Apple MacBook Air 13-inch (M4): Two-minute review

How do you make the best MacBook, and arguably one of the best laptops on the market, better? You could redesign it, but that’s a move fraught with potential downsides; if the current design is popular, you risk disenfranchising fans. In that case, making small changes, especially under-the-hood ones, is probably the smart move, and it’s clearly Apple’s strategy.

The MacBook Air 13-inch (M4) is virtually indistinguishable from the M3 model. Apple has left the exquisite keyboard and responsive trackpad untouched, and the same goes for the brilliant Liquid Retina display. The 2.7lbs. weight is unchanged, and even the two Thunderbolt 4 ports are essentially the same. Visually, the only thing that's new is a new color option, and the Sky Blue finish is a subtle hue that can, depending on the light, look almost gray, but a second glance always reveals that pleasing almost pastel-like azure. It’s a color that should sell out fast.

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The other two significant changes are to the hardware. Replacing the FaceTime camera is the new 12MP Center Stage Camera. It’s an ultra-wide lens in a screen notch that can keep you in the frame during video calls, and it’s a nice-to-have though not earth-shattering update.

There’s also the M4 chip, which adds cores and performance over the M3 Apple silicon it replaces. Like the M3, this is a fast, efficient, 3-nanometer chip with plenty of headroom for AAA gaming, video editing, music creation and, of course, Apple Intelligence.

From one perspective, the biggest upgrade might be in the value space. Apple doubled the base memory from 8GB of unified memory to 16GB while reducing the price to $999 / £999 / AU$1,699. That’s a shocking, and very welcome, turn of events. The best MacBook is now back to its pre–MacBook Air M3 price, and better value because of it.

It really is hard to find any fault with the MacBook Air 13-inch (M4). It’s lightweight, attractive, powerful, easy to use, and up for anything. I gamed, streamed video, browsed the web, answered email, texted friends, conducted FaceTime calls, edited video, practiced guitar, and wrote this review on it. I’m not concerned about the lack of design changes, and I like the new color, the Center Stage Camera, and especially the price. I would not be surprised to see the MacBook Air 13-inch (M4) rise to the very top of our best laptops list.

Apple MacBook Air 13-inch (M4) review: Price and availability

• Starts at $999 / £999 / AU$1,699
• Lower launch price than the discontinued M3 model
• M2 and M3 models no longer on the Apple Store, but M2 MacBooks can be found at third-party retailers

Rarely do I get to write about a price drop for a new product that arrives with feature enhancements. Usually, we get the same or sometimes a little less for the money. That is not the case with the MacBook Air 13-inch M4.

Even though Apple hasn't radically refreshed its best MacBook, the updates in performance, memory, and video conferencing, plus a new color, hit all the right notes – and when paired with a now $100 (in the US) lower price, they have me singing a happy tune.

Funnily enough, the first 3lb MacBook Air – the one that slid out of a manilla envelope in 2008 – cost $1,799. It would take a few years for it to hit that $999 sweet spot, which it maintained until recently.

Sometimes that $999 got you a lower-end Intel Core I, but in the age of Apple silicon we’re getting great performance and efficiency at an excellent price.

The MacBook Air 13-inch (M4) comes in three base configurations. If you upgrade to the $1,199 / £1,199 model the GPU gets a bump from eight to 10 cores, and the storage doubles to 512GB. Go for the $1,499 / £1,499 / AU$2,399 top-tier model and the base unified memory is increased from 16GB to 24GB, and you can get up to 2TB of storage. Whichever option you go for, you can upgrade the RAM to 32GB.

It’s available in the new Sky Blue (like my 256GB review unit), Midnight, Starlight, and Silver. Apple has discontinued Space Gray (for now).

Apple unveiled the MacBook Air 13-inch (M4) on March 5, 2025, and the laptop starts shipping on March 12.

• Price score: 4.5/5

Apple MacBook Air 13-inch (M4) review: Specs

The Apple MacBook Air 13-inch (M4) comes in three pre-configured options.

Apple MacBook Air 13-inch (M4) review: Design

• No major redesign
• Sky Blue is subtle but attractive
• Excellent construction, materials, keyboard, and trackpad

There are still some who mourn the passing of the original MacBook Air’s wedge design, the one that started at a more than half inch (1.61 cm) at one end and ended at 0.16 inches (4.064mm) at the other. That design remains so popular that the M1 model featuring it is still a top seller at Walmart.

I’ve moved on. The MacBook Air M4 is just 2.7lbs / 1.24kg, and at 11.97 x 8.46 x 0.44 inches / 30.41 x 21.5 x 1.13cm, is thinner than the OG MacBook Air was at its thickest point. This is a laptop that's built for your backpack and, yes, it’s light enough that you might forget it’s there.

