Since Blackmagic doesn't play nice with Intel chipsets we don't run it on Windows laptops we review, so I can only share with you how these new M3 Airs compare against their predecessors.Īnd the news is generally good, if unexciting: Apple's M3 Airs appear to perform as well or better than their predecessors in the Blackmagic tests. We also ran the M3 Airs through the Blackmagic disk speed testing tool to get a sense of how fast their SSDs are, and how they compare to older Macs. In some scenarios the Intel laptops could complete tasks faster than Apple's M3 Airs, especially if the apps being used are optimized to use multiple cores at once, but most of the time you likely wouldn't notice a difference. That's worth knowing, but what's also worth knowing is that these test score disparities likely amount to barely-noticeable differences in real-world performance. As you can see, Acer's Swift Go 14 and Dell's XPS 14 both fell behind the M3 Airs in single-core performance, but managed to beat Apple's M3 laptops in the multi-core performance tests. What's more interesting is the difference between Geekbench 6 results for the M3 Airs and the most recent Windows laptops we've tested packing the latest Intel Meteor Lake chips. So if you're concerned about a significant power difference between sizes of M3 Air, don't be - each of these new Airs runs circles around its predecessors, confirming early reports that M3 MacBook Air benchmarks show big gains over M2.

The 13-inch M3 Air and 15-inch M3 Air easily sped past older models and were basically neck-and-neck in this and all tests, coming within a hundred points of each other on each test. The first big test we run is Geekbench 6, a cross-platform benchmark which helps us gauge how fast a CPU is by running it through a single-core and multi-core test, then spitting out a score for each that we can compare against other PCs. We're currently running performance tests on both the 13-inch and 15-inch M3 Airs, and while we've finished most of our work, we're still waiting to complete a few final tests.īut even though we haven't finished gathering data, I can already share a lot of key test results that will help you understand how much faster these new M3 Airs are compared to their predecessors. Now let's talk performance testing, where we really find out how fast this thing is under the hood. These new Airs are also notably brighter than some of the most recent Windows 11 laptops we've tested, like the Acer Swift Go 14 and the Dell XPS 14.

We test the screen's brightness in five different zones and average them out to come up with the average brightness, which is measured in nits.Īs you can see, the new M3 Airs basically achieve the 500 nits of brightness Apple advertises, but they're not as bright as the latest MacBook Pros, which are advertised as achieving up to 600 nits of brightness or higher when viewing HDR content. What's more relevant to most people is the average brightness of a laptop display, because that helps you know how usable it is near windows or in direct sunlight. (Image credit: Tom's Guide)īut you really don't need to worry about those numbers unless you do a lot of work that requires color accuracy. The new MacBook Air M3s get as bright as Apple advertised, up to 500 nits in zones of peak brightness.

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