Apple today unveiled two new MacBook Air models with the all-new M3 chip, available in 13-inch and 15-inch versions. According to Apple, these notebooks offer up to 60% improved performance compared to the previous M1 MacBook Air, with battery life extended to a maximum of 18 hours. Consumers can now pre-order these devices, and they will be officially shipped on March 8th (Friday). Ahead of the 2024 WWDC conference, Apple made a bold statement, claiming that their new M3 MacBook Air is the "world's best consumer-grade AI laptop." This declaration is clearly aimed at generating excitement for the upcoming series of new AI features to be unveiled at the conference. In today's announcement, Apple emphasized that with the transition to their in-house chips, every Mac has become an outstanding platform for artificial intelligence. The new M3 chip features a faster and more efficient 16-core neural engine, combined with accelerators in the CPU and GPU, greatly enhancing the device's machine learning capabilities. This exceptional AI performance enables macOS to provide a range of intelligent features that enhance productivity and creativity, such as powerful camera support, real-time speech-to-text, translation, text prediction, visual understanding, and accessibility features. Leveraging its rich ecosystem of applications, users can take advantage of advanced AI features in these apps, from homework checks to automatic photo enhancements, and even video background noise removal. In addition, the new MacBook Air, with its unified memory architecture powered by Apple chips, can run optimized AI models locally, including large language models (LLMs) and diffusion models for image generation. Furthermore, the MacBook Air supports cloud-based solutions, allowing users to run a variety of powerful AI-driven productivity and creative applications, such as Microsoft 365's Microsoft Copilot, Canva, and Adobe Firefly. It is worth noting that Apple, in a rare move, specifically highlighted artificial intelligence in this announcement, compared to the press release for the M3 MacBook Pro released in October last year. In fact, Apple has typically only briefly mentioned concepts like machine learning in their press releases. Apple CEO Tim Cook has already revealed the company's plans regarding the announcement of new AI initiatives on multiple occasions this year. During last month's earnings conference call, he disclosed that Apple would share more details about their AI work "later this year." And at the shareholder meeting a few weeks later, Cook further hinted that Apple would "open a new chapter" in the field of generative AI this year. Additionally, Apple is actively developing a range of new AI features, including an upgraded version of Siri, which is expected to be introduced to consumers later this year.