I tested Apple’s M4 MacBook Air, the best boring laptop I’ve ever used

I was a bit confused when Apple rolled out the MacBook Air with M4, its 2025 edition of its beloved thin and light laptop, as there wasn’t a whole lot of ‘new’ in this news. While Apple upgraded the brains and lowered the starting price, I typically expect more than that when Apple updates one of its biggest products. But maybe this is just a sign that I’ve been reviewing the best MacBooks for too long.

The good news, though, is that Apple didn’t need to change the MacBook Air. It’s still one of the top laptops at most everyday tasks you could need it for, and one of its few flaws — the relatively high price compared to the average PC laptop — was addressed for 2025. But since it’s still too pricey to be an impulse purchase, I took the time to put the M4 MacBook Air (both its 13-inch and 15-inch versions) through our standard tests to see if you should buy one.

What I liked about it

Still a fantastic laptop for most people

As a tech reviewer, I’m spoiled by the opportunity I get to test the latest and greatest in laptops. So I have to remind myself that even though the MacBook Air with M4 isn’t a thrilling update in this venerable brand’s history, it’s still both the best laptop for most people and the MacBook I recommend to family and friends. And this year, the only physical difference is the new Sky Blue color option that brightens up the color palette, though it’s such a muted hue I would have argued to call it Ice Blue.

Whether I was watching the “Grand Theft Hamlet” trailer or rewatching the dogfights in “Top Gun Maverick” to see how nice the explosions would look, the MacBook Air’s display presented color and detail well. From the ambers of horizons to the blues of the skies above Miles Teller’s Rooster, as well as the weird little details in the character designs in Grand Theft Auto Online, everything looked crisp and vibrant. I quickly found myself using the 15-inch MacBook Air more than the 13-inch counterpart because of how much more I can fit on its screen when it comes time to multitask. The only negative thing I could say is that these laptops don’t have the brightest screens (go for the MacBook Pro M4 if you want that), as I noticed myself a little too clearly in reflections when I was taking photos for this review.

The M4 MacBook Air’s keyboard is also just as great as it ever was, providing a clicky experience that enabled me to crank out most of this review lickety-split. Apple’s keyboards from the last four years have been so reliable and trustworthy that they’ve become the de-facto standard for typing.

The other predictably-great part of the new MacBook Air is that music sounds great blasting from its speakers. Bumping Charli XCX and The Japanese House’s version of “Apple” on the 13-inch MacBook Air’s four-speaker system, I noticed the ethereal pop song’s vocals and synths sounded accurate, while the 15-inch MacBook Air provided stronger sound with its six-speaker array and woofers. But since life isn’t all pop, I threw on The Cribs’ raucous indie rock track “Hey Scenesters!” to admire the guitar riffs and clattering drums. I noticed a slightly wider sound on the 15-inch MacBook Air, which gave more separation and space for percussive instruments such as rattling maracas.

One of my favorite things about the current MacBook Air is its MagSafe charging cable, which complements its dual USB-C ports and headphone jack. This connector snaps on and off to avoid the accidental damage that could be caused if a strong amount of force tugs the cable away from your laptop, which could easily happen if a pet, child or energetic adult is moving too quickly to notice what amounts to a fancy version of a trip-wire. This port was the standard for years, but disappeared on the MacBook Airs released in 2018 through 2020.

Apple also upgraded its webcams, from a 1080p FaceTime camera in the M3 MacBook Air to a 12-megapixel module in the M4 MacBook Air — though all of the selfies I shot have the same 1440 by 960 resolution and don’t have any noticeable difference in color or clarity. My colleague Mike Andronico agreed on multiple video calls when he said “you look like you’re on a MacBook, and that’s a good thing.” So what changed? Well, the addition of Apple’s Center Stage technology that lets you stay in the middle of the frame on video conferencing calls in programs such as Slack and Zoom — though you have to enable this feature in a menu at the top of the screen. For those always moving around on calls, this is a neat trick. For the rest, it’s the kind of thing you don’t even need to know is there.

Apple delivers a performance upgrade at a lower price

The big news of the new MacBook Air is that Apple lowered the barrier of entry to its latest generation of laptops by $100 for both the 13-inch and 15-inch models, which start at $999 and $1,199, respectively. Apple also doubled the default memory from 8GB to 16GB, a move it quietly made when announcing the M4 MacBook Pro. I’ve tested the slightly-upgraded configurations that add two GPU cores and double the storage to 512GB, and cost $200 extra.

Of all the slightly tweaked specs in the new MacBook Air, the biggest is the upgrade to the M4 chip, its latest generation of Apple silicon that debuted in 2024’s iPad Pro. It delivered snappy performance throughout my work and play, juggling dozens of browser tabs (including YouTube videos), Slack and other productivity apps including Todoist and Drafts.

The benchmarks, though, tell a predictable tale of incremental boosts when compared to last year’s model. The M4-based MacBook Airs we tested beat the M3-based counterparts by 17% to 24% on the Geekbench 6 general performance benchmarks, which measure how a system handles lightweight everyday apps in single-core testing and more-intense programs in its multicore test. The one exception was when the 13-inch M4 Air whooped its M3 forefather by 40%, though I’m not shocked because the newer model had two more GPU cores.

Speaking of GPUs, the MacBook Air continues to make slight ground as a laptop for casual gaming, as I could run the recent Mac port of Resident Evil Village on it — though I only played a slow-paced early scene where you’re walking around your house holding an adorable baby.

