Apple·laptop
MacBook Air M4
Based on 76 credible posts from Hacker News, YouTube & Bluesky. 31 filtered out as bot-like or off-topic.
High confidenceA large sample of owners; this score is stable. How we score
Scored September 27, 2026
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Owner reviews
Overall owner mood
Most owners are happy with it: 78% of 76 reviews are positive and 3% negative. Praise centers on performance and price & value. The most common complaint is performance (3 owners). Owners with 6+ months of use are more positive (100%), which suggests it holds up well.
What owners like
Performance praised by 8 owners
“I like Linux and can imagine reasonable price:performance can be found w/ recent high-end hardware...”
Price & value praised by 6 owners
“the new the product for $999 is incredible value and that's what I want the Air to be: a good compromise of power and price.”
Battery & charging praised by 5 owners
“Loving the battery life especially.”
Software & AI praised by 3 owners
“After a few rounds of deep research (shoutout to Gemini for helping me break through some implementation walls), I had something that actually worked for my daily workflow.”
What owners complain about
Performance raised by 3 owners
“My use case does not allow for the potential short comings to be realized, i.e., no thermal throttling, no attempt at "AI" use, rarely have even 4 apps open at one time.”
Controls & input raised by 2 owners
“Don't forget this also came with the awful butterfly keyboard, allegedly to save 0.5mm in thickness.”
Battery & charging raised by 2 owners
“As someone whose job required using Windows for the last 3 years, I can say without any doubt or reservations, Windows is (much, much) worse.”
Camera raised by 2 owners
“No Prompt Boxes: I didn't want to "chat with my photos." FIXXER treats the VLM as a headless reasoning engine.”
What owners talk about
- Performance8 praise · 3 complain
- Price & value6 praise · 2 complain
- Battery & charging5 praise · 2 complain
- Display3 praise · 1 complain
- Software & AI3 praise · 0 complain
- Controls & input1 praise · 2 complain
- Camera1 praise · 2 complain
- Sound3 praise · 0 complain
Built from the reviews themselves — every quote links to the owner who wrote it.
Full text of every credible post we scored. Bot-like and off-topic comments are hidden.
[...] I can generate a complete 5-minute explainer video on my MacBook Air M4 in about five minutes from a single prompt, using the Gemini TTS API and MiniMax H3 Max for b-roll. [...]
The MacBook Air is the same weight and thinner, so for a mobile machine I think that still wins out. The last gen MacBook Air (M4, 16GB, 256GB) was down to $749 with retailer discounts last year. Currently $759 on Apple's certified refurbished site.
As someone whose job required using Windows for the last 3 years, I can say without any doubt or reservations, Windows is (much, much) worse. I like Linux and can imagine reasonable price:performance can be found w/ recent high-end hardware... but IME nothing comes close to my m4 macbook air.
It’s been at least 10 years since I bought a Mac laptop. I couldn’t resist the $200 off plus $100 gift card on the base 13-inch MacBook Air M4. [...]
[...] I don't get the obsession with huge screens... [...] If I want to watch movies, I have an OLED TV on the wall for that. [...]
That will be my new mac. Though my M1 MacBook Pro is not doing too bad for 5 years old. It's insane.
I still have my MacBook Air M1 16Gb, and it runs smoothly as possible after 5 years. Apple’s ARM chips are a revolution.🎉
I use both the base M4 Mac mini and an M4 MacBook Air for Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, and Fusion, and while they're not as almost-always-perfectly-smooth as my Mac Studio, they're about 100x better than the experience I used to have on my old Intel MacBook Pros in the 2010s. [...] It's only after stacking 3-5 effects before things can stutter, really. Or if you try doing something CPU-intense in the background while running some heavy creative software. [...]
[...] I specifically bought a MacBook Air M4, first Mac product in my life, for its fantastic performance in a passively cooled notebook. [...]
Not used a mouse for years, trackpad on 15 MacBook M4 Air is 100x better for my type of work.
You can do it with a phone camera, ffmpeg, colmap, and opensplat on an m4 macbook air easy enough. I got a nice render of my logitech mouse from it.
[...] A MacBook M4 Air, a Mac Studio, and there’s an x86 iMac in the corner. [...]
