M4 MacBook Air review: Am I blue?
The new M4 MacBook Air is the Mac most people should buy.
It’s easy to get caught up in the small changes Apple rolls into its most popular computer as it iterates on the MacBook Air from year to year. It rolls from M1 to M2 to M3 to, in 2025, the M4. And this new model does offer a few notable changes and improvements, which I’ll get to momentarily.
But first, let’s consider the larger picture.
A very large percentage of all Macs that are sold are laptops. The last time Apple broke out desktop and laptop sales figures, 75 percent of all Macs sold in Apple’s fiscal 2012 were laptops,1 and it’s hard to imagine that number has gone down. While the MacBook Pro appeals to many higher-end users, most people opt for the MacBook Air—that’s why Apple keeps touting it as the world’s most popular laptop. Since the arrival of Apple silicon in 2020, even the humble MacBook Air combines performance and battery life in a way that makes it hard to imagine any normal, everyday computer user whose needs couldn’t be fulfilled by one.
That’s why perhaps the most important change in the M4 MacBook Air is its base configuration, which starts at $999. When Apple introduced a winning new flat-with-rounded-corners Air design in 2022, it had to keep selling older models in order to get down under a thousand dollars. Three years later, Apple is finally able to sell a brand-new Air—with a generous 16GB of unified memory—at that important price.
So: No more quibbles about stepping back a generation or two to an older model with a lower price. Apple has done away2 with that strategy for the MacBook Air: The latest and greatest model is the one most people shopping for a Mac should buy, especially if they’re coming from an Intel model.
The pace of change
In fact, before discussing the other changes in this generation of MacBook Air, I feel the need to lay out the pace of progress Apple has made during the Apple silicon era—along with an attempt to connect it back to the Intel era.
I know that a lot of very tech-focused people roll their eyes at Apple continuing to compare new models to five- or six-year-old Intel Macs, but Apple’s not just doing it in order to make pleasantly eye-popping speed comparisons. Five, six, even seven years is not a remotely unreasonable amount of time for people to keep using a laptop. I’m certain Apple knows exactly how much of its Mac installed base is still on Intel—and it’s continuing to work hard to encourage them to finally take advantage of the speed boost that comes with moving to an Apple-built processor.
I decided to run some benchmark tests on all four generations of Apple silicon MacBook Air, along with a last-generation Intel model from 2020. The charts are below, but the results are what you’d expect—there’s a huge leap from Intel to Apple silicon, and Apple’s been pushing performance forward with each generation of chip. (This new M4 actually offers the largest jump in processor performance between generations in the Apple silicon era.)
I’m a believer in the idea that at the speeds of modern computers, it’s very hard for someone to perceive a 25 percent improvement in maximum processor performance. Most of us don’t tax our processors at that level, and certainly for not that long. Sure, there’s something there—but where it really adds up is when you upgrade after two or three or four chip generations. Upgraders from a M1 Air will see more like a 40 to 60 percent speed boost, and that’s something that you might be able to notice. But upgraders from Intel, well… that’s where you will be able to notice the speed difference in literally everything you do.
A few hardware improvements
There are two major improvements to the M4 MacBook Air when compared to previous generations. First is the camera, which has been updated to a 12MP ultra-wide sensor with support for Center Stage and Desk View. This collection of specs seems to be Apple’s current baseline for Mac cameras, as they’re the same as in the M4 iMac and M4 MacBook Pro. Of course, every model’s shape differs and Apple’s not making any claims about the cameras being identical in anything but specs. I found the iMac’s camera more impressive than the MacBook Pro’s camera, for example.
In normal lighting, the new MacBook Air camera didn’t appear that different from previous generations—it offered a little better contrast. As the lighting got worse, it showed that it could do a better job. Those statements give short shrift to the versatility of the camera, however. Because it’s a 12MP widescreen camera, the default, comparable webcam view is actually zoomed in via Center Stage—and zooming out exposes that the camera covers much more ground than its predecessors.
Center Stage doesn’t seem completely necessary in a device that can easily be tilted and repositioned, and Desk View doesn’t really work well with the geometry of laptops, but adding a better, more versatile camera to the MacBook Air has been a long time coming and I’m happy with the upgrade, subtle though it may be in most circumstances.
I’m also happy to report that at last, an Apple silicon-based MacBook Air can fully support driving two external displays while also driving its internal display. Support for two external displays—a feature Intel-based MacBook Airs supported—was completely lacking in the M1 and M2 generations, frustrating people who rely on docking their laptop to two monitors. In the M3 generation, the Air picked up the ability to drive two displays with its lid closed. I plugged my Apple-supplied M4 MacBook Air into two Studio Displays and ended up with a whole lot of pixels. If you’ve been holding out for this feature—and believe me, I hear from plenty of people who have been—it’s now your time to shine.
So tired of all this traveling
Finally, let’s talk about color. Though Apple occasionally goes bold with its color choices—the current iMacs and the iPhone 16 come to mind—it has been much more conservative when it comes to its laptops. Really only the G3 iBook was boldly colorful among Apple laptops. I suspect the primary reason for this is a belief within Apple that while an iMac might provide a nice color accent in a home or business, laptops are taken into various environments and therefore should be more neutral.
I don’t really agree with this approach, nor Apple’s insistence on offering no color choices for those who might prefer to show off a little bit. But it is what it is, and that’s why the M4 MacBook Air comes in four conservative colors. Space Gray is gone, but standard silver, the warmer silver of Starlight, and the beautiful almost-black navy of Midnight remain. The new color is Sky Blue.
I really don’t mean to give Apple a hard time, but I had to double-check my shipping manifest because I was convinced the company had sent me a silver laptop to review. But when I placed the MacBook Air next to other modern Apple silver products, it’s clearly a different shade, and at certain viewing angles the blue undertone becomes more pronounced. If you want to think of Starlight as silver with a yellow undertone, and silver as neutral, Sky Blue is silver with a blue undertone. They are basically three slight variations on one another.
Is it pretty? Sure, especially in the right environment and at the right angles. It’s exactly what Apple wanted to make: a new color choice that won’t draw anyone’s attention when it’s opened in a conference room or at a cafe.
I think MacBook Air users should be given at least one fun color option, but I have to grudgingly respect Apple’s commitment to this philosophy. I want to believe that a bright blue or orange or red or green MacBook Air might sell, but Apple’s the one who knows how many silver iMacs it has sold. Maybe most MacBook Air buyers just want to blend in. Until Apple tries something more daring than Sky Blue, we’ll never know.
- In FY12, Apple sold 13.5 million laptops out of 18.1 million total Macs sold. (We don’t know how many Macs Apple sold in FY24, but Mac revenue was up 31 percent from FY12.) ↩
- The M2 Air is available in a few countries at a lower price, and Walmart is still selling M1 Airs for now, but those are marketing experiments that are outside the canonical list of products being promoted on Apple’s site. ↩
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