Air M3's out-of-the-box display accuracy is superb. Most color and white balance inaccuracies are extremely minor and hard to spot. The color temperature is slightly cooler than the standard 6500K target, giving the image a slight, near-imperceptible blueish tint. The gamma follows the sRGB curve almost perfectly except in very dark and bright scenes, which are a little too dark.

The display's color gamut is outstanding. It has full sRGB and near-full DCI P3 coverage, the color spaces used in most SDR and HDR content, respectively. Its Adobe RGB coverage is excellent but not enough for professional print photography as it's missing the saturated greens that define Adobe RGB.

The backlight technically flickers, but the flickering isn't noticeable to most people as the frequency is very high.

The Apple MacBook Air M3 has a great keyboard. It's the same keyboard as its predecessor, the Apple MacBook Air 15 (2023). Its layout feels spacious and is easy to get used to. The keycaps feel smooth and high-quality, but as mentioned in the Build Quality section, they pick up oil and quickly develop a permanent shine with regular use. The keys are stable and tactile; however, they have a very short travel, and combined with the keyboard deck's stiffness, it can feel like typing on a hard surface, resulting in fatigue. Typing noise is relatively low and isn't bothersome in quiet environments. As for the backlighting, you can adjust the brightness manually through the settings or let the system adjust it automatically based on the amount of ambient lighting.

The Apple MacBook Air M3's touchpad is outstanding. It's large (roughly 33% bigger than the Apple MacBook Air 13 (2024)'s touchpad), smooth, and responsive to all movements and gestures. Like most recent MacBooks, it uses haptic feedback to simulate the clicks instead of physical buttons, allowing you to click anywhere. The haptic engine provides great tactile feedback and is relatively quiet.

The speakers get very loud with minimal compression artifacts at higher volume levels. They sound clear, full, and natural, with a good amount of bass. Although the frequency response chart looks quite different from the M2 Apple MacBook Air 15 (2023), both laptops sound nearly identical in person. The only perceivable difference is that this newer model sounds more spacious, and vocals aren't as forward as on the M2.

The Apple MacBook Air M3 has an excellent webcam. The image looks detailed, with true-to-life colors and proper exposure. Voices sound loud and clear over the microphone with little to no background noise.

The Apple MacBook Air M3 has the same port selection as its predecessor, the Apple MacBook Air 15 (2023). Both USB-Cs support USB 4/Thunderbolt 3 data transfer speed (up to 40Gbps), USB 3.2 Gen 2 (up to 10Gbps), DisplayPort, and charging. The only change in the new M3 model is its support for an additional external display (2 total); however, this only works with the laptop closed. This means you can use the built-in display alongside an external monitor with a max resolution of 6k @ 60Hz or two external displays, one with a max resolution of 6k @ 60Hz and the second with a max resolution of 5k @ 60Hz.

We can't confirm which wireless adapter the Apple MacBook Air M3 uses. Wi-Fi 6E gives access to the 6GHz band, providing faster speeds, lower latency, and less signal interference than previous Wi-Fi standards. However, you need a router that supports Wi-Fi 6E to benefit from these features.

The Apple MacBook Air 15 2024 is only available with an M3 SoC. This chip is identical to its M2 predecessor in core composition, meaning it has four performance and four efficiency cores. The M3 chip brings slightly better performance, as well as new features like an AV1 decoding engine (which makes playback of AV1-encoded video more efficient, resulting in longer battery life) and hardware-accelerated ray tracing. The M3 SoC is mainly designed for general productivity tasks like web browsing, text processing, video playback, spreadsheets, and presentations. It can handle more intensive tasks like programming and A.I. development, but due to this laptop's fanless design, it'll throttle under load, so you aren't getting the full performance in heavy, sustained workloads. Video editing is possible, thanks to the dedicated video decode/encode engines, but again, you might not get the smoothest experience if the material is overly complex, and video rendering times will be noticeably longer than on a laptop with active cooling, like the Apple MacBook Pro 14 (M3, 2023).

