If you have been waiting for the rumored 15-inch MacBook Air, you should know it won’t take much longer to get your hands on this model. After months of rumors, we have finally come to a full picture of what to expect from this machine. Unfortunately, another report from a trusty leaker shows this Mac will only have one downside – which we all were aware of.
According to user yeux1122 on the Korean blog Naver, a Taiwanese supply chain source told them the new 15-inch MacBook Air would be equipped with an M2 chip, not an M3 processor, which was initially planned.
Apple has reportedly delayed its plans to manufacture the M3 processor due to market conditions, inventory adjustments, and TSMC mass production problems. In addition, early this April, BGR reported that Apple halted production of the M2 chip for the first two months of the year due to MacBook demand decreasing.
With that in mind, Apple will bring a brand new size for the MacBook Air lineup, but with a year-old processor. Last week, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that the 15-inch MacBook Air with the M2 chip is already in the final tests at Apple. Developers have registered logs of these machines due to the Cupertino firm testing compatibility between the new Mac and third-party apps.
These logs show the 15-inch MacBook Air will continue offering four high-performance and four efficiency cores with a minimum of 8GB of RAM – the same as the entry-level M2 chip. Interestingly enough, these devices were already running macOS 14 – the upcoming operating system for Mac computers.
The screen resolution of the Mac 15,3 is equal to the 14-inch MacBook Pro. Gurman raises the possibility that the larger Air would run “the same resolution” as the MacBook Pro but with “slightly less sharpness,” which is why the company is going with a 15-inch display.
When will Apple launch the M3 chip? Is it coming with the MacBook Air?
According to Gurman, “bigger changes to the Mac” will come with the release of an M3 chip with the 3nm production process. That said, the journalist doesn’t give a timeframe for the base model but says Apple plans to refresh the 14-inch and the 16-inch MacBook Pro models in the first half of 2024, meaning the M3 Pro and M3 Max would land in less than a year from now.
The M3 chip could be used for the 13-inch MacBook Air, the 24-inch iMac, and the entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro. Apparently, all of these Macs are being tested by Apple running macOS 14, but their release date is unclear.
