The ultra-thin MacBook is back for another 12 rounds in the ring with a growing slate of stellar lightweight laptops. Apple took the sheet off its new M4 MacBook Air models Wednesday. Though the big news is that MacBook Air now supports the full M4 chip with its 10-core GPU, we’re more excited about the $1,000 starting price and the lovely “sky blue” color that’s not just another gray MacBook.
The MacBook Air bears a striking semblance to last year’s M3 model, even with the new colorway. However, there are a few extra benefits to the new chip. The main new feature is the ability to use the MacBook Air with two external displays and keep using the MacBook’s own screen. It supports two displays up to 6K resolution and 60 Hz refresh rates over USB-C. The M3 MacBook Airs supported two external displays, though you were forced to keep the lid closed.
© Image: AppleAs for screen and ports, its what you’ve come to expect from a MacBook Air. It includes the usual MagSafe 3 charging port and two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports. While the MacBook Pro upgraded to Thunderbolt 5, you won’t be getting the same throughput on Apple’s thinner design. It features the same Liquid Retina IPS LCD panel with a claimed 500 nits of peak brightness.
The M4 MacBook Air starts with 16 GB of RAM (which has become standard since Apple started promoting its Apple Intelligence updates) and you can opt for a version with either an 8- or 10-core GPU. The 13-inch versions with the better GPU start at $1,200, but a base model with the less-capable M4 goes for $1,000, which was last year’s price for the M2 MacBook Air. The 15-inch MacBook Air M4 starts at $1,200.
Preorders are available starting Wednesday, and the laptop is expected to ship March 12.
It’s been more than 10 months since Apple debuted the M4 chip with the iPad Pro from 2024. Then, in November, the tech giant brought us the MacBook Pro with M4 along with the new M4 Pro and M4 Max chips. These have become my go-to Macs, even though the M4 Pro Mac mini remains an enticing proposition. Now, the MacBook Air completes the trifecta of user-end Mac products. There’s also an ultra-expensive Mac Studio, and the big news there is it comes with a M3 Ultra chip.
If the MacBook Air M4 is anything like the M3 MacBook Air, it will see MacBook Pro levels of performance in most benchmarks, though perhaps with worse graphical performance if it lacks a few GPU cores, as we saw with M3. Still, the thinnest MacBook models have proved to be solid workhorse machines, despite them having the same look and displays for more than two years.
While the other Apple news for Wednesday was a new Mac Studio, it’s been an Air-filled week for Apple. The tech giant announced new iPad Air models with the M3 chip on Tuesday. Those devices are similarly sized to last year’s M2 models, though Apple promises they should be better at graphics processing tasks. There’s also a new version of the basic iPad with an A16 chip. Despite Apple’s talk about giving everything access to Apple Intelligence, that’s one of the few new devices in its current lineup that won’t support any of Apple’s AI.
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