OMG new Macs look insanely great

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I do not want the new MacBook Air. I do not want the new MacBook Air. I do not want the new MacBook Air.

But OMG, that new sky blue color.

And the $999 starting price point? Just $899 for education!

I thought we were in the grips of inflation. Apple lowering prices ... that’s not what usually happens. What in the Sam Hill is going on?

Naturally, I recently bought an older M2 MacBook Air, cheapskate that I am, for just $750 — a screaming deal — but now I’ve got buyer’s remorse. I coulda used that $750 toward one of these brand-new machines.

That’s silly, though, because this stuff always gets better, and the M2 MacBook Air is one of the best laptops I’ve owned, ever!

The industrial design is gorgeous. It’s light and thin and superbly well-made. It comes with a lot of high-end touches, from the great backlit keyboard to the hinges in the screen, which were laboriously engineered to ensure the laptop doesn’t budge when you lift the lid open.

It’s a superb machine for just $750 (or even $999); a brilliant deal for a computer of this quality. And, of course, the new MacBook Airs share this same great design. It’s hard to improve on near-perfection.

And what about the new Mac Studio, which oddly mixes your choice of processors. You can choose between an M4 Max or an M3 Ultra, which, despite coming from the previous generation, is a screamer of a chip, making an M3 Ultra Mac Studio the most powerful Mac ever.

You can configure the M3 Ultra with up to 512GB of unified memory, allowing it to run 600-billion-parameter LLMs right in the laptop’s RAM. That’s insane! Who needs an Nvidia data center when you’ve got a new Mac Studio?

I saw some people complaining on the socials this week, calling yesterday’s iPad upgrades the laziest ever and accusing Apple of rent-seeking.

I disagree, and today’s new machines firmly put the lie to that misguided sentiment. Yeah, they’re spec bumps, but what spec bumps they are!

Apple’s lineup of computers and tablets and phones and watches and earbuds is easily the best on the market. They put even the best products from competitors to shame.

What a time to be alive!

Also in today’s newsletter:

• Here’s why Apple is calling the new M3 Ultra Mac Studio “the ultimate desktop for AI development.”

• And if you’re wondering why Apple went with an M3 Ultra instead of an M4 Ultra, here’s why: The M4 generation will never get an Ultra version because Apple expressly designed it not to!

• If you’re cheap like me, now’s a good time to pick up an older MacBook Air. Seriously, these are gorgeous machines.

• One thing Apple doesn’t offer is a Hall effect keyboard, like this new mechanical beauty from Keychron.

• I couldn’t get through Ken Burn’s history of the Vietnam War, but the new Apple TV+ version looks a lot more accessible. Here’s what we like about the docuseries.

— Leander Kahney, EIC.

^{A message from the Cult of Mac Deals team}

^{A message from the Cult of Mac Deals team}

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Today’s poll

Results from yesterday’s poll: What do you think of the new iPad Air?

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