This year has seen some excellent laptops, but it seemed almost inevitable that the MacBook Air 13-inch (M4) would be our choice for the overall best laptop of 2025 in the TechRadar Choice Awards 2025.
Why? Well, despite some brilliant competition from the likes of Microsoft and Dell, the MacBook Air 13-inch (M4) feels like a culmination of the incredible roll Apple has been on since the launch of its first computing chip, the M1, back in 2020.
A perfect marriage of performance and efficiency
The reason why the MacBook Air 13-inch (M4) impressed us so much in the review, and why it’s proved so popular with consumers, is how it balances performance with power efficiency.
Now, ‘power efficiency’ might not be the most exciting of phrases (though in these days of ever-rising utility bills, perhaps it should be), but what it means is that the MacBook Air, and its M4 chip, offers enough power to easily handle any day-to-day tasks, as well as more demanding workloads such as video editing.
Thanks to the power-efficient design of the M4 chip, the MacBook Air uses less electrical power, which means battery life is prolonged. During our review, the MacBook Air hit an excellent 14 hours and 51 minutes for web browsing. For some tasks, such as watching videos, this can be even longer.
Many rival options among the best laptops that offer the same level of performance as the MacBook Air have much shorter battery lives. The power efficiency also means that less heat is produced by the internal components, and that has allowed Apple to make the MacBook Air as thin and light as possible – and it doesn’t have any built-in fans, so it’s completely silent when in use.
It also means that when you’re using the MacBook Air 13-inch (M4) on battery power, the performance doesn’t drop. Many other laptops throttle the performance of the hardware when on battery power, which reduces the power consumption. This can help prolong battery life, but it comes at the cost of poorer performance. The MacBook Air, however, doesn’t not suffer from this, and offers sustained performance no matter if it’s plugged in or not, giving you far greater flexibility.
What else do we love?
The thin and light design of the MacBook Air 13-inch (M4) really is fantastic, following a major redesign of Apple’s iconic laptop back in 2022 that brought a bigger screen, thinner bezels, an improved webcam, and a much more modern-looking aesthetic.
It’s a gorgeous-looking laptop that’s easy to carry around, with a keyboard that feels great to type on. Meanwhile, the 13.6-inch Liquid Retina screen with its 2560 x 1664 resolution and 500 nits of sustained brightness is vibrant and sharp, putting a lot of the screens found in other laptops at this price to shame. So, even though the design has remained unchanged since the M2 model that launched three years ago, when a laptop looks this good, we can’t complain.
Speaking of price, the MacBook Air 13-inch (M4) launched at $999 / £999 / AU$1,699, which is actually cheaper than the launch price of the previous M3 model. While this isn’t the cheapest laptop out there (check out our guide to the best budget laptops for that), it represents incredible value for money.
Put simply, there just isn’t another laptop at this price that offers the same level of performance, battery life and design quality. It should come as no surprise that the MacBook Air 13-inch (M4) also won our best value award at the TechRadar Choice Awards 2025.
While the 13-inch model of the M4 MacBook Air has got all the attention (and awards), it would be remiss of me not to mention the MacBook Air 15-inch (M4), the larger version of this fantastic laptop that offers pretty much everything the 13-inch model does. Its larger screen means the MacBook Air 15-inch (M4) isn’t quite as portable as its smaller sibling, and it’s a bit more expensive, but it’s an absolutely fantastic choice if you like the look of the MacBook Air, but want a laptop with a larger screen.
No matter what size it comes in, the M4 MacBook Air is a worthy winner of our Laptop of the Year 2025 award.
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matthew.hanson@futurenet.com (Matt Hanson)
