- Apple adds the M4 to its MacBook Air
- The laptop welcomes center stage
- There’s a new color, while another shade is retired
Apple’s MacBook Air, arguably the most popular Mac and a laptop that regularly sits near the top of our best laptops list, is finally getting the M4 chip, a piece of Apple silicon that first appeared in the iPad Pro last year and later the MacBook Pro. It’s also, rather surprisingly, seeing a price drop.
While fundamentally the same laptop as last year’s MacBook Air M3 (and the M2 from the year before), there are a handful of upgrades and even one aesthetic change. In addition to the M4 chip, Apple is upgrading the 12MP FaceTime camera with Center Stage functionality, and the laptop now has two Thunderbolt 4 ports.
Those ports offer roughly the same throughput as last year’s Thunderbolt 3 port (up to 40 GBps) but with one noticeable difference. The MacBook Air M4 can now drive two external screens through those ports while still powering the laptop’s main Liquid Retina Display. That’s right, the laptop stays open.
There’s also a new color to consider: Sky Blue. It replaces Space Gray and joins Midnight, Starlight, and Silver.
These updates run across the 13-inch and 15-inch models, which now, somewhat remarkably, are $100 cheaper than last year. The 13-inch MacBook Air M4 starts at $999 with 16GB of memory, and the 15-inch model starts at $1,199.
Digging in
The M4 chip brings more power in the form of a 10-core CPU and up to a 10-core GPU. You can also specify up to 32GB of unified memory.
In practice, this makes the MacBook Air M4 a better system for creativity and business. While I didn’t get to try the laptops for myself, Apple did show me some impressive live demos.
We watched as photo editor Pixelmator Pro, which Apple bought last year, tapped into the 12MP Center Stage camera, took a headshot, and then used backgrounds and other presets to make a passport photo quickly.
The M4 does support Apple Intelligence, and the MacBook Air puts it to good use. We saw Apple Intelligence quickly pull numbers from a disorganized document and instantly create a helpful table. Writing Tools were used to generate an executive summary from a long document.
We saw some integrations of Apple Intelligence in third-party apps. In one case, we selected an Image Playground button to quickly generate a colorful image of a backpack in a forest. Apple’s generative image work still leans more toward cartoon than realism.
Apple then switched to Blender, an open-source 3D app that has been optimized to run natively on Apple Silicon. With it, we could render a complex arctic ice scape image in just 18 seconds.
The M4’s powerful 16-core neural engine isn’t just for Apple’s AI tools. In one case, we switched to Companion from WebAI, a large language model with 22 billion parameters, and, using the App Intents Framework that connects third-party apps to Apple Intelligence capabilities, started entering prompts about a document we had open.
Companion answered the prompts and even opened the native Mail app to send a report.
Apple’s been working hard to convince the world that the Mac is AAA game ready, so I was not surprised to see Wuthering Waves running on the MacBook Air M4. The gameplay was smooth, with zero tearing, stuttering, or visible frame loss.
Perhaps most surprising was that everything Apple showed me was running at once. It was a nice demonstration of the M4’s raw power.
Apple is claiming 18 hours of battery life and showed us how the demo MacBook Air wasn’t even plugged in, a further demonstration of how performance wouldn’t change if you’re not tethered to a wall outlet.
A fixed design
Other than price and performance, the MacBook Air M4 13 and 15-inch are identical to the M3 units.
In my very brief time with them, they looked and felt the same. The 13-inch is still 2.7 lbs. and the 15-inch model is 3.3 lbs. They still feel thin and light.
Aside from that higher-resolution Center Stage camera, the screen specs are unchanged. Both offer Liquid Retina Displays with 2560×1664 resolutions and 500 nits of brightness. The notch, which accommodates the Face ID camera, remains. It’s a great-looking display with vibrant colors and crisp images. Sadly, it did not get the MacBook Pro’s reflection-defeating nano-texture glass.
The keyboard, which includes the Touch ID power button, is unchanged and feels just as good as it does on the M3 MacBook Air. Oh, and the almost pastel-like Sky Blue is lovely.
There’ll be a tiny bit of shuffling as the MacBook Air M4 enters the market. The M3 model will be discontinued, and the M2 MacBook Air, which launched the new design language, will remain a lower-cost option. And, yes, the OG MacBook AIr M1 is still in the channel (usually Walmart) at a sub-$700 price.
Considering the well-established and generally pleasing design, M4-grade power, and a more attractive price, the MacBook Air M4 stands a good chance of moving up our list of Best Laptops.
You can pre-order the MacBook Air M4 in 13 or 15-inches today, and it ships on March 12.
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lance.ulanoff@futurenet.com (Lance Ulanoff)
