Apple MacBook Air M4 review: a little more for a little less

Apple rarely offers you more for less, especially in its most popular products with the broadest appeal. It has perfected the measured, iterative year-over-year product cycle. But for the 13- and 15-inch M4 MacBook Airs, Apple has put new chips in its established design while shoring up the device’s biggest flaws and dropping the price by $100.

The MacBook Air is an even better value than before, even against increased tariffs, further cementing it as the no-brainer, no-fuss recommendation for most people who need a basic laptop for around $1,000. And it anchors the MacBook lineup with a much clearer upgrade path for those with higher demands.

Now starting at $999 once again, the 13-inch M4 MacBook Air comes with a 10-core CPU and 8-core GPU, 16GB of unified memory, and 256GB SSD. The 15-inch M4 starts at $1,199 with a 10-core CPU / 10-core GPU and similar 16GB / 256GB base configuration. Our review samples from Apple include the base $999 13-inch and a stepped-up $1,399 15-inch, which has a 512GB SSD, offering twice the storage and faster read / write speeds. The Air pair may start at $999, but I strongly suggest spending the extra $200 for the extra GPU cores and expanded storage. The roomier SSD and a little more future-proofing are still worth it if you can swing it.

Much of what you see, feel, and hear on the new M4 MacBook Airs has been around since the M2 generation’s redesign in 2022. You’d be hard-pressed to tell the M2, M3, and new M4 models apart if not for nuances like a specific color option or how many external monitors are plugged in. That’s totally fine, if a little unexciting, since the Airs have been all-around fantastic for years now.

The new Airs offer a new sky blue color, a Thunderbolt 4 upgrade for the two ports, the Center Stage webcam from the MacBook Pro, and support for a proper triple-display setup by keeping their lids open while connected to two external monitors. You might think I’ve lost my marbles if I rattled off that list of changes with any semblance of excitement, but factoring in the price cut turns this otherwise humdrum update into a formidable refinement.

The color is nice, but it’s another example of Apple not being bold enough in its hues. It’s pleasant-looking (if a bit boring and inoffensive) but often dulls to looking like any old silver MacBook in warm-toned light. If Apple’s dying breed of desktop computers can get some lively saturation (on their rear, at least), then I think it’s time for the metallic equivalent of bondi blue on MacBooks.

The Center Stage webcam offers a sharp image that works well in most lighting conditions, including low light and strong backlighting like a bright window. Compared to the M3 Air, it shows a little more detail in hair and is less prone to flares and ghosting from a strong light source. The 12-megapixel webcam sensor has a wider field of view and follows you so you stay in frame during video calls — or, if you’re picky, allows you to manually choose your composition. Desk View remains a shrug-your-shoulders “better than nothing” tool for sharing a book or what’s on your desk, though it’s still quite distorted and awkward-looking.

The M4 Air’s most “pro” new feature is its support for two external monitors in tandem with the built-in display. (Apple has incrementally improved this functionality over the last couple of years, allowing one external monitor on the M1 and M2 generations, and then two with the lid closed on the M3.) The M4 Air’s port selection only offers a MagSafe charging connector and two Thunderbolt 4 / USB-C ports, so you’ll need a USB-C hub or a monitor with built-in ports to allow more I/O while using three displays. Even if the average MacBook Air user may not have or need this kind of setup, it’s nice to see fewer limitations for those seeking lots of extra screen real estate in their work-from-home and office setups. And it’s one less reason to be forced into a MacBook Pro purchase.

The new MacBook Air now uses a similar M4 chip as the base 14-inch MacBook Pro and has some solid performance gains over the M3. The M4 scored over 20 percent higher marks than the M3 in single-core and multi-core CPU performance (Geekbench and Cinebench). As for GPU performance, the base-model 13-inch M4 with eight GPU cores slightly edged out the M3 with two fewer cores. In a more apples-to-apples comparison of the 15-inch M4 versus the 15-inch M3 (both with 10-core GPUs), the M4 scored about 20 percent higher. The most marked improvement of the M4 Air was in the Blender classroom test, which it finished nearly twice as fast as the M3, showing even the M4’s 8-core GPU is more capable for short bursts of light 3D rendering work.

In real-world everyday use, the M4 Air doesn’t feel wholly different from the M3: everything is still fast while working and multitasking in documents and across various productivity apps. You can dabble in creative apps like Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom Classic, but at some point while doing that kind of work, the fanless MacBook Air will eventually throttle to prevent overheating, and those progress bars start hanging longer than the initially estimated time remaining.

If your work involves dipping into those kinds of workflows only once in a while, you’re likely just fine with a MacBook Air. But stepping up to a $1,599 14-inch Macbook Pro gives you the room to thrive, more ports, an SD card slot, a better screen, and even better speakers. What was a murky, confusing delineation between the two MacBook lines last year is now much clearer, with the 14-inch Pro’s improvements — including a third USB-C port — and the lower price of the Airs.

The MacBook Air continues to nail the fundamentals at a fairly affordable price. It still has exceptional battery life that lasts all day (not just squeaking through a workday but confidently getting through your whole day). It has a great keyboard, even though I prefer deeper key travel, and a solid IPS display that’s bright enough at 500 nits for outdoor use. Its haptic trackpad is the best around. The speakers on both sizes are very good, with the two extra speakers on the 15-inch allowing it to get quite loud without sounding distorted or tinny. It even has good mics and an improved webcam.

You can easily spend $2,000 or more on various Windows laptops that still don’t nail all those basics, and the Airs hammer each home to make it an exceptional package that’s now a little cheaper. High-demanding gaming and creative tasks aside, the M4 MacBook Airs are the ultimate no-fuss laptops for anyone who wants to buy an everyday computer and not think much of it for another five years or more.

The one glaring, lackluster spec of the base-model M4 Airs is its starting 256GB drive. While I think it’s best to pay the Apple tax and outfit your Air with 512GB of storage, at least the days of frustratingly slower read / write speeds in the 256GB base config are thankfully long gone. The 512GB SSD in the M4 Air is still a little faster than the 256GB, as shown in our benchmark table above, but it’s on par with the same config in last year’s M3 model.

But this year, the base configuration gets you 16GB of RAM, unlike last year, when it was still a paltry 8GB. This change was already set in motion in the fall, midcycle for the M3 model, when Apple made 16GB standard across all base Macs for the sake of Apple Intelligence. Apple Intelligence remains mostly inconsequential, especially on Macs, but RAM is not.

The new M4 MacBook Airs don’t do anything groundbreaking or exciting, but sometimes being boring and consistent is a good thing. There’s nothing wrong with an iterative update.

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge