Apple M4 MacBook Air review: I have no notes

A year ago, we called the M3 version of the MacBook Air "just about as good as laptops get."

The "as good as laptops get" part was about the qualitative experience of using the laptop, which was (and is) good-enough-to-great at just about everything a general-purpose laptop needs to be able to do. The "just about" part was mainly about the cost because to be happy with it long-term, it was a good idea for just about everybody to spend an extra $200 upgrading it from 8GB to 16GB of RAM. Apple also kept the M2 version of the Air in the lineup to hit its $999 entry-level price point; the M3 cost $100 extra.

Apple fixed the RAM problem last fall when it increased the minimum amount of RAM across the entire Mac lineup from 8GB to 16GB without increasing prices. Though Apple probably did it to help enable additional Apple Intelligence features down the line, nearly anything you do with your Mac will eventually benefit from extra memory, whether you're trying to use Photoshop or Logic Pro or even if you're just opening more than a couple of dozen browser tabs at once.

The new M4 Air also starts with 16GB of RAM. And Apple is launching it at $999 ($1,199 for the 15-inch), ditching the M2 and M3 versions of the Air. It's hard not to be impressed with a laptop that addresses our two biggest substantive complaints about the previous version.

The laptop is still expensive, insofar as it is still a $1,000 laptop. But Apple is selling a laptop for $999 that would have cost you $1,399 a year ago. In a time of constantly rising prices, that's a pretty rare thing.

The MacBook Air, again

This is the third iteration of the MacBook Air's M2-era refresh. Apple originally introduced the design in the middle of 2022, and it was joined by a similar 15-inch iteration in the summer of 2023. For owners of Intel or M1 Airs or any other laptop, here's a brief recap: Apple got rid of the Air's tapered design for this one, in favor of a laptop that's still thin but has a uniform thickness throughout (0.44 inches for the 13-inch Air, 0.45 inches for the 15-inch model).

The laptop comes in four finishes—the traditional silver, the gold-ish Starlight, Midnight (still a bit smudge-prone), and a new Sky Blue option that replaces Space Gray. I like Sky Blue, and it's probably my favorite of the three light-colored options, though I do wish it was more saturated. It's similar in hue to the blue finish Microsoft offers for its Surface devices, but I prefer Microsoft's version because it's more noticeably blue.

The Air still takes a minimalist approach to ports, with a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports (both on the left side) and a headphone jack (on the right). You can free up one of those ports for other things if you use the laptop's resurrected MagSafe connector, but you can continue to charge it using USB-C power bricks or monitors. At this point in the USB-C transition, I've almost never used MagSafe outside of testing it and taking photos of its color-matched cable. But it's nice to have it back as an option.

The weirdest thing about it relative to those older pre-M2 Airs is still the display notch, a small cutout at the top of the screen that houses the camera. In practice, you mostly stop noticing it after a while. But the way macOS handles it makes the strips of screen space on either side mostly useless for anything other than the menu bar—most apps in full screen mode simply turn that part of the screen into non-functional black strips.

Speaking of the webcam, it's one of the few material changes from last year's model. It's now a 12 megapixel webcam, up from 1080p (about 2 megapixels). Like the webcam in the Studio Display, the M4 iMac, and the MacBook Pros, it has a wide field of view that it uses to support the motion-tracking Center Stage feature and Desk View mode, as well as preserve a bit more detail than the old webcam. You probably won't notice a difference when you're a tiny fraction of a window in a big Zoom call, though—white balance and color all look about the same, and you need to get close to see the difference in detail.

The M4 Air does two new things that might help talk you out of a MacBook Pro if you were thinking of buying one. For one, the maximum amount of RAM has increased from 24GB to 32GB. Second, the laptop can support up to two 6K external displays at 60 Hz without having to turn off the internal display. For both the M1 and M2 Airs, the limit was one external display. The M3 Air could support two external screens, but only if the lid was closed and the built-in screen was turned off. This finally gets the Air's external display count back up to where it was during the Intel era.

