Gamingdeputy reported on March 4 that Apple today released a new MacBook Air equipped with an M3 chip. In a press release on Apple’s official US website, Apple boldly declared that the new MacBook Air is “the world’s best consumer laptop for AI ( the world’s best consumer laptop for AI)”. It was previously reported that Apple will announce a series of new artificial intelligence features covering all its platforms at the WWDC 2024 conference.
In a press release, Apple said: “Thanks to the switch to Apple silicon, every Mac becomes an excellent artificial intelligence platform. The M3 chip integrates a faster and more powerful 16-core neural network engine, which works with the central processing unit and Accelerators in the graphics processor work together to speed on-device machine learning, making the new MacBook Air the world's best consumer laptop for AI. macOS leverages this incredible AI performance to deliver a powerful suite of features that enhance productivity and creativity. Intelligent features such as powerful camera capabilities, real-time speech-to-text, translation, text prediction, visual understanding, accessibility and more.”
Gamingdeputy noticed that, perhaps taking into account the provisions of China’s advertising laws, Apple’s press release on its official website in China did not call the new MacBook Air the world’s best consumer-grade AI laptop, but changed it to “This enables MacBook Air to Continue to support the application of AI technology.”
Apple also said, “Thanks to the rich ecosystem of artificial intelligence applications, users can perform various operations, such as checking homework with the “AI Math Assistant” in Goodnotes 6, automatically enhancing photos with Pixelmator Pro, or eliminating photos with CapCut. Background noise in videos. Combined with the unified memory architecture of Apple chips, MacBook Air is also able to excellently run optimized AI models, such as large language models (LLM) and image generation diffusion models. In addition to strong performance on the device side, MacBook Air also supports Cloud solutions enable users to run productivity and creative applications that leverage powerful AI capabilities, such as Microsoft 365's “Microsoft Copilot”, Canva and Adobe Firefly.” (Gamingdeputy Note: This paragraph does not appear in Apple China official website news (in manuscript)
It is worth noting that Apple’s press release announcing the M3 MacBook Pro in October last year did not mention anything related to artificial intelligence. While Apple typically mentions things like machine learning in its press releases, it's rare to mention “AI” so explicitly.
Apple CEO Cook hinted at Apple’s plans to launch new artificial intelligence features on two separate occasions this year. During Apple's first-quarter earnings call last month, Cook said Apple would share details of its artificial intelligence efforts “later this year.” A few weeks later, at Apple's shareholder meeting, Cook hinted that Apple would “make a breakthrough in the field of generative artificial intelligence” this year.
It is reported that Apple is working on launching a number of new AI features this year, including an updated and more powerful Siri.