Early super-fast M3 MacBook Air benchmarks offer little in the way of surprises

Apple finally announced the M3 MacBook Air in both 13- and 15-inch configurations earlier this week and the new tablets are now available for preorder. They'll begin arriving on the doorsteps of people who placed their orders early starting on Friday, March 8, and they should also become available in Apple Stores around the globe on the same day. But we don't have to wait that long to find out just how capable these machines are, with early benchmarks having already started to appear online.

As spotted by the folks at MySmartPrice, Apple's M3-powered MacBook Air has already popped up in the online Geekbench database of results which means that we can get a feel for how fast the new laptops are. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, these machines are just as quick as other M3 Macs that are already on sale.

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The MacBook Air currently available in the Geekbench database is an M3 model with 16GB of RAM which manages a single-core score of 3,157 and a multi-core score of 12,020. The machine has the model identifier of Mac15,3 which suggests that it is a 15-inch model.

To put that score into perspective, Apple's M2 MacBook Air with the same 16GB of RAM scored a single-core result of 2,610 and a multi-core score of 10,120 which means that those upgrading from an M2-powered MacBook Air can expect performance improvements of around 20% in single-core tasks and 18% in multi-core tasks. These figures largely match the results of the M3 chip that is sued in the 14-inch MacBook Pro that has now been on sale for a few months.