Apple MacBook Air M4: First Impressions and Analysis
First (TWO) Impressions
Apple’s MacBook Air is its best-selling laptop. It has had enormous industry impact even before the switch to Apple Silicon five years ago. I have been testing Apple's latest MacBook Air M4 for a few days, long enough to form two opinions:
1. Qualcomm, AMD, and Intel have begun to shrink the gap, but Apple Silicon still has a meaningful price/performance/efficiency lead. The base $999 MacBook Air M4 configuration outperforms every Windows laptop in single-core benchmarks, by a lot, and meets or beats the competition on multi-core performance.* GPU performance is also fantastic for the price and form factor.
I haven't tested battery life yet, but it should be great (Apple is claiming 15 hours of web browsing).
2. The new Sky Blue version is the one you want -- it's shiny, catches the light in different ways, and isn't terminally boring. However, it is more of a finish than a color. It is not "blue," as you can clearly see when you put other things Apple has called "blue" up against it. I remain convinced that somewhere in Apple's CMF lab there is an Apple Studio Monitor with its color saturation accidentally turned all the way down. Still, I like it better than the other non-colors.
Analysis
Apple has a reputation for selling “expensive” products, and there are certainly areas where that is objectively true: the infamous wheels on the Mac Pro, the AirPods Max, and high-margin storage upgrades for its phones, tablets, and laptops. However, Apple also sells some premium products that are effectively inexpensive, thanks to the performance of its custom silicon and Apple’s vertical integration and scale. That’s before including the value added by its proprietary software and ecosystem.
The MacBook Air M4 is one of the inexpensive products for the experience it provides, particularly at or near its base configurations. The $999 13" model is reasonably equipped with 16GB RAM and 256 GB storage. Adding more display size, more RAM, or more storage raises the price to $1200 - $2400. Apple also knocks off $100 for students and educators, and some of its older M-series MacBook Airs remain on the market at even lower prices. Apple's price advantage does shrink as you get higher up on the size/RAM/storage ladder, and then rivals start offering more ports, faster refresh displays, OLED displays, Wi-Fi 7, or discrete GPUs at similar prices. Still, the MacBook Air M4 in configurations from $1000 - $1400 are enormously strong values.
Apple was always expected to put an M4 in a MacBook Air. While PC OEMs likely weren’t expecting a price cut in an age of tarrifs,** they do still have avenues for differentiation. They can take advantage of Apple’s steep storage costs and compare spec’d up $1400 MacBook Air models to their own laptops with equal storage and higher-feature content like brighter displays. They can push Microsoft’s Copilot AI integration into Windows vs Apple’s delayed Apple Intelligence improvements, though it sure would help if Microsoft’s own features weren’t also delayed. They can lean more heavily on Qualcomm’s higher performance-per-watt silicon; Snapdragon X Elite doesn’t outperform the M4, but it does perform extremely well for productivity and content creation tasks, with long battery life, and can be sold at lower price points than Intel’s Core Ultra 2 (Lunar Lake) systems. Microsoft’s Surface Laptop 7 and Lenovo’s YOGA Slim 7x are good examples, and excellent laptops. Apple’s software ecosystem has its strengths, but it remains weak on gaming, an area where Intel and AMD are strong.
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*The highest configuration Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite in Samsung's GalaxyBook4 Edge and the AMD Strix Point in HP's EliteBook X G1a do come out slightly ahead of the MacBook Air on multi-core performance. However, in my testing, the AMD needs to be plugged in to do it, and both of those laptops have fans and cost a lot more.
**My MacBook Air M4 review unit was assembled in Vietnam. It is likely that Apple is deliberately routing manufacturing of Macs for the U.S. market to Vietnam instead of China to avoid current/anticipated tariffs.