M4 MacBook Air 2025 review: The perfect laptop for most consumers
Apple's new MacBook Air laptops, which the company unveiled alongside a new iPad Air and a disappointing 11th-generation iPad earlier this month, are now on sale. They feature the M4 chip and some additional upgrades that remote workers and desk jockeys, in particular, may appreciate.
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I've been playing around with the new 15-inch M4 MacBook Air with 16GB of memory and 512GB of storage. Here are my thoughts on it, along with the very similar 13-inch model.
Let's address the laptop's M4 chip upgrade first, since it features heavily into Apple's marketing.
There's no denying that the M4 chip, which comes in two varieties in the new MacBook Air lineup (an 8‑core or 10-core GPU—the more the better for graphics-intensive apps), is the fastest chip ever in a MacBook Air. Apple brags that the M4 delivers '23x faster performance' in some cases versus the fastest Intel chip ever included in older Intel-based MacBook Airs. The company also boasts that the M4 is also up to two times faster than the M1 chip.
But there's a reason that Apple is comparing the M4 to chips that are five years old or older. While the M4 is indeed technically faster than the M2 and M3 chips found in the company's 2023 and 2024 MacBook Airs, you're not going to see much of a difference in speed. Indeed, in normal, everyday tasks, including web browsing, photo editing, and word processing, I've yet to see any notable speed improvement between my M3 MacBook Air and the M4 MacBook Air review unit I received.
In other words, the inclusion of the M4 is nice, but most users won't see many real-world benefits over the M2 or M3. That being said, the M4 MacBook Air does feature some genuinely notable upgrades that a select group of users will find invaluable.
While many aspects of the M4 MacBook Air are nothing more than spec bumps (a slightly faster processor and base RAM upgrades), the laptop series did receive two notable upgrades in 2025, which remote workers and desk jockeys, in particular, will appreciate.
First, Apple has ditched the 1080p FaceTime camera found in the M3 MacBook Air for a 12MP Center Stage camera. Center Stage is the name Apple gives to its most advanced webcams. Center Stage uses AI to track your movements in the frame to always keep you in the center of the shot. This is a huge boon when you're on video calls, especially if you are up and about moving around with, say, a whiteboard behind you.
Another feature of the Center Stage camera is called Desk View. This is a mode that allows the MacBook's webcam to display what is lying on the desk in front of it. This top-down view makes it easy for those on a call with you to see an object clearly. For example, if you're a clothing designer videoconferencing with a client, you can lay out fabric samples before you, and your client will be able to get a great overhead view of them all.
Second, the M4 MacBook Air includes a big display-related upgrade that people who like using multiple monitors will appreciate. The M4 MacBook Air can now power two external displays with resolutions of up to 6K in addition to the laptop's screen. The M3 MacBook Air had been able to support two displays—but only if the laptop's lid was closed. This means the M4 MacBook Air allows you to have a three-display setup on your desk if you want it.
The M4 MacBook Air series has gotten a color shake-up. Apple has finally done away with the decade-old Space Grey color option (it looked like metallic ash). In its place, the company unveiled a new Sky Blue color option, which was the color of the review unit I received.
The thing is, the color doesn't look that blue. As a matter of fact, when I took the MacBook Air out of its box, I thought there had been a mix-up, and they accidentally sent me the silver color. If you're hoping for a blue laptop, you should definitely check out the color in person before buying it because you may be disappointed with how light the shade of blue looks.
While the M4 MacBook Airs are great machines, I was let down by a few of Apple's choices. First, I'd hoped that Apple would finally address its frustrating USB-C port placement on this year's model. Recent MacBook Airs (the 2025 model included) have 2 USB-C ports. That's enough for most people. But the annoying thing is that both ports sit on the laptop's left side.
I'm not sure why Apple doesn't just move one of the USB-C ports to the right side of the laptop so that users can plug their accessories in from either end. Doing so would allow users to spread their accessories more evenly across their desktop, leading to a more comfortable workspace.
Second, on the 2024 M4 MacBook Pro series, Apple allowed users to upgrade the display from glossy to a nano texture, giving it a more matte-like look. As I wrote late last year, the nano texture display is a sight to behold, and if Apple had added that option to the 2025 M4 MacBook Air, I'd seriously have considered upgrading from my M3 MacBook Air this year. But they have decided not to give users that choice—and that's disappointing.
Despite being merely a collection of minor spec bumps in many respects, the M4 MacBook Air is still the perfect laptop for most consumers. It is incredibly thin, light, and powerful. It's also got one additional element that I haven't mentioned yet, which makes the computer more compelling than ever.
Apple has reduced the price of the new MacBook Airs by $100 from last year's models. This was unexpected (especially with Trump's tariffs threatening to see the prices Americans pay for electronics rise in the coming months). Now, the 13-inch MacBook Air starts at $999, and the 15-inch starts at $1199. If you want to lock in these attractive lower prices, you might want to purchase the new MacBook Air sooner rather than later in case those threatened tariffs do force Apple and others to raise prices in the months ahead.
The M4 chip is powerful enough to run artificial intelligence tasks such as Apple Intelligence and even LLMs like DeepSeek and others locally, meaning that this laptop likely has the power to get you through the next three or four years of a rapidly changing AI landscape. My advice, however, is to upgrade the new MacBook Air to at least 24GB of memory when you buy it (the MacBook Air series now starts with 16GB). More RAM will make compute-intensive tasks, like AI, run faster.
While users with M2 or M3 MacBook Airs could probably hold off on upgrading for a few more years, if you have a Windows PC or an M1 MacBook, the M4 MacBook Air makes for a compelling upgrade—and it's a no-brainer if you still have an old Intel-based MacBook.
This post originally appeared at fastcompany.comSubscribe to get the Fast Company newsletter: http://fastcompany.com/newsletters
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