This year's MacBook Air and Pro could be packing Apple's next-gen M3 chip

Right now it seems that Apple is seeing more leaks than a Welsh greengrocer. Fresh from reports that the next iMac may sport Apple's next-gen M3 processor, another report says that the M3 chip will make its way into this year's MacBook Air and MacBook Pro – and those laptops could be unveiled as soon as this summer.

This time the report comes from 9to5Mac, whose sources claim that the new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air will be M3 devices and that a refreshed M3 MacBook Pro is also in development.  

According to 9to5Mac’s sources, the new 13-inch MacBook Air (codenamed J513) is already in the works with an M3 chip. It will be announced along with a brand-new 15-inch version (codenamed J515), which will also have the M3 chip.

So what will the M3 bring to the Mac party?

What the M3 chip is likely to deliver

The MacBook Air and MacBook Pro will reportedly get an 8-core M3 system on a chip. That's similar to the current M2 MacBook Air, which is available with 8-core CPUs and either 8-core or 10-core GPUs. Hopefully this time around there'll be more memory: both M2 MacBook Airs top out at 8GB of unified memory.

It's likely that we'll also see Pro and Max versions of the M3, albeit not in these first laptops. The M2 versions take the cores up to 10 or 12 GPU cores, 16, 19 or 30 GPU cores and 16 or 32GB of unified memory.

As ever with the MacBooks, the Air is likely to get the least powerful version of the M3 in order to differentiate it from, and encourage people to buy, the MacBook Pro models.

As for the WWDC launch, that bit appears to be speculation: Apple did announce the M2 at WWDC last year, but as yet there's no firm indication that it intends to repeat that in 2023.