15-inch MacBook Air (M4, 2025) Overview: Bluer and Higher

The M4 additionally offers the MacBook Air its AI enhance with Apple Intelligence. The 38 TOPS of native AI processing by the quicker 16-core Neural Engine makes the M4 MacBook Air nearer to the 48 TOPS on Intel’s Lunar Lake chips and 45 TOPS of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips.

That is troublesome to evaluate, as a result of Apple Intelligence may be very a lot nonetheless unfinished, however there are some new third-party apps that Apple is showcasing that use Apple Intelligence proper out of the field in third-party purposes, such because the note-taking app, Bear. Now you can do issues like mechanically format textual content into tables or summarize a report. It additionally comes with Picture Playground, the up to date model of Siri with ChatGPT integration, and plenty extra. Then again, you’ve by no means wanted quick native AI processing to get Apple Intelligence, as AI duties on older gadgets simply get run on Apple’s Non-public Cloud Compute system.

The uncooked efficiency bump you’ll see on the M4 MacBook Air over final yr’s M3 is 22 % quicker GPU, 31 % multi-core, and 18 % single-core, as measured in Cinebench R24. That’s a very stable step up for one technology, notably in single-core efficiency, the place Apple Silicon continues to dominate the competitors. By way of the graphics, that’s additionally over double the efficiency from the M2. Whether or not you’re picture enhancing or doing 3D modeling, that’s sufficient to really feel the distinction for those who’re coming from an M1 or M2 MacBook Air.

As with all MacBook Airs, it’s a very fanless machine. That feels unbelievable at sure factors, particularly once you’re in heaving purposes like a sport. I whipped out Baldur’s Gate 3, and whereas it’s removed from preferrred efficiency, the completely silent system means you received’t even want headphones to play. However at 1200p, medium settings, and upscaling, it wasn’t too arduous to discover a stability of efficiency and picture high quality that felt pleasurable. Attaining that efficiency with out followers is one thing that may’t be carried out on another laptop computer proper now.

The draw back of being fanless, in fact, is you’re not getting fairly as a lot out of the M4 as you’ll on a system with energetic cooling, specifically the 14-inch MacBook Professional. The Air’s system has to throttle frequencies down to stop a meltdown, and even nonetheless, I recorded CPU temperatures as excessive as 102 levels Celsius. Thankfully, the floor temperatures by no means obtained insufferable in my time with it, even whereas operating beneath full load.

{Photograph}: Luke Larsen