Everything about the MacBook Air M4 feels premium. The 100% recycled aluminum enclosure is light but solid and has all the exacting tolerances Apple is known for. It’s a finely machined, eye-catching piece of hardware, and few laptops can match its elegance.

The backlit keyboard is an absolute pleasure to type on, and has remarkable travel and response for such a thin design. It includes all your function keys and a multipurpose power / sleep / Touch ID button that’s useful for unlocking the MacBook Air and logging into various apps and services with your registered fingertips.

I do prefer the Microsoft Surface Laptop’s Windows Hello feature, which lets you log on using your face in much the way you do with Face ID on any of the best iPhones, although I don’t have to touch anything because I set the MacBook Air to unlock automatically with my Apple Watch.

While Apple hasn't redesigned the keyboard, there is one small change that you might not notice at first glance: the mute key now features a speaker icon with a line through it, which matches what you see on-screen when you press the key. It's a small but clarifying change.

There’s ample room to rest your palms, and the glass-covered multi-touch trackpad is huge and responsive.

Ports and other elements are unchanged from the last two MacBook Air generations. There are two Thunderbolt 4 ports on the left side with up to 40GBps of throughput and which are capable of driving two external screens, even with the MacBook Air lid open. Next to those is the MagSafe charging port, and on the right side is the 3.5mm headphone jack.

The four-speaker stereo sound system is hidden in the hinge below the display. It can fill a room with bright, crisp audio, although it mostly lacks bass (the 15-inch model offers a 6-speaker sound system with force-cancelling sound woofers).

• Design score: 4.5/5

Apple MacBook Air 13-inch (M4) review: Display and Center Stage

With one exception, the 13-inch M4 MacBook Air’s display is identical to the last generation. It’s still a 13.6-inch Liquid Retina panel with 2560 x 1664 resolution and 500 nits of sustained brightness, which in my experience is viewable in direct sunlight, and support for one billion colors. It’s a fantastic display for everything from gaming to streaming to content creation.

There is a notch at the top for the camera, but most apps do not wrap around that cutout, and it’s not distracting on the desktop.

The notch also contains the new 12MP Center Stage Camera. The idea here is that the lens is an ultra-wide camera, but for the purposes of video conferencing it crops to an undistorted rectangle. Then, as you move around, the frame moves around to keep you in the frame. If you like to get up and walk around, or people walk in and out of the video conversation, this can be tremendously useful, and it worked well for me as long as I didn't stray too far out of frame. If you need the camera to stay still (as I do when I use the 1080p camera to go on TV), you can easily turn Center Stage off.

Compared to Microsoft’s excellent Surface Laptop 7, the screen is missing one feature: touch. I used Surface laptops for years, and I did enjoy being able to touch and even draw on the display with a dedicated Bluetooth pen. Apple has steadfastly resisted introducing touch on its MacBook line – and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs didn’t think it made sense. If you require that kind of multipurpose device, you may want to consider the M4 iPad Pro 13-inch plus a Magic Keyboard.

• Display score: 4.5/5

Apple MacBook Air 13-inch (M4) review: macOS and Apple Intelligence

• macOS Sequoia is a rich, deep, and well-organized platform
• Everything is well integrated into Apple's wider ecosystem
• Apple Intelligence can be useful, but it's not yet compelling

With macOS Sequoia, Apple has built one of the most consistent and stable desktop platforms on the planet. It virtually never crashes, and it’s full of useful features.

The latest version is mostly a refinement of the platform, but if it’s been a while since you’ve upgraded you will notice feature enhancement like better widgets and window-management tools, the excellent new Passwords app, and audio transcription on Notes.

What’s more, macOS makes excellent use of the M4’s power.

At one point I ran Garage Band, and I was pleased to discover that not only could I use the MacBook Air to tune my guitar, but it could also tell me if I was playing my chords correctly. I also used Pixelmator Pro image and video editor (now owned by Apple) to effortlessly apply complex masks.

Of course, the big news on the software side is Apple Intelligence, Apple’s own brand of AI, which is supported by the M4’s 16-core neural engine.

It enables features like Image Playground, which lets you imagine wild scenes that can include representations of you and others from your Photos library. It’s good fun, but I still struggle to see the utility, and I wonder when Apple will offer a more open-range image-generation platform, one that enables me to describe a complex scene in a prompt and get a result. Most Windows laptops running Copilot can do this.

Writing Tools, which is available in Apple's native text composition apps like Notes and Mail, is useful, especially if you struggle to write clear, cogent sentences. It's of limited utility to me.

