Apple’s M3 MacBook Air announcement drops some big hints about Apple’s upcoming focus on AI
Apple on Monday announced an update to its best-selling laptop, the MacBook Air. The big headline new feature is that the MacBook Air (in both 13-inch and 15-inch models) now comes with Apple’s M3 chip. Apple likes to compare the M3 with the M1 because it makes the performance gains look more impressive than if they were to compare the M3 with the M2, and they say that the MacBook Air with M3 plays games up to 60% than the M1 model, with video editing in Final Cut Pro 60% faster, and Excel spreadsheets 35% faster.
In welcome news, the MacBook Air now supports two external displays. The M1 and M2 Mac laptops only supported a single external display. That meant that if you wanted to run more than one external display, you had to buy a MacBook Pro. This will be huge for enterprise customers that standardize on two external displays for their employees. Note: you must close the lid in order to support two external displays with the M3 MacBook Air. That’s a worthwhile trade-off.
But perhaps the biggest news is just how much Apple had to say about AI in the press release:
With the transition to Apple silicon, every Mac is a great platform for AI. M3 includes a faster and more efficient 16-core Neural Engine, along with accelerators in the CPU and GPU to boost on-device machine learning, making MacBook Air the world’s best consumer laptop for AI. Leveraging this incredible AI performance, macOS delivers intelligent features that enhance productivity and creativity, so users can enable powerful camera features, real-time speech to text, translation, text predictions, visual understanding, accessibility features, and much more.
With a broad ecosystem of apps that deliver advanced AI features, users can do everything from checking their homework with AI Math Assistance in Goodnotes 6, to automatically enhancing photos in Pixelmator Pro, to removing background noise from a video using CapCut. Combined with the unified memory architecture of Apple silicon, MacBook Air can also run optimized AI models, including large language models (LLMs) and diffusion models for image generation locally with great performance. In addition to on-device performance, MacBook Air supports cloud-based solutions, enabling users to run powerful productivity and creative apps that tap into the power of AI, such as Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365, Canva, and Adobe Firefly.
This is significant because it hints at a change in messaging from Apple. During last year’s WWDC keynote, Apple seemed to be taking pains to avoid the phrase “AI,” instead referring to their efforts in specific subsets of AI including machine learning and transformer-based language models.
Apple of course knows that “AI,” by which people mostly mean prompt-based generative text and images, is the hottest thing in tech right now, and it’s widely believed that Apple will be revealing its own plans for this type of AI this summer. I think their new approach to AI messaging is prepping the press and other Apple-watchers to be ready for that announcement.
Earlier this year, Apple CEO Tim Cook addressed the topic during a quarterly earnings call with financial analysts:
In terms of generative AI, which I would guess is your focus, we have a lot of work going on internally as I’ve alluded to before. Our M.O., if you will, has always been to do work and then talk about work and not to get out in front of ourselves, and so we’re going to hold that to this as well. But we’ve got some things that we’re incredibly excited about that we’ll be talking about later this year.
We’re probably only about three months away from finding out exactly what Apple’s near-term generative AI plans are. I look forward to breaking that all down for you here this summer.