M3 MacBook Air Models Now Arriving to Customers in New Zealand and Australia
It is Friday, March 8 in New Zealand and Australia, which means customers who pre-ordered one of the new machines in those two countries are receiving their MacBook Air models.
Introduced on Monday of this week, the updated 13.6-inch and 15.3-inch MacBook Air models are equipped with the same M3 chip that was introduced in the MacBook Pro late last year.
There are no external changes to the MacBook Air, with Apple instead focusing on internal updates. The M3 chip is up to 30 percent faster than the M2 chip in terms of CPU performance, and there are notable GPU improvements with Apple adding support for Dynamic Caching, hardware-accelerated ray tracing, hardware-accelerated mesh shading, and support for AV1 decode.
Other improvements to the MacBook Air include support for two external displays when the machine is used in clamshell mode, support for Wi-Fi 6E, enhanced voice clarity for audio and video calls, and a new anodization seal to reduce fingerprints on the Midnight finish.
Apple retail stores in Australia are selling the new MacBook Air machines, and there is plenty of stock for walk-in customers. Apple does not operate stores in New Zealand, so customers in that country need to order online.
Following New Zealand and Australia, sales and deliveries of the new MacBook Air models will launch in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and finally, North America.
We'll be sharing a hands-on review of the new M3 MacBook Air in the morning after picking up one of the new devices.
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Top Rated Comments
Didn't order one, but still.
Else if 16GB is "enough" for someone, instead of only paying for 8 MORE GB in that upgrade for $200, one could buy the entire 16GB for considerably less than that $200...
Neither example is "cheapest"- shopping around would likely find even better pricing- but just representative of what fast RAM can cost... when there are competitors vs. a lone "company store" able to basically charge anything and if someone wants/needs "the rest", they have to just pay up.
So yes, if Apple just upped the RAM and charged $200 more, many people would likely react negatively. Looking at retail pricing of 16GB for $45, we can assume half of that (the upgrade) might be $22.50 at retail. Given Apple's near 50% margin, shall we assume in that it costs them about HALF of that: $11.25? Maybe fold that extra 8GB into Macs and keep the price the same? It never hurts to throw customers a value added bone from time to time and that one seems easy and inexpensive... especially if we further worked the numbers at Apple purchase volumes instead of pretending like Apple would be dealing with retail pricing all the way down to cost per unit. I'm confident that such a move would be very well received by Apple customers.
I'm an Apple "everything" guy for about 24 years now and this just erodes the halo for me... so much so that I find myself seriously considering a PC laptop to replace my aging MB, something that would not even had a moment of consideration as recently as 5 years ago. But hoorayyyy for them shareholders! ???
Bizarre.
I had 8GB in my MacBook in 2011.