The M3 MacBook Air goes on sale Friday, but as Apple continues to sell the M2 Air, people are asking one important question. Apple has been reluctant to answer that question, but the Geekbench results tell us the answer.

According to the new Geekbench 6 listing (search on Mac15,13), the M3 Air is significantly more powerful than its M2 counterpart. As you can see below, it would be foolish to pay an extra $100 for the turbo boost.

The 3nm chipset, the M3, has shown very impressive performance in the various MacBook Pro models we reviewed in November; the M3 chipset in the Air performs better than the M2 model.

Multicore performance has improved by 19% and (as one would expect from the M3's impressive single-core performance) by nearly 21%.

Now let's see how these initial numbers compare to the M3 MacBook Pro, the base model of the 14" laptop with the same chip. It should come as no surprise that the numbers match up very closely.

Of course, these numbers do not take into account one of the MacBook Air's weaknesses, its sustained performance. Without the fan, you would see a drop in performance over sustained use.

The full hands-on testing of the M3 Air will reveal how much (if any) this decline is.