The MacBook Air gets an M3 upgrade

Sure but when you can do a thousand disk I/O operations in less time than it takes to draw to an LCD screen... is the user going to notice that not everything is in RAM?

Apple has been progressively moving things out of RAM and onto the SSD for about ten years now. Try running modern MacOS on a spinning rust hard drive and it's completely unusable these days.

I've been using the same 16GB of RAM on my Mac workstations for the last 10 years and I have more memory headroom every year. Right now I've got two Linux Virtual Machines running on my Mac and I still have so much free memory that 6GB are being used as a filesystem cache (so... a lot of those SSD file reads which would be plenty fast enough, aren't even going to hit the SSD).

If all you do is browse the web... 8GB is plenty. And it also improves battery life - Apple doesn't publish stats but it's common for RAM to draw more power than these laptops can afford with only a 50Wh battery. I'd like to see a test, but I bet upgrading from 8GB to 24GB comes with a considerable real world battery life penalty.

It's too early for third party tests on this model, but the old had the same "up to 18 hours" marketing and third party tests found it lasts between 3 hours playing CPU/GPU intensive games and 30 hours if you really stretch the battery and don't do much (e.g. just read an ebook in a dark room with low screen brightness). You're not going to get anywhere near the highest numbers even under light load with fully upgraded RAM, since it draws quite a bit of power even when it's idle.

Same, im not normally one to worry about aesthetics, but the thin wedge is a really nice shape

The M2 was basically just an overclocked M1 with a few extra cores and it ran fine with it's reduced cooling capacity. The M3, especially tuned down for the Air should perform great for what it is.

I've seen YouTube videos of people putting thermal tape inside of it and getting better performance and less heat.

Are you sure you're measuring that right?

My understanding is with a fixed workload (e.g. compress a specific video file as part of a youtube video upload) then the M3 is faster, draws less battery power, and generates less heat.

But if you play a computer game with M1 running at 30fps but the M3 runs at 60fps... then yeah, the M3 will be hotter and draw more power. But it's also doing twice as much work. Drop the graphics settings down, so that the M1 and M3 are both able to hit 60fps (in a game where you can cap the frame rate), then the M3 will be cooler and use less power.

And the difference could be significant, especially if the M3 is fast enough to shut down the performance cores and do everything on the "efficiency cores". Those cores use a lot less power since they are designed to run on an smartphone sized battery.

Yes, they said it’s coming soon via software update.

https://9to5mac.com/2024/03/04/14-inch-m3-macbook-pro-multi-display-support/

My brother in Christ, that is literally in the byline of the OP. Just click the link before commenting, I beg you.

My MacBook M1 Pro does 2 monitors closed. I even have a usb dongle for a third monitor. Am I misreading your question?

You're barking up the wrong tree by asking how many displays the CPU supports. The CPU is not involved in displays at all.

It's the GPU that matters, and the M3 MacBook Pro is available with GPUs ranging from "barely good enough" to "holy fuck that's a lot of compute for a laptop".

The entry level GPU configuration can drive a single external display. The high end can have four external displays. The mid range can do two.

I agree, it was clearer in the old days when the CPU and GPU were separate line items on the order page... but if you go to the tech specs page and scroll down to "Display Support" for a full page of text explaining in perfectly clear language exactly what each configuration supports.

It's not as simple as just "what GPU" either — it also depends on the specs of your display (for example, is it HDMI or Thunderbolt? Does it run at 60Hz or faster? Is it 4K or higher? Those things matter and Apple doesn't even detail all of it, for example Display Stream Compression can free up a lot of bandwidth. If your display needs 64 Gigabits per second... such as this one then even at the high end you can only have one of them on Apple's most expensive laptop. I have no sympathy - that's a $300,000 display that doesn't even come with an actual display (you need to pay someone to build the wall for you and that might cost even more). Perhaps you should consider a Mac Studio instead? It can drive three of those projectors.

But back to reality, I do feel your pain. I've got two Macs on my desk, with Universal Control to share a single keyboard/mouse between them, because neither of my Macs can drive enough displays for the work I do. I can't wait to upgrade to a better GPU and go back to using a single computer. They are available now - but not as cheap as I'd like.

Huh? My 2019 mbp can do that, without display link.