This M3-powered 15-inch MacBook Air has received a large price cut from Amazon
A larger MacBook Air for less.
Usually, Apple's smaller screen MacBooks are the ones that get discounted, but today's I've spotted a marvellous and rare reduction on Apple's larger screen M3 MacBook Air that's currently available on Amazon. At the moment, it's £1079 for the 8GB/256GB base model from the big online retailer, saving you a fair chunk on its £1299 list price, which is an excellent price on such a capable laptop.
Against the M1 and M2-powered MacBook Airs of recent years, the M3 offers some small but handy upgrades in terms of oomph, with two extra GPU cores on this 15-inch model and an 8-core CPU, although pack more of a punch with better single and multi core performance to allow for more potent results where it matters. It makes the M3 MacBook Air an increasingly better choice for more intensive tasks such as video editing and creative workloads. The M3 chip also supports output to multiple displays, unlike previous Apple Silicon MacBooks, which is integral for power users, while also coming with support for Wifi 6E for super-speedy wireless networking. The biggest benefit here will be to people coming from the last gen of Intel Macs, which feel sluggish by comparable to Apple Silicon hardware, while M1 and M2 users may only experience modest upticks in performance.
As the larger-screen model, this M3 MacBook Air comes with a 15-inch Liquid Retina Display which, while an IPS panel, offers fantasic detail with solid colours and brightness. It lacks the vividity of the Mini LED panels found on MacBook Pros, as well as the higher 120Hz refresh rate, although is still perfectly serviceable for a range of workloads. Internally, you get a 8GB of 'unified memory' as Apple calls it, or what is essentially RAM, as well as a 256GB SSD. The 8GB of RAM here is quite stingy, although Apple's advances with their own silicon has meant you can still get by with 4K video editing and such on MacBooks with 8GB of RAM. The 256GB SSD is of a reasonable size, although if you are dealing with high-res video and such in Final Cut, it may fill up quite quickly.
The port selection of a pair of USB-Cs and one MagSafe port does leave a little to be desired, though. As someone who was subject to the pain of Apple's minimal options for connectivity in previous times, it is a bit of hassle, but you can find plenty of USB-C dongles for reasonable money these days to offer you better connectivity. As for battery life, Apple says this MacBook Air should last for up to 18 hours on a single charge, giving you good endurance for a couple of working days away from the charger, while in its silver colourway, it looks excellent. It also comes with Apple's typically excellent tactile keyboard and the customary massive trackpad.
If you're in the market for a larger-screen MacBook Air for less, this Amazon reduction on the 15-inch M3 model is not to be missed.