Upcoming 15-inch MacBook Air Release in June Comes with a Major Drawback
The long-awaited 15-inch MacBook Air is finally on the horizon, but it seems there’s a catch. A reliable leaker, yeux1122, claims that the new MacBook Air will be equipped with an M2 chip instead of the originally planned M3 processor. According to reports, Apple delayed the production of the M3 processor due to market conditions, inventory adjustments, and mass production problems with TSMC. The M2 chip was also affected by production issues earlier this year, which caused Apple to halt production for two months.
Despite these setbacks, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported last week that the 15-inch MacBook Air with the M2 chip is already undergoing final tests at Apple. Developers have registered logs of these machines, which reveal that the MacBook Air will have four high-performance and four efficiency cores, with a minimum of 8GB of RAM – the same as the entry-level M2 chip. Interestingly, these devices were already running macOS 14 – the upcoming operating system for Mac computers.
Gurman speculates that the 15-inch MacBook Air will have the same screen resolution as the 14-inch MacBook Pro but with slightly less sharpness. This could explain why Apple opted for a 15-inch display for the new MacBook Air. Despite the use of an older processor, the new MacBook Air is still a highly anticipated addition to the MacBook lineup.
When will Apple introduce the M3 processor? Does it accompany 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.
