2024-03-05 20:26:20 Author: Yao Liwei

Rumors have surfaced suggesting that Apple will unveil a brand-new upgraded lineup of iPad products at this year’s spring event. However, there is currently no information available about the new iPad models. On the contrary, the all-new MacBook Air was already launched for sale on March 4th. This MacBook Air comes in two versions, 13-inch and 15-inch, priced at 8999 yuan and 10499 yuan respectively.

Compared to its predecessors, the most significant upgrade on the MacBook Air is the adoption of the M3 chip. Although there are no significant changes in its design, the M3 chip boasts impressive performance. It is the world’s first laptop System on Chip (SoC) manufactured using a 3nm process.

The M3 chip features an 8-core CPU and a 10-core GPU, with a staggering 250 billion transistors, 50 billion more than the M2 chip. This translates to a 25% performance boost, supports unified memory capacity of up to 24GB, and offers a battery life of up to 18 hours.

Furthermore, there have been improvements in graphics processing. The M3 chip utilizes a new architecture GPU with innovative dynamic cache capabilities, introducing hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shading to the Mac platform for the first time. Additionally, it supports various encoders and decoders such as H.264, HEVC, ProRes, ProRes RAW, and AV1.

Regarding color options, users can choose from four different styles: silver, space gray, gold, or midnight. Moreover, purchasing the M3 version of the MacBook Air will come with a matching MagSafe magnetic charging cable and four speakers.

Despite the powerful performance of the M3 MacBook Air, it has sparked some controversy. The base model still comes with 8GB+256GB of storage, and upgrading the memory and storage will incur a minimum additional cost of 1500 yuan. This has led industry experts to jokingly remark on Apple’s products being priced as exorbitantly as gold.