New M3 Macbook Airs!

One thing of note is they are finally selling a preconfigured SKU of a 16/512 13in Air that US retailers like Costco and Best Buy will sell. These retailers often have significant discounts of $200-300 so this is a welcome addition.

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Nice! Two external displays with the lid closed is a good improvement. (Wifi 6E is also nice for those who know they have it or will be getting it, but probably not a sales driver…)

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Of course they have 6e now that 7 is official! :slight_smile:

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I’m sure IT managers at Mac-only companies will rejoice at dual monitor support! I’d imagine Apple sold a decent number of Pros to companies just for that alone.

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This is very good news. It also says the midnight version gets the same anti-fingerprint treatment as the space black MBPs.

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It’s also great that the 13” M2 Air is replacing the aging M1 as the $999 entry level model, though idk why anyone wouldn’t pay the extra $100 for the M3, if only because it will be supported longer.

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We also got the MacPad today for anyone brave enough to attempt this instead of trading in their old M1 Air… :smiley:

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After reading the article, I can see why Apple hasn’t been selling this version of a so-called MacPad! :slightly_smiling_face:

Looks like the base M3 MBP is also going to get the same dual monitor support:

Exciting! I’ve been waiting for the Air M3.

I want to upgrade the memory or storage, but don’t have the budget for both. At the moment I have 16GB memory and 1TB hard drive on Mac mini M2 Pro. I’m planning to keep this as a media/backup hub and secondary computer.

I don’t do much in the way of video, but do a lot of photo work. I also conduct a lot of genealogy research (might require more storage in the future) and manage a museum/archive web site. Generally, there are 9-10 apps open at one time (with additional background apps). 16GB seems to be fine but I have heaps of browser tabs open at once, which sometimes need to be reloaded.

Would you go for the memory upgrade to 24GB or storage upgrade to 2TB? :thinking:

Generally, I’d say the tendency is to recommend more RAM (if you need 24 GB), as there are always workarounds for storage, from using external SSDs to only partially syncing to cloud services to storing cold archives on a NAS, since, of course, RAM is not upgradable over the lifecycle of the device.

As for deciding on 16 vs 24 GB, launch the Activity Monitor and look at the memory pressure while you work on your most demanding tasks. If it’s mostly green and only rarely yellow, and if there’s little swap used, then you are OK with 16 gigs.

Edit: This is my M3 Pro MBP – and also the first Mac in over 15 years of using Macs that I have with more than 8 GB of RAM. There’s little I can do (except for firing up Parallels and running a VM) that will push it to yellow. Following a reboot, it stays at 0 bytes used for swap, sometimes for days. I’m using Office, Arc (with several spaces and lots of pinned tabs), Edge, Craft, OneNote, DEVONthink, sometimes I edit a photo or two, there are many apps in the menu bar (OneDrive, Google Drive, Mountain Duck, Backblaze…) and 18 GB seems more than enough for that. The point being, in my use case, going for more than 18 GB would probably be a waste of money.

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I think that the choice comes down to what you think “seems to be fine.” There might be drawbacks to either choice. If you are firm that everything needs to be stored on the Air, then go with the storage upgrade. If you are concerned that you will be running photo work that is memory intensive, then go with the memory upgrade. You might also want to compare the expense comparing the MacBook Pro vs Air. The other issue is how “future-proof” you want the Air to be. From how you wrote the question and my reading of it, it seems the storage upgrade would be what you would be most happy.

Personally, I’d go for the 24GB. 16 may be fine now but will it be in 2 or 3 years after major macOS and app upgrades? Not having enough RAM is going to be way more painful than having a little extra.

The storage doesn’t matter nearly as much for the reasons others have mentioned—you can always off-load files onto an external drive (some are very compact) or the cloud.

Wow, I didn’t ever think to look at this closely before. I wasn’t even working on demanding tasks (just the usual apps and browser tabs open) and it was already yellow with 956MB swap. Only after closing some tabs/apps did it start to go green. I noticed some browser tabs took up 1GB each! :exploding_head:

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