Unlike the Apple MacBook Air 13 (2024), this 15-inch model is only available with a 10-core GPU M3 SoC, giving you slightly better performance than the base M3 SoC with eight GPU cores on the 13-inch model. This integrated GPU is mainly designed for general productivity tasks; however, it's fast enough to handle some gaming at 1080p if it's an older game like World of Warcraft Classic or a well-optimized title like the Resident Evil 2 remake. Games from Apple Arcade will also run well. That said, Macs are still less ideal for gaming than Windows devices, as there are far fewer games that run on macOS, and most of them must run through Rosetta 2 (due to the lack of optimization for Apple silicon), which can cause some performance loss or instability.

This laptop can be configured with 8GB, 16GB, or 24GB of memory. The RAM isn't user-replaceable.

You can configure the Apple MacBook Air M3 with 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, or 2TB of storage. Unlike its M2 predecessor, the base 256GB storage configuration on the M3 model has two NAND chips for faster speeds. The SSD isn't user-replaceable.

The Apple MacBook Air M3 has an outstanding overall score in the Geekbench 5 benchmarks. Compared to its M2 predecessor, the M3 chip is roughly 19% faster in single-thread and 16% faster in multi-threaded workloads. This level of performance is more than adequate for general productivity tasks like web browsing, text processing, and video playback. Heavy multitasking isn't a problem unless the applications involved are extremely demanding. As for demanding tasks like video editing, remember that the video encoders and decoders do most of the heavy lifting, so these synthetic benchmark scores aren't fully representative of the performance. The GPU (with ten cores) is 11% faster than its direct M2 predecessor and the M3 with eight GPU cores. This performance level is great for an integrated GPU but still falls short of even entry-level discrete GPUs like the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650.

The Apple MacBook Air M3 has an outstanding overall score in Cinebench R23. Compared to its direct M2 predecessor, the M3 chip is 19% faster in single-threaded and 11% faster in multi-threaded workloads. This performance is adequate for heavy multitasking. You can run some intensive multi-threaded applications but know that there are significantly faster processors on the market, like the Dell Alienware m18 R2 (2024)'s Intel Core i9-14900HX and Apple's own M3 Max chip in the Apple MacBook Pro 16 (M3, 2023).

The base M3 SoC's GPU renders images in Blender relatively quickly. If you want faster rendering times, you'll have to go up to an Apple MacBook Pro (14- or 16-inch) with a Pro/Max SoC, or a Windows laptop with a dedicated GPU. In the case of the latter, even an entry-level GPU like the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 can render images faster this the base M3 SoC's GPU.

The Basemark GPU score is pretty good for integrated graphics, scoring in the same ballpark as an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 discrete GPU, but it isn't quite powerful enough to handle truly demanding games like Cyberpunk 2077 or Red Dead Redemption 2. While you can play some older or highly optimized titles at 1080p, you'll have to turn down the graphical settings a fair bit to get playable frame rates. Even then, performance can vary wildly because most games must run through Rosetta 2 (due to the lack of optimization for Apple silicon). This 10-core GPU is roughly 23% faster than the 8-core GPU on the base M3 Apple MacBook Air 13 (2024) but isn't a significant upgrade over its direct M2 predecessor.

Unlike the M2 Apple MacBook Air 15 (2023), the M3 model with 256GB of storage has two NAND chips, resulting in much faster speeds.

Borderlands 3 isn't playable on the Apple MacBook Air M3 at 1080p. The gameplay is very choppy, even with low settings.

Civilization VI is playable with only a few tweaks in the graphical settings. The gameplay isn't always smooth, as there are occasional stutters, but it isn't a huge issue since it's a strategy game that doesn't require precise aiming or a fast reaction time. The main downside is the long average turn time.

Counter-Strike 2 doesn't run on macOS, as Valve has discontinued support.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider runs poorly on the Apple MacBook Air M3 at 1080p. Although you can get over 30 fps with some tweaks in the settings, the gameplay is very choppy due to frequent frame drops.

The keyboard gets hot under load and can cause some discomfort. Thankfully, the bottom is much cooler, reaching only a maximum of 39.5°C. There's no fan noise since this is a fanless device.

The Apple MacBook Air M3 comes with macOS Sonoma (14). There's no additional pre-installed software other than the ones that typically come with macOS.

The Apple MacBook Air M3 has a fingerprint sensor built into the power button. You can use it to log in quickly, authorize purchases in the Apple App Store, and auto-fill saved passwords on supported websites.