In my personal experience, 13” M1 MacBook Air, 15” M4 Macbook Air, M4 Pro Mac Mini, and MacBook Neo, the Neo is the fastest for single threaded and strictly CPU bound tasks. [...] And, out of the box, you get a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, video editing, digital audio, web browser, and a bunch of other things. [...] This is easily a laptop you can buy and use for years in 90% of settings.
no issues here either, macbook air m4 + 2k 180hz monitor + a bunch of usb and bluetooth peripherals the only thing i miss from sequoia so far is the launchpad, but i've already adapted to just using spotlight
I have a personal 16 GB M4 Macbook Air and my wife’s work computer is a 24 GB M4 Macbook Pro. My laptop runs circles around her work’s. Companies install so many invasive shit in the name of security theater and employee control that there is lots of waste going on.
[...] I just bought our entire G&A team M4 Macbook Air 15" for the same price as our Dell Pro laptops. They are 20% faster, have 2x the battery life, and 8 more gb of RAM. [...] they need 32gb of RAM on Windows 11 because the performance was terrible. [...] The upgrade to 32gb of RAM moves the price to $1500+ each, they also recently swapped to soldered RAM for both Intel and AMD, so we are forced to the $1500+ option with a faster CPU. Initial reactions have been overwhelmingly positive, about 50% of them are new to Macs and have figured it out, additionally they all love the battery life and performance (most are switching from 11th and 12th gen Intel). Our more tech savvy members have mentioned the better screen, webcam and audio as positives. I am considering switching our call center (200 members) to Mac mini's, the same price as our Lenovo mini PCs and will last a long time, the Core Ultra 210 is not great. [...]
[...] I recently bought a Framework and, while I am pretty happy with it in isolation... when I use my partner's M4 Macbook Air I just think... [...]
Python's recent developments have been monumental, new versions now easily best the PyPy performance charts on M4 MacBook Air, idk if this has something to do with optimizations by Apple but coming from Linux I was surprised
[...] I'm typing this on an M4 MacBook Air I picked up cheap during Black Friday sales. [...]
[...] Some context on why this exists and the decisions behind v1.0: The Problem I'm a photographer, and my workflow was broken. [...] A properly named file is searchable on any system without special software. [...] The Journey [ Screenshots and more at ] This started as a 300 line CLI script on an M4 MacBook Air. After a few rounds of deep research (shoutout to Gemini for helping me break through some implementation walls), I had something that actually worked for my daily workflow. [...] No Prompt Boxes: I didn't want to "chat with my photos." FIXXER treats the VLM as a headless reasoning engine. [...] Native RAW Support: Most AI photo tools assume JPEGs. [...] Straight from camera to AI pipeline. [...]
I was so impressed with the MacBook M3 Pro that my daughter had that I switched from Windows desktop and laptops to the Apple ecosystem. And I'm a veteran Microsoft user from the '90s! Currently using a MacBook Air M4 and a Mac Mini M4.
[...] I had to create a custom image of llama.cpp compiled with vulkan so the LLMs can access the GPU on my MacBook Air M4 from inside the containers for inference. [...] To be honest so far I've been using mostly cloud models for coding, the local models haven't been that great. [...]
I did for years too, but newer MacBooks no longer allow running with lid-closed unless connected to a monitor, I was disappointed to recently learn this. If I’m wrong, someone tell me how to do it! On an M4 MacBook Air running latest OSX release.
[...] An Early 2025 M4 MacBook Air has a GB6 Single Core of 3700, and Multi Core 14600. [...]
Personally, I'm getting 15 tok/s on both RTX 3060 and my MacBook Air M4 (w/ 32GB, but 24 should suffice), with the default config from LMStudio. Which I find even more impressive, considering the 3060 is the most used GPU (on Steam) and that M4 Air and future SoCs are/will be commonplace too. (Q4KM with filesize=18GB)
Don't forget this also came with the awful butterfly keyboard, allegedly to save 0.5mm in thickness. It had terrible reliability, Apple was forced to do replacements and IIRC required a motherboard replacement to actually replace. [...] To increase the Average Selling Price ("ASP") of Macs. [...] the new M4 Macbook Air for $999 is incredible value and that's what I want the Air to be: a good compromise of power and price. [...]
