New MacBook Air Brings the M4 Chip and a $100 Lower Price Tag

The Apple “Air” rumors we’ve been hearing turned out to apply to both a new iPad Air and a MacBook Air.

On March 5, Apple revealed the new MacBook Air comes with its in-house M4 chip, 16 GB of unified memory, and Apple Intelligence with macOS Sequoia. The M4 offers a 10-core CPU, up to 10-core GPU, and support for up to 32 GB of unified memory.

The new MacBook Air starts at $999 — pretty low for a Mac and $100 less than the previous generation MacBook Air — for the 13-inch version, while the 15-inch version costs $1,199. It can hook to two 6K external displays. The new 13- and 15-inch MacBook Air are available to pre-order today, with availability beginning March 12.

“With a new lower starting price of $999, MacBook Air delivers more value to consumers than ever before, making this the perfect moment to upgrade or experience the Mac for the first time,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, in a press release.

SEE: Pre-order Apple’s New iPad Air With Powerful M3 Chip and AI Now

New Mac Studio offers options of 36 GB or 96 GB of memory

Apple has also refreshed its professional desktop computer, Mac Studio. Powered by the M3 Ultra chip, plus an up to 16 TB SSD storage, Mac Studio maintains Apple’s place in the high-performance workstation market.

The Mac Studio comes in two versions: one with the M3 Ultra for $1,999 or with the M4 Max for $3,999. The more expensive version raises the stats from 36 GB of memory and 512 GB of storage to 96 GB of memory and 1 TB of storage.

Apple M3 Ultra can support half a terabyte of memory

Apple’s newest and most powerful chip, the M3 Ultra, will appear in the Mac Studio Pro desktop starting March 12.

“M3 Ultra is the pinnacle of our scalable system-on-a-chip architecture, aimed specifically at users who run the most heavily threaded and bandwidth-intensive applications,” Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies, said in a press release.

The M3 Ultra starts at 96 GB of memory, and can be configured up to 512 GB. Apple said the chip is optimized for graphics professionals, including those working in 3D rendering, visual effects, and AI.

Additional storage options include up to 16 TB of ultrafast SSD storage.

SEE: Apple is taking the UK government to court over their request for a backdoor into encrypted iCloud data.

Apple’s own UltraFusion packaging architecture enables connecting two M3 Max dies, with over 10,000 high-speed connections for low latency and high bandwidth.

The M3 Ultra also includes:

• A Thunderbolt 5 with 120 Gb/s data transfer speeds, more than 2x the bandwidth per port compared to Thunderbolt 4.
• A 32-core CPU with 24 performance cores and eight efficiency cores.
• An 80-core GPU, the largest in Apple’s history.
• A dynamic caching, hardware-accelerated mesh shading, and ray tracing for gaming, game development, and other professional graphics work.
•  A 32-core Neural Engine for machine learning and the Apple Intelligence generative AI.
• 800GB/s of memory bandwidth.
• Secure enclave, an isolated subsystem for sensitive user data.

Along with the other features designed for AI, the M3 Ultra can run large language models up to 600 billion parameters on device.