Apple on Monday launched new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air models powered by the company’s M3 chipset. The 3nm processors are the biggest upgrade in the refreshed product line, with Apple claiming the new laptops are 60 percent faster than MacBook Air models powered by the M1 chip. However, the GeekBench scores for the tech giant’s latest products have now been released. According to benchmarks, while it’s still a significant improvement of 20% compared to the M2 and 30% to 40% compared to the M1, it’s not as high as Apple claims.
According to the results shared by GeekBench, the MacBook Air equipped with the M3 chipset scored 3134 in the single-core test and 12048 in the multi-core test. It is worth noting that this processor is equipped with an eight-core CPU and a 10-core GPU, and is clocked at 4.05GHz. If you’re not a performance fanatic, the benchmark scores themselves may not mean much. However, they underscore just how powerful the latest generation of laptops are compared to older Apple chips.
A GeekBench comparison shows that the 2024 MacBook Air model scores 18% higher in single-core tests than the 2023 15-inch MacBook Air equipped with the M2 chipset. In terms of multi-core performance, the difference is 20%. Compared to the M1 MacBook Air launched in 2020, the performance difference widens further. In the single-core test, the latest generation Apple laptop scored 31% better than its M1 counterpart, while in the multi-core test the performance difference was even greater at 37%.
Additionally, it states that the GPU has received significant upgrades on the M3 chipset, but GeekBench did not test GPU performance. Furthermore, the duration of the benchmark is short and may further increase over longer periods of time. Taking these two factors into account, Apple estimates it’s possible that the M3 MacBook Air will be 60 percent faster than its M1 counterpart. However, there’s no way to say for sure.
Both MacBook Air 13- and 15-inch models feature a Liquid Retina display with a resolution of (2,560 x 1,664 pixels) and a peak brightness of 500 nits. These laptops come with up to 16GB of RAM and can be configured with up to 24GB of RAM. They also come with up to 512GB of SSD built-in storage and can be configured up to 2TB. The new MacBook Air models also feature a MagSafe 3 charging port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and two Thunderbolt/USB 4 ports for a variety of use cases.