The Apple MacBook Air 15 2024 is only available with an M3 SoC. This chip is identical to its M2 predecessor in core composition, meaning it has four performance and four efficiency cores. The M3 chip brings slightly better performance, as well as new features like an AV1 decoding engine (which makes playback of AV1-encoded video more efficient, resulting in longer battery life) and hardware-accelerated ray tracing. The M3 SoC is mainly designed for general productivity tasks like web browsing, text processing, video playback, spreadsheets, and presentations. It can handle more intensive tasks like programming and A.I. development, but due to this laptop’s fanless design, it’ll throttle under load, so you aren’t getting the full performance in heavy, sustained workloads. Video editing is possible, thanks to the dedicated video decode/encode engines, but again, you might not get the smoothest experience if the material is overly complex, and video rendering times will be noticeably longer than on a laptop with active cooling, like the Apple MacBook Pro 14 (M3, 2023).