M4 Macbook Air Review: Too Easy!

(upbeat music) - All right, I think we can make this pretty short and sweet. The Mac team is on one? See, the M4 Mac Mini refresh was already one of the best tech deals of all 2024, great computer, great price.

So now here comes this new M4 MacBook Air. It's the most capable, powerful version yet, obviously, thanks to the new chip. The starting memory is 16 gigs, it gets a sneaky, slightly larger battery, some Thunderbolt improvements, a new webcam, a new color, and the price goes down.

It's kind of funny looking back a bit at the arc of reviewing MacBook Airs over the years. Like at first, it was this spectacle of engineering, but also kind of impractical and missing a few ports. It went from that to being, you know, a bit of an outdated design, but improving a lot.

Then turned into basically the easiest to recommend laptop in the world at 999. But then with Apple silicon updates and higher base storage, the price did go up with the M2 generation by 200 bucks, so it was 1,199, and I feel like everyone just kind of went, all right, it's still fine, yeah, still a good laptop for that price. But now it's 2025 and it's got the M4 chip and the price has dropped back down to 999 for the base machine again, and that is sick.

Now, almost nothing else has physically changed with this laptop. Still the same keyboard, you know, there's no speaker grills, there's still MagSafe charging, two USB type C ports, the headphone jack, the notch at the top of the 60 hertz LCD, the thin and light aluminum build, this is very much still the MacBook Air. If you wanna get sweaty about it, as Dave2D would say, I noticed the mute button icon is different, and the webcam is now a 12 megapixel center stage webcam, which can follow you around the frame if you leave it on.

But I actually do turn it off every time. And also I noticed on Apple's website, the battery capacity went up slightly from 52. 6 watt hours to 53.

8 watt hours this generation, so that's about 2% more capacity. I'm paying attention, okay, it's a real life spot the differences challenge. But really the main way, obviously, you'll know if it's the new laptop generation or not, is this, did you notice it's a new color?

Barely. It's called Sky Blue this time. If I could rename it, I'd rename it barely blue, considering, when it's up against white backgrounds, okay, it looks a little bit blue, but when it's up against actually blue things, it literally looks silver again.

It's like the LaCroix of MacBook paint colors. It's like someone whispered the word blue in the paint shop just before placing each one in its box and shipping it away. But, yeah, now you know, if you see this pale blue color on a MacBook Air, you know it's the new one.

This replaces Space Gray. But also, speaking of boxes, this is the box that my MacBook Air came in from Apple, the review unit, and I don't know if you notice on the corner there, it appears someone has bled onto the box of this computer. I don't really know how that happens, I just pulled it outta the cardboard shipping box and it just looked like this.

Really weird, never seen that before. I really hope whoever packaged this computer is okay. Anyway, the main reason this laptop is such a big deal is the chip, right?

This M4 chip, it's really good. We already learned this from the M4 iPad Pro nine months ago, and then again with the M4 Mac Mini four months ago, this chip in the laptop will be passively cooled, so no fans in the Air, unlike the Mac Mini, so, yeah, sustained performance ceiling is going to be a bit lower. But for the quick bursty stuff like normal computer activities, yeah, it's amazing as expected.

And then, the specific benefit, in case you forgot, of the M4 over previous generations of Apple silicon is gonna be more AI specific horsepower. So more powerful 16 core neural engine, some of that manifests itself in useless stuff, like image playground, rendering images locally faster than ever before, cool. But also some of that is potentially useful stuff, like the background cutouts being quicker and more accurate, or the single click photo enhancer in Pixelmator Pro being much faster.

Reviewing MacBook Airs is so funny though 'cause we do this every time, this is the baseline, this is the cheapest entry level way to get a Mac laptop, for people who don't care about pro-level tasks, they're just gonna check their email and web browse and maybe edit a photo once in a while, basic stuff, MacBook Air, classic. But because Apple silicon has gotten so good, we end up able to do things that are way beyond that. This machine is capable of things that required a Pro chip like a couple of years ago, that's not an exaggeration.

So when I tell you I could load up a bunch of 4K and 8K footage into a Final Cut Pro timeline, and it would scrub through the timeline with almost no hesitation at quarter res playback resolution, and then it could export the project just a few beats slower than a Mac Mini, that literally doesn't matter to 99% of MacBook Air buyers. But the chip is so powerful, it's capable of it. So it's just good to know that you could.

You know most Airs will never have 3D modeling applications or Logic Pro or ever be churning through the Adobe Suite or playing AAA games, but instead they'll be doing video calls and having 20 Safari tabs open or flipping through a bunch of productivity apps. But it is pretty sick that this computer can stretch and handle all of that, should you choose to throw that at it, that is the modern MacBook Air. There's even allegedly a customer that was frustrated with the last generation of Air because it couldn't connect two different 6K displays at the same time and use them with the lid open.

And so, now this one can. So, okay, great, this laptop is still a great machine and a great deal. Here's my only complaint potentially with this laptop, I would like a better display.

Now I know that I'm coming from a MacBook Pro, and I'm very used to these really good displays, and it seems like Apple is, as they usually do, reserving certain things for the Pros. So the Mini LED, the pro res high refresh rate, even the nano texture coating on the display, all of that stuff is reserved for the MacBook Pro. But all that is stuff that I would like to see in a MacBook Air, and I think it could handle it, I think it's got plenty of battery, it could go brighter, it could look even better so I want a better screen on the MacBook Air, me personally, as an option.

But, again, I know that most people won't even notice and will be totally fine with this. But here's a more important question that I ask basically every year with this MacBook Pro, because we always talk about this base price. Can you actually order the base price spec and still be fine?

And this year, again, I feel like for most people, the answer actually is yes, because this time, that's 16 gigs of unified memory and then has 256 gigs of base storage. So the storage and memory upgrades are always borderline robbery, that's not a shocker. Like, I do like that you can get a much faster charger for 20 bucks if you don't already have one, but, yeah, doubling up to 16 gigs base for 999 is huge since these computers can go into swap memory so quickly.

Shout out to the single best feature of Apple Intelligence, which has been improving the amount of RAM in every Apple device. If you are in the market for a base machine though, I think if you don't plan on ever doing super high-end tasks, you can still consider the last gen, this is gonna sound familiar, but the last gen is also a really good deal, it has half that memory, eight gigs, but it's 799 at Best Buy right now. So that's a really good deal, obviously, if you have an older MacBook, if you have an Intel MacBook, this is the type of stuff you're gonna be looking at.

Otherwise, then, yeah, pretty easy to recommend the baseline, the new entry level Sky Blue MacBook Air. All things considered, it's pretty boring that this laptop doesn't change very much and it's just a barely new color and it's a chip we've already seen before, but I think it's pretty exciting that laptops have gotten this good, period. Thanks for watching.

Catch you guys in the next one. Peace.