I have a 16" M1 Max MacBook pro and I just got an M4 Air. Im really excited to see the battery life difference between the two. [...]
i got one. and i love it. and i would buy it again and again and again :D i use it even for intense tasks like sound design and it works very well
there are some people, that will never be happy, I have the m4 MacBook Air with 16, 256, and I'm glad to see there are finally you tubers who are realizing that the base models are very good machines, not everyone can afford the upper premier laptops, so I decided to be happy with my purchase, she's beautiful and powerful enough for me!!!!!😉😉😉😉
I just can't believe people still downplay the performance on these Airs. [...]
For the first time in a long time, I’m an Apple person who doesn’t have an iPad. I have hardly used mine since I got my iPhone 17 Pro Max and MacBook Air M4. It’ll be interesting to see how just using those two devices over time for reading books in Apple Books, Kindle app, Reedly, and Reeder […]
I have hardly used my M1 iPad Pro since I got my iPhone 17 Pro Max and MacBook Air M4. I’m tempted to trade the iPad in to Apple for the £340 store credit their online calculator says it’s worth. That would cover my Apple One and iCloud subscriptions for 15 months!
I have hardly used my M1 iPad Pro since I got my iPhone 17 Pro Max and MacBook Air M4. I’m tempted to trade the iPad in to Apple for the £340 store credit their online calculator says it’s worth. That would cover my Apple One and iCloud subscriptions for 15 months!
Things must be going well for me when my new MacBook Air M4 died not even 24 hours since I bought it new from Best Buy. Good ol’ bathtub curve. Exchange time after work I guess.
I see I’m like everyone else lol. This my first Mac book and i got it under $900. I’m excited to pick it up and start using it to DJ
I bought this MacBook like a month ago. as a high school student it was the best choice I've ever made. truly recommend
Just ordered mines today, upgraded from my 2014! $749.00 Black Friday!
Just bought the 15 inch MacBook Air with 16GB and 512 GB SSD. It will be more than enough for me. I'm only using for MS Office, Email, YT and web.
Can't believe I got a MacBook Air M4 for 700$ Just couldn't choose the color so I got Sky Blue.
After a lot of research I decided to go with the M4 as my first macbook , imagine my surprise after charging it to a 100% around 12 pm, and then using it unplugged, only to see the battery level at 97% at 4:50 PM!!!!!!!!! WHAT. INSANE.
I bought an M4 Air 15-inch 16/512GB silver color mac in Japan when I was traveling last month. It was around $1200, which was much cheaper than my country. I saved about $300, haha!
I've been using my MBA 2017 for so long, and when I got the M4 today I was so surprised by how fast it is. And the performance is amazing! [...]
Not gonna lie, going back to an old 2015 13" Macbook I was super impressed by the IPS even after using OLEDs for a while now.
I absolutely love the 15" MacBook Air - It's my daily driver for everything work and personal. [...] Performance wise, the M4 can outpace the M1 Pro in all of my workloads, even web development using C++ and Web Assembly. If you set your projects up right - incremental builds are fast and painless. It's a developer thing - mostly working single files at a time, needing quick bursts of performance to compile them in the scope of a larger project. [...]
i just bought it with 24 ram and 512 ssd, im doing a lot of homeworks, im so excited to put my hands on
[...] Main reason is because my M2 had 8GB of RAM and It would slow down when I'm editing videos or pics. [...]
The 13" MacBook Air M4 is very chic. [...] I bought a custom model with 24 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD, so I can run Windows 11 and Linux as VMs at the same time if I want to. I bought a Parallels Desktop for Mac Pro Edition subscription.
I just got my MacBook Air a month ago and I like it for what I do. I just got a external hard drive and a flash drive for extra storage instead of paying apple more for storage.
[...] The Performance is just incredible. [...]
[...] My use case does not allow for the potential short comings to be realized, i.e., no thermal throttling, no attempt at "AI" use, rarely have even 4 apps open at one time. [...]
MacBook Air M4 long-term: how it holds up
Long-term owners feel about the same as new ones, so the MacBook Air M4 holds up.
- First months100% recommend · 6 owners
- 1 year or more100% recommend · 7 owners
The claims, and the evidence
Owners push back on 1 of 9 marketing claims.
