The new M4 MacBook Air is coming “relatively soon” and for Apple, it may not be soon enough. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the current M3 MacBook Air–it’s Apple’s best laptop. It offers a great combination of performance, portability, and price for the customer.
The issue is with the M3 chip itself–again, there’s nothing wrong with it from a user standpoint. But behind the scenes, the M3 caused problems with Apple’s Mac lineup, which is why the M3 was the shortest cycle of the M-series chips.
The M3 was a standard 3nm chip. “3nm” refers to the fabrication process to create the chips; it doesn’t define a chip’s physical size, it’s a general term used to refer to a chip’s transistor density, speed, and power efficiency. TSMC, which manufactures Apple’s chips, had issues with the initial standard 3nm process. It was costly, and yields (the number of viable chips in a semiconductor production wafer) were lower than those of previous processes.
Read more at Macworld.com