Apple's new MacBook Air M3 goes on sale tomorrow (March 8). After spending several days reviewing both the 13-inch and 15-inch models, we can finally tell you exactly how they perform in our test lab.

This is important to understand exactly how much of a performance boost you will get when purchasing these new Airs with the new Apple M3 chip.

This is the third generation of Apple's Mac silicon, and while I'm sure these M3 Airs are faster and more power efficient than their predecessors, I'm not sure exactly how much better they are or if they are worth the money to upgrade.

To help you make that decision, I've gathered everything I've learned in this hands-on test of the new M3 MacBook Air here to show you how it compares to the best MacBooks and best Windows laptops to date. those looking to switch to Mac with the M3 or an Apple fan who's still trying to decide whether to upgrade to the M3 MacBook Air or the M2 MacBook Air, the data from our test lab should help you make your decision.

First and foremost, let us tell you what we learned by pointing our Klein K10-A colorimeter at these new Airs. If you want to skip over the speed, battery life, and other important results below this, we won't criticize, but these screens are worth studying.

We measure brightness and test how well the screen displays color and how close to accurate color it is. The chart below is broken down into a form that is easy to read if you know what the numbers mean, and I will gladly explain.

The Delta-E score indicates color accuracy (the closer to 0, the better), and the sRGB gamut percentage shows how well these screens can display the typical sRGB gamut. Both new M3 Airs cover 100% of the sRGB color gamut, and without going over, you can expect a fairly colorful and color-faithful display, although laptops like the 14-inch MacBook Pro M3 and Acer Swift Go 14 outperform the M3 Airs in this regard, Delta-E scores show that they are quite accurate as well.

However, unless you do a lot of work that requires color accuracy, you shouldn't be concerned about these numbers. More important to many people is the average brightness of their laptop display. This is because it helps us to know how usable it is near a window or in direct sunlight. We tested the screen brightness in five different zones and averaged them to come up with an average brightness.

As you can see, the new M3 Air basically achieves Apple's advertised 500 nits brightness, but not as bright as the latest MacBook Pro, which is advertised to achieve up to 600+ nits when viewing HDR content.

Also, these new Airs are noticeably brighter than some of the latest Windows 11 laptops we tested, including the Acer Swift Go 14 and Dell XPS 14.

Now let's talk performance testing. Here we can actually see how fast this product is under the hood. We are currently running performance tests on both the 13" and 15" M3 Air, and while we've done most of the work, we're still waiting for some final tests to be completed.

However, even though we have not yet finished collecting data, we can already share a number of key test results that will help you understand how much faster the new M3 Air is compared to the previous one.

The first big test we'll run is Geekbench 6, a cross-platform benchmark that helps us gauge CPU speed by running single-core and multi-core tests and outputting scores for each so we can compare them to other PCs.

The 13-inch M3 Air and 15-inch M3 Air easily outpaced the older models, essentially neck and neck in this and all tests. Corroborating early reports that the M3 MacBook Air benchmarks show significant improvement over the M2, each of these newer Airs is circling around its predecessor.

Even more interesting is the difference between the M3 Air's Geekbench 6 results and those of the latest Windows laptops tested with the latest Intel Meteor Lake chips. As you can see, Acer's Swift Go 14 and Dell's XPS 14 lagged behind the M3 Airs in single-core performance, but managed to beat Apple's M3 laptop in multi-core performance tests.

This is worth knowing, but what is even more worth knowing is that the difference in these test scores is likely to be barely noticeable in real-world performance. In some scenarios, an Intel laptop may be able to complete tasks faster than an Apple M3 Air. Especially if the apps you use are optimized to use multiple cores at once, but most likely you won't notice the difference.

We also ran the M3 Air through Blackmagic's disk speed test tool to get an idea of SSD speeds and how they compare to older Macs; Blackmagic is incompatible with Intel chipsets, so on the Windows laptops we review Blackmagic is not used.

And the news is generally good, though not exciting: Apple's M3 Air appears to perform as well or better than its predecessor in Blackmagic's tests. The graph of the results above shows that the only exception is the 13-inch M3 Air's drive write speed, which is slightly slower than the previous model. A difference that is hardly noticeable in everyday use, but it is worth knowing.

I'll also mention how well these new M3 Airs can handle video encoding, measuring the time it takes to transcode a 4K video to 1080p using Handbrake.

We will compare the times to see which Mac is the fastest. As you can see from the results, the M3 is definitely faster than the M2, and the new Airs completes this task more than a minute faster than the previous model.

However, the Acer Swift Go 14 and Dell XPS 14 were at least a few seconds faster than either M3 Air. And neither of Apple's new M3 Airs could cut video faster than the recent MacBook Pro, the M2 MacBook Pro that Apple released over a year ago.

Finally, let's talk gaming: we don't yet have test data to determine how well the 15-inch M3 MacBook Air can play games, but we have finished testing the 13-inch version, and other tests show that the two machines' performance shows little difference.

What we do know so far is that if you're into gaming, you're better off choosing a MacBook Pro or a Windows laptop. As you can see, the M3 MacBook Air 13" is a better gaming machine than its M2-equipped predecessor, but otherwise it loses out to every laptop on our list.

Even simple cross-platform games such as Sid Meier's Civilization VI, for example, are difficult to compare the performance of these Air's displays due to their uncommon aspect ratio and resolution. For this reason, most of the above results are at 1200p resolution, but in some cases we tested at different resolutions and have noted them as such where appropriate.

However, it is clear that the M3 Air is not designed to be a gaming machine, given the difference in laptop size and resolution. If you want to play a few rounds of Fortnite between classes but don't want to lug around the best gaming laptop, you might be a little happier with a Windows ultraportable in the same price range like the MacBook Pro or XPS 14.

We put both of the new M3 Airs through our in-house battery tests, and the results were quite good. Each lasted just over 15 hours on a full charge, which, while not quite the 18 hours of battery life that Apple claims can be achieved with these MacBooks, is still a very good score compared to most laptops.

As can be seen from the results table above, both the 13" and 15" M3 MacBook Airs lasted longer than the M2 Air and M1 Air on a single charge. These new M3 Airs lasted longer than the latest Meteor Lake Windows 11 laptops we tested, including the Dell XPS 14 and Acer Swift Go 14.

However, despite their long-lasting performance, these new M3 Airs failed to outlast the last few generations of the MacBook Pro, one of the laptops with the longest battery life on the market.

Apple has yet to release the M3 MacBook Air, but thanks to our test lab and their willingness to ship early, we already know how much better these machines are than the previous ones.

And the answer, simply put, is a little better: the M3 chip takes this slender productivity wedge to new heights, delivering better battery life and faster performance than any MacBook Air to date. If you love the Air, this is the new best model on the market.

But if you're just looking to buy a new laptop, this new Air with the M3 chip is not far ahead of the competition except for battery life. In this area, the MacBook still reigns king thanks to the power efficiency of Apple silicon, and the M3 Airs are at the top of that hierarchy.

But if you play games or do demanding tasks like video editing, you'll be happier looking elsewhere; if you stick with Apple's hardware, the MacBook Pro remains the best choice for these tasks, and if you want to play the latest games at one If you want to display as many frames per second as possible and have more games to choose from, you are still better off with a gaming laptop like the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14.