- A Metal benchmark for the M4 MacBook Air has just leaked
- It’s in line with the M4 chip in the iPad Pro, which makes a lot of sense
- The laptop is anticipated to launch within the next few weeks
The M4 MacBook Air is widely expected to launch imminently, with the new chip touted to bring performance and efficiency improvements to one of Apple’s best MacBooks. And it looks like we won’t even have to wait until its release to find out its performance.
That’s because a benchmark has just leaked on the Geekbench website. The test results were published on February 19 and show a device running macOS 15.2 and bearing a ten-core M4 chip and 24GB of memory.
In terms of performance, the M4 chip in this MacBook scored 54,806 in the Metal graphics benchmark. Compare that to the 13-inch iPad Pro with M4 chip, which scored a very similar 54,064. Considering both devices are known for their thinness and fanless cooling, the slim margins between them make sense.
Labelled as “Mac16,12,” the mysterious MacBook is thought to be Apple’s upcoming M4 MacBook Air because it doesn’t match any existing Mac codenames. It does, however, line up with a Mac identifier that Apple itself accidentally leaked – one that was attributed to an M4 MacBook Air.
A believable benchmark
It’s possible that this benchmark was faked to give the appearance of belonging to an unannounced piece of Apple hardware. That seems unlikely, though, as it’s broadly in line with what we’ve come to expect from the M4 chip.
We mentioned the iPad Pro score above as a comparison point, but we can also see how this leaked benchmark does against the M4 MacBook Pro. On Geekbench, a sample Metal test scored 57,596, an improved result versus the MacBook Air that shouldn’t come as a surprise given that the MacBook Pro has active cooling that can help boost its performance.
So, all things point towards this leak being a believable, perhaps genuine result for the upcoming M4 MacBook Air.
Aside from the new M4 chip, the next MacBook Air could get an improved LCD display (sadly an OLED panel is still a few years away), a better webcam, and stronger support for connecting multiple monitors.
It’s widely expected to launch this Spring (sometime between now and June), with Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman claiming it will be on sale “by March at the latest.”