Similarly, Siri got a few nice upgrades, like the ability to respond to text prompts and better handle broken speech patterns, but it's still unable to carry on longer conversations or learn anything about you, and you still can't use it to comprehensively control your MacBook. What’s worse is that promised updates to Siri that would have made it a more able competitor to ChatGPT and Gemini have failed to materialize. At least Siri can now tap into ChatGPT (if you allow it) for more complex queries.

Safari is an excellent browser, but I still find myself using Chrome.

• Software score: 4/5

Apple MacBook Air 13-inch (M4) review: Performance

• M4 has more CPU cores than the M3 that preceded it
• Ample power
• Decent but not massive performance upgrade
• Excellent platform and increasing Apple Intelligence capabilities

Ever since Apple switched from Intel to Apple silicon we’ve seen significant gains in performance and efficiency. The power of these lightweight laptops and the M-class chips can appear limitless, and all-day battery life is now usually a given.

Of course, the world has not stood still. Some Windows laptops are now arriving with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite, and these ultraportables often nearly match Apple silicon for performance and battery life.

The M4 10-core CPU and 8-Core GPU backed by 16GB of unified memory inside my test system generally outperformed the X Elite on single-core scores but are now matched for multi-core performance.

These are just numbers of course, and I prefer to rely on real-world performance. In my tests, the MacBook Air 13 and its M4 chip handled everything I threw at it. It can be difficult to stress out the system – I played the AAA game Lies of Pi at maximum settings and it was smooth as butter, thanks no doubt in part to the new Game Mode that optimizes performance for gaming.

I highly recommend getting a controller (I use one designed for the Xbox), but regardless, the new MacBook Air offers a great gaming experience with thrilling, smooth graphics, and excellent sound.

I often ran the game alongside multiple background apps, including Final Cut Pro. I had no trouble editing four 4K 30fps streams at once, but when I loaded up four 4K 120fps clips, I did notice some stuttering on video playback, although as this is not a considerably more expensive MacBook Pro, that doesn’t concern me.

I noticed in my benchmarking that the Metal Score on the MacBook Air M3 was slightly higher than that of the M4 system, but that’s because I had a 10-core GPU on the older MacBook and just an eight-core GPU on the new M4 system. You can, as I noted earlier in the price section, pay a bit more for the two extra cores. It’s worth noting, though, that the differences in performance between the M3 10 Core and M4 8-Core GPU were minimal.

The system supports WiFi 6e and Bluetooth 5.3, which is good, if not entirely forward-leaning – I'd like to see WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.

• Performance score: 4.5/5

Apple MacBook Air 13-inch (M4) review: Battery life

• 14 hours battery life (web activities)
• Effectively lasts all day (mixed use)
• Charges to 50% in 90 minutes; 100% in three hours

Apple is promising up to 18 hours of battery life from the MacBook Air 13-inch (M4), which is mostly a test of how long the laptop can play 1080p video for; for comparison, Microsoft promises 20 hours from its Surface Laptop 7 for a similar task. The MacBook Air 13 M4’s real-world battery life numbers will vary significantly when performing a mix of sometimes CPU-intensive tasks.

In my tests, which included playing games (which made the base of the laptop quite warm), editing video, opening multiple browser windows and streaming video, battery life came in around eight hours. That’s quite good for a hard day of work, and especially for such a thin and light laptop. In our Future Labs test, which is primarily web browsing, the MacBook Air 13-inch (M4) managed 14 hours, 51 minutes, which is about 30 minutes longer than the M3 but for slightly different tasks.

Overall, you're getting good, all-day battery life, but your experience will vary based on the tasks you perform.

After I drained the laptop to zero, I recharged it with the included 30W charger (the more expensive 24GB model comes with a 35W charger) and (matching Sky Blue) woven MagSafe charger to 50% in 90 minutes, and 100% in three-and-a-half hours.

• Battery score: 5/5

Should you buy the Apple MacBook Air 13-inch (M4)?

Buy it if...

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Apple MacBook Air 13-inch (M3) review: Also consider

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How I tested the Apple MacBook Air 13-inch (M4)

• I used the Apple MacBook Air 13-inch (M4) for five days
• I worked, played, listened, edited, and wrote this review on it
• I usually ran multiple apps at once

After receiving my MacBook Air 13-inch (M4) review unit I immediately unboxed it and began testing, and it did not leave my side for much of the next five days.

I ran benchmarks, installed multiple apps, and then began using it to edit images and video, play AAA games, listen to music, stream movies and shows, answer email, browse the web, and generate words and images with Apple Intelligence.

I've been reviewing technology for over 30 years, and I've tested everything from DOS-based word processors to Apple's Vision Pro. I've reviewed laptops of all stripes, including traditional clamshells and convertibles. I regularly work on macOS but also use the Windows platform almost every day – I like to keep my hands in all the ecosystems.

Read more about how we test

First reviewed March 2025