M4 MacBook Air Review: More power less price

I fell in love with the M3 MacBook Air in 2024, and the new M4 chip pushes the laptop to the next level. Add in a $50 price cut, and you can see why the M4 MacBook Air is the hottest laptop around.

I was surprised by how much power is packed into this small machine. If you think you need a MacBook Pro, keep reading. If you spec the Air right, it’s a capable machine for most workflows, including video and photo editing. You can even play AAA games on it with some minor caveats.

Buying a MacBook Air as little as six years ago meant major compromises to performance, but Apple shifted that paradigm with the M-series of chips in 2020 and the M4 is so powerful that it pushes up against the MacBook Pro, proving that most people will only ever need a MacBook Air.

A portable powerhouse

This year, the M4 chip ups the number of efficiency cores to six instead of four in the M3. This should help you use the computer longer without needing to switch over to the less power-efficient performance cores. Apple hasn’t highlighted any battery improvements in the MacBook Air this year, but the extra efficiency in the chip can help if you’re not pushing the computer to its extremes.

If you do push it, the M4 can handle it, but the battery life goes down a bit. I was surprised by how it was possible to game at all on last year’s M3 Air and the M4 Air can play games at closer to medium settings, at least until it thermal throttles, and then you’re back down to low settings.

Baldur’s Gate 3 runs great on the MacBook Air, but make sure to use FSR and disable V-sync.

It’s nice that you can play games on an Air at this budget, but the thermal throttling will catch up to you in about 15-20 minutes of gameplay. If you really want to play, I’d recommend getting at least the M4 Mac mini since it has a fan. However, realistically, you want at least an M4 Pro chip since it has the larger GPU.

In Lightroom, I tested a workflow with 100 RAW files. It imported them in roughly 30 seconds, and then it took under 45 seconds to paste a basic edit profile onto each file. When I ran the same test on my M4 Pro laptop, it beat the Air by about 10 seconds each time. This gap gets wider the bigger the photo set is, but it illustrates how small the Air and Pro gaps can be for some tasks. If you work with 1,000s of photos every week, it’s probably worth investing in the Pro, but if you only do a few photos at a time and only a few large batches each year like me, the Air is enough.

This year, you can connect two external displays to the Air while using your laptop’s screen.

Using this machine for medium-level video editing was also fine, and overall, this is one of the first MacBook Airs I’ve ever used where everything just worked. Want to play a game? If it’s available on Mac, it’s going to run. Want to start a YouTube channel? Great, grab one of the many editing programs, and you’re good to go. If you’re a professional making money off the creative work you do on a computer, then upgrade to a Pro, but for most, the Air is more than enough.

The one limit I run into on the Air, no matter what I’m doing, is storage. I’d expect most people are likely going to hit the 256GB limit unless you upgrade it at checkout. My girlfriend has been using a 512GB Air for two years, and when she was working as a social media creator, she needed to clear it off every couple of weeks. Now that she works as a social media manager, and does less work with video and photo files, she only needs to clear it off yearly, but storage is the one limit she needs to worry about.

Something Blue

The new Blue colour catches the light in a really nice way.

The change to the design this year is the new Sky Blue colour. I was worried another blue option would be pretty boring, but in person, it’s won me over. I generally like warm metal tones like Starlight, but Sky Blue is a nice counteroffer for people who like cooler colours. It also does a great job of repelling fingerprints.

I’d love Apple to add some more consistency to its colour lineup. I have nothing against the options we have, but I think it’s weird that the iPad Air comes in ‘Blue’ while the MacBook Air comes in ‘Sky Blue’ and both are almost the same, but not quite. It’s nothing against each product, but it does feel like Apple doesn’t have the same attention to detail that was so important during its early years.

While they look close, in person, the Air is less saturated.

I assume Apple was able to cut the price this year by honing its supply chain and manufacturing after selling this design for three years. There were reports when the M2 came out that COVID was delaying chips, so perhaps we’ve made it over that hump. Either way, it illustrates the supply chain mastery of Apple in the Tim Cook era.

While I have no qualms with the current design of the Air, the wedge design from the Johnny Ive era exemplified Apple‘s work to offer the smallest footprint around. The newer Air might be narrower overall, but the tapered edges on the older Air felt thinner, and at this level, the perception of thinness is arguably more important.

Both the USB-C ports are rated for Thunderbolt 4 speeds.

The current model has no real problems and even improves on some aspects of the older design by raising it more off the table to allow for some airflow under the machine. The removal of the tapered sides also allows for more battery and those batteries don’t need to be stacked in a super bespoke way to fit within the tapered computers.

However, the design also feels more straightforward and easier to mass produce. While the old Air was trying to be the best computer to hold in your hands, the new one is prioritizing simple assembly as well. I understand that this is a weird complaint because the current Air is a fantastic laptop, but I hope the next iteration can push the back towards the cutting edge of computer thinness.

The MacBook Air design rides the fine line between simple and minimal.

On the outside, there are still only two USB-C ports, but thanks to a new Display Engine in the M4 chip, you can finally support two external displays while leaving the MacBook’s lid open. This would have been a great reason to add another USB-C port to the right side of the laptop, but alas, we’re still left with only two Thunderbolt 4 ports, one headphone jack and a MagSafe charger. The default option comes with a 30-watt charger, but I’d recommend spending the extra $30 at checkout to get the dual port 35-watt brick. It’s a small upgrade, but I use both ports on my 35-watt charger a lot–the extra cost is worth the convenience.

It would have been a great addition for Apple to improve the screen brightness and offer the Nano-texture coating to make using the Air better outside and on the go. I fell in love with the matte screen option when testing the M4 MacBook Pro, and now that I’ve had it on a MacBook, I want it on everything.

What model should you get?

The webcam is a little better this time around, but it’s nothing to write home about.

This year, Apple has discontinued the older MacBook Airs, so if you can find a good deal on an M3, I’d grab that. However, those models will sell out soon, leaving most buyers with two options: a new M4 or a refurbished unit.

Apple has some solid deals in its refurb store. At the time of writing, a base model M2 with 8GB of RAM is only $879, which is a great deal for office workers and students. If you need more power, there are some other refurbished deals, but this store changes its stock often, so you’ll need to see what’s available.

If you want a new MacBook Air, I’d recommend buying it from Apple’s education store since anyone in Canada can access it. This will drop a few dollars off the price. If you plan to play AAA games or video edit, get the 10-core CPU upgrade and more storage. Office workers and students will be fine with the base model, but as always, get as much storage as you can afford because you’ll likely use it over the many years you own this Mac.

At the end of the day, the MacBook Air is my favourite laptop. The amount of power packed into the small frame is exactly what I wanted when I bought a 12-inch MacBook in 2017. Back then, it felt like you couldn’t have it all in a laptop, but the M4 Air proves that you can.

The M4 MacBook Air starts at $1,249 with education pricing, and the 15-inch is $1,549. Prices go up $150 per unit in the standard Apple Store.