Apple’s press release for the new M3 MacBook Air includes a bold claim, calling the machine the “world’s best consumer laptop for AI.” The claim comes ahead of WWDC 2024, during which Apple is expected to announce a slew of new artificial intelligence features across all of its platforms.
In today’s press release, Apple says:
With the transition to Apple silicon, every Mac is a great platform for AI. M3 includes a faster and more efficient 16-core Neural Engine, along with accelerators in the CPU and GPU to boost on-device machine learning, making MacBook Air the world’s best consumer laptop for AI. Leveraging this incredible AI performance, macOS delivers intelligent features that enhance productivity and creativity, so users can enable powerful camera features, real-time speech to text, translation, text predictions, visual understanding, accessibility features, and much more.
With a broad ecosystem of apps that deliver advanced AI features, users can do everything from checking their homework with AI Math Assistance in Goodnotes 6, to automatically enhancing photos in Pixelmator Pro, to removing background noise from a video using CapCut. Combined with the unified memory architecture of Apple silicon, MacBook Air can also run optimized AI models, including large language models (LLMs) and diffusion models for image generation locally with great performance. In addition to on-device performance, MacBook Air supports cloud-based solutions, enabling users to run powerful productivity and creative apps that tap into the power of AI, such as Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365, Canva, and Adobe Firefly.
Notably, Apple didn’t mention artificial intelligence at all in the press release for the M3 MacBook Pro last October. While Apple generally mentions things like machine learning in press releases, this is a very rare mention of AI specifically.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has teased Apple’s plans for new AI announcements this year on two separate occasions. During Apple’s Q1 earnings call last month, Cook said that Apple will share details on its AI work “later this year.” During Apple’s shareholder meeting a few weeks later, Cook teased that Apple will “break new ground” in generative AI this year.
Apple is working on a variety of new AI features for this year, including an update and more powerful version of Siri. You can learn more about the company’s AI plans in our dedicated roundup.
I guess you could call this the “MacBook AIr.”
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