What the brand claims
- M4 chipOwners agreePerformance: 8 of 11 positive
- Up to 18 hours of battery lifeOwners agreeBattery & charging: 5 of 7 positive
- 16GB of unified memory to startOwners agreePerformance: 8 of 11 positive
- 12MP Center Stage cameraOwners disagreeCamera: 1 of 3 positive
- Supports up to two external displaysOwners agreeDisplay: 3 of 4 positive
- Silent, fanless designFew owner reports
- Liquid Retina displayOwners agreeDisplay: 3 of 4 positive
- MagSafe chargingOwners agreeBattery & charging: 5 of 7 positive
- Built for Apple IntelligenceOwners agreeSoftware & AI: 3 of 3 positive
What owners report
“[...] I can generate a complete 5-minute explainer video on my MacBook Air M4 in about five minutes from a single prompt, using the Gemini TTS API and MiniMax H3 Max for b-roll. [...]”
after 1 yearView on Hacker News“The MacBook Air is the same weight and thinner, so for a mobile machine I think that still wins out. The last gen MacBook Air (M4, 16GB, 256GB) was down to $749 with retailer discounts last year. Currently $759 on Apple's certified refurbished site.”
after 1 yearView on Hacker News“Things must be going well for me when my new MacBook Air M4 died not even 24 hours since I bought it new from Best Buy. Good ol’ bathtub curve. Exchange time after work I guess.”
“I did for years too, but newer MacBooks no longer allow running with lid-closed unless connected to a monitor, I was disappointed to recently learn this. If I’m wrong, someone tell me how to do it! On an M4 MacBook Air running latest OSX release.”
Common MacBook Air M4 problems
Issues at least two owners independently report.
- Controls & input2 mentionsView on Hacker News
“No WiFi 7. I am guessing it will come next year when Apple have their own WIFi Chip going in this year iPhone 17. [...] Trackpad slightly too big that causes false positive which was non-existent on older gen MacBook and Keyboard is new scissors that as less Key Travel than old scissors. No 120Hz Screen. Some people want OLED, personally I prefer LCD. [...] Quality Face Camera is not solvable yet though. [...] May be Silicon Carbon Battery in the future. [...] Most of the solution above are ready today if Apple is willing bump the price up. I am thinking if Apple will drop the current M4 MacBook Air to $899 and release the M5 at $999.”
- Camera2 mentionsView on Hacker News
“No WiFi 7. I am guessing it will come next year when Apple have their own WIFi Chip going in this year iPhone 17. [...] Trackpad slightly too big that causes false positive which was non-existent on older gen MacBook and Keyboard is new scissors that as less Key Travel than old scissors. No 120Hz Screen. Some people want OLED, personally I prefer LCD. [...] Quality Face Camera is not solvable yet though. [...] May be Silicon Carbon Battery in the future. [...] Most of the solution above are ready today if Apple is willing bump the price up. I am thinking if Apple will drop the current M4 MacBook Air to $899 and release the M5 at $999.”
- Performance3 mentionsView on YouTube
“I just can't believe people still downplay the performance on these Airs. [...]”
- Battery & charging2 mentionsView on Hacker News
“[...] the machine (mostly) comes back to life instead of just crashing. [...] However, PM does not work in the sense that battery like on my M4 Macbook Air is literally 2x what I would get from a comparably priced Linux laptop. [...] - Audio now mostly works without glitching, just like it did in OS X circa 2002. [...] (Just typing these words gives me PTSD.) Here is a typical "solution" from within the past year for audio troubles in Linux: There are thousands more threads like this to be found online. [...] - Don't even get me started on Bluetooth. [...]”
- Price & value2 mentionsView on Hacker News
“[...] the machine (mostly) comes back to life instead of just crashing. [...] However, PM does not work in the sense that battery like on my M4 Macbook Air is literally 2x what I would get from a comparably priced Linux laptop. [...] - Audio now mostly works without glitching, just like it did in OS X circa 2002. [...] (Just typing these words gives me PTSD.) Here is a typical "solution" from within the past year for audio troubles in Linux: There are thousands more threads like this to be found online. [...] - Don't even get me started on Bluetooth. [...]”