To put the Airs through more strenuous exercise, I ran the recent hit roleplaying game Baldur’s Gate on these thin and light laptops. The games ran slightly below full HD resolution and medium graphics on both models, where I quickly noticed an upside and a downside. While the game was definitely playable, consistently running at between 30 to 40 frames per second, I did notice a bit of screen tearing at the default settings (which I fixed by toggling V-Sync on). This is a marked improvement over the 13-inch M3 MacBook Air’s performance last year, which ran at the same resolution but on low graphics.

The M4 Airs also performed well on the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark, which we run at full HD and highest graphicsIt hit 36 to 37 frames per second, exceeding the 31 fps we got on the 10-core GPU model of the M3 MacBook Air. So, upgrade to 10 GPU cores if you care about your gaming, as both of these laptops pack the same M4 chip with 10 CPU cores and 10 GPU cores.

Oh, and in terms of how much the M4 MacBook Airs will help with those generative AI features that Apple’s branded under the phrase Apple Intelligence? Well, I don’t see myself ever using this stuff in my personal time, but it works relatively snappily. Looking through the photos I shot for this review, I realized one snapshot of the MacBook Air on a table could be cleaner if I’d had removed the nearby chairs and positioned the laptop away from a hole used for elegantly snaking cables away. So, I opened the image in the Photos app, tapped Edit, tapped Clean Up, and saw the app pretty quickly identify the chairs as objects it could remove. I tapped them away and the M4 chip erased them rather quickly, filling that space with more floor and table.

That said, I can’t quite say I liked removing objects from images, even when it’s this modest. I’ve never been a proponent of generative AI, and I also just think that photos should document what was actually there — and not what we wish was there. While Apple enables the Apple Intelligence suite of tools by default now, I’m going to keep them disabled now that I’ve finished testing for this review.

Reliable battery life … but not the best of the Apple tree

The MacBook Air continues to be a laptop you can rely on for getting your work done during the day and having some juice left over for streaming at night. Not that I’m surprised; this year’s model is rated for the same endurance as last year’s model. On the latest version of our in-house battery test — which loops a 4K video with the display at 50% brightness while the laptop is essentially in airplane mode — both MacBook Airs came in at over 14.5 hours.

But that’s not the high-mark for Apple’s modern laptops, as the MacBook Pro M4 models put additional hours of screen time on the board. We haven’t tested our favorite PC laptops on this latest version of the battery test, but they posted record-breaking scores last summer, so don’t worry about the Microsoft Surface Laptop and Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x letting you down in crunch time.

What I didn’t like about it

The MacBook Air could use a new touch or two

If most of my praise for the MacBook Air is familiar, then it should surprise nobody that my critiques aren’t exactly new, either. And that’s why this is the perfect time to mention how Apple’s laptop line could use a long-overdue touchscreen option. Sure, that’s ostensibly what iPads with Magic Keyboards are for, but what if I wanted a way to use MacOS — which is superior to iPadOS in many ways, especially since it can run iPad apps — on a touchscreen?

A touch screen on a laptop is familiar to many who’ve used Windows in the last decades, but there’s little to explain why Apple hasn’t attempted its own version when there are so many PC counterparts. Those include some of the best Windows laptops – such as the Microsoft Surface Laptop and Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x – while Apple still has nothing on that level. Sure, select iPads offer the Stage Manager mode, which is kind of like the windowed MacOS experience, but it’s limited at best — and downright claustrophobic on the 11-inch iPad Air and iPad Pro.

The more I talk to people outside of the tech press, the more I meet folks who don’t exactly love the Windows 11 experience but don’t want to leave their touchscreen laptops behind, either. One in fact said they’re “stuck” with their laptop because they tap the touchscreen so much they don’t want to “downgrade” and give that option up.

I hate calling the M4 MacBook Air boring when it’s such a good laptop, but the third year of this design has me wondering what else Apple has in its drafts folder. I don’t know if the MacBook Air is the right laptop for a touchscreen, but I dare Apple to figure out an answer that doesn’t involve the iPad.

Apple’s still out on USB-A — and we’re the ones who lose

Sure, it can be argued that the MacBook Air’s thin design would only be possible without the rectangular USB-A port that Apple left years and years ago. That said, the current Microsoft Surface Laptop still packs that port and is pretty thin, though it’s 0.3 inches thicker than the 0.4-inch thick 13-inch MacBook Air.

Lamenting the lack of USB-A this many years after Apple did away with it (the 2017 MacBook Air says “hello!”) might feel like I’m grasping at straws, but it’s not without reason. I still use USB-A accessories, Logitech still ships products that use USB-A and I don’t feel great about throwing out my old USB-A cords, either. You could fix this issue by picking up a USB-C hub, but at this price, it’d be nice if you didn’t have to.

How it compares

Bottom line

After all of my testing and typing was done, I’ve returned to the same conclusion I had last year: the 15-inch MacBook Air M4 is the laptop I’m telling nearly everyone to get. Unless you need a laptop small enough for a seat-back tray on a plane (get the 13-inch MacBook Air or think about the iPad Mini), the combination of a larger display with Apple’s nimble M4 performance and excellent keyboard is hard to argue against.

Those who prefer a laptop with a touchscreen should check out the Microsoft Surface Laptop and the Lenovo Slim 7x, and especially the former if you like USB-A. Lastly, anyone who’s got a MacBook Air with M2 or M3? Unless you really need that extra 20% or so performance or really fancy this Sky Blue design, I think you’re already good.

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Electronics writer Henry T. Casey has been reviewing all sorts of Apple products over the years, including most of the MacBooks Apple’s released in recent memory.