There are still features you'll need to buy a MacBook Pro to get, though. Those include the nano-texture display—a matte finish that Apple sells as an add-on for the iMac and MacBook Pros—and ProMotion, Apple's branding for screens that refresh at 120 times per second instead of 60. Given that it's available in the iMac, the absence of nano-texture is particularly annoying, though the Air's glassy screens still use Apple's anti-reflective coating. The 500 nits maximum brightness and DCI-P3 color gamut coverage are unchanged from previous models.

All the other fundamentals here remain solid, as they have been for years now. The scissor-switch keyboard has a comfortable amount of travel and will be a huge improvement for those who are still using butterfly-era Mac laptops. Trackpads are as large as they reasonably can be, but I haven't had problems with palm rejection. Neither laptop is setting records for thin-and-light-ness, but at 2.7 pounds and 3.3 pounds for the 13- and 15-inch models, they're light enough that your back and shoulders won't complain about having to schlep them around in a bag. And the silent fanless design remains a selling point—even the Arm laptops in Windows-land still mostly come with cooling fans.

Performance and power: An M4, but fanless

Apple's M4 is a thoroughly known quantity by now thanks to the M4 MacBook Pro, the M4 iMac, the M4 Mac mini, and (to a lesser extent because of the software differences) the M4 iPad Pro.

The M4 added two extra efficiency cores to its CPU, bringing the total number of cores to 10 (four P-cores and six E-cores). The number of GPU cores is still 10, the same as the M2 and M3. The basic $999/$1,199 models have an 8-core GPU instead, so note that the performance in our graphics benchmarks below will be slightly lower on those models.

The big difference between this M4 and the one in all the other Macs is that the Air still doesn't include an active cooling fan. For Apple's chips, this usually means that they can run at full speeds for a few minutes under a sustained heavy CPU or GPU load, but that performance can slow down a bit once the chip gets too hot to run at full speed.

Note that Apple provided us with the 15-inch version of the Air to test and that the 13-inch version may throttle a bit more aggressively, depending on how well its heatsink dissipates heat.

The Air's M4 performs identically to the actively cooled versions in many of our lighter benchmarks, including Geekbench, single-threaded Cinebench tests, and even most of our graphics benchmarks. It's only in heavier, longer-running tests like our Handbrake video encoding tests that it begins to slow down significantly compared to the actively cooled versions of the chip. This is pretty consistent with what we've seen in the other Apple Silicon MacBook Airs; the kinds of workflows that will really challenge the Air are the ones that you don't really buy a MacBook Air to handle regularly.

Compared to older Macs, the M4's CPU is about 15 or 20 percent faster than the M3 in single-core benchmarks and 20 or 30 percent faster in multi-core benchmarks, thanks to its pair of extra CPU cores. The GPU's performance improvements are better in some tests than others, though somewhere in the 10-to-20-percent range is pretty typical. Apple is gradually working toward doubling the performance of the original M1, but we're not there quite yet—the M4 is somewhere between 50 and 70 percent faster than the M1 across the board, depending on what benchmark you're comparing. The M1 still feels good for most day-to-day computing, especially if you sprang for 16GB of RAM, but the M4 is noticeably snappier.

The M4 remains impressively efficient, using less energy than the M3 (and M1) to perform the same amount of work and consuming less power on average under load, something that should help its battery life. Apple still says that both Air sizes are good for "up to 18 hours" of battery life, the same broad estimate it used for the M3 and M2. In our days with the laptop, battery life felt about the same as it did for older Air models—the laptop can easily make it for a couple of full work days between charges, and for intermittent use, you can go days without plugging it in.

A laptop you don’t have to think about

If I had a criticism, it's that there are a few nice-to-have features that Apple only offers on its Pro laptops. A display with a higher-than-60-Hz refresh rate and a nano-texture display option would both take the Air to the next level, even if they were both sold as separate add-ons. And the display notch still feels silly, given that the Mac never added Face ID and things other than the macOS menu bar can't really do anything with that top strip of screen space.

But other than pointing out things the Air could also have, there's just not a lot to say here. For anyone other than people who absolutely need or require an operating system that isn't macOS, this is the default laptop. And it's not even "this is the default laptop, but you should really pay at least $200 to upgrade the RAM if you want to be happy long-term." The vast majority of people can just navigate to Apple's site, pick the size they want, and buy the base models without needing to worry about it much. I have been writing about Apple's products for many years, and I am here to tell you how weird and rare that is.