MacBook Air M4

[...] 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. [...]

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. [...]

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.

[...] 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. [...]

[...] 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 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 just did a comparison between my MacBook Pro Early 2015 to MacBook Air M4 Early 2025. Intel Core i5-5287U: - Single-Core Maximum Wattage: 7-12W - Process Node: 14nm - GB6 Single Core : 950 - Apple M4: - Single-Core Maximum Wattage: 4-6W - Process Node: 3nm - GB6 Single Core : 3600 Intel 14nm = TSMC 10nm 7nm 5nm 3nm In 10 years, we got 3.5x Single Core performance at 50% Wattage. i.e 7x Performance per Watt with 3 Node Generation improvements. In terms of Multi Core we got 20x Performance per Watt. [...]

[...] An Early 2025 M4 MacBook Air has a GB6 Single Core of 3700, and Multi Core 14600. [...]

[...] At the time I got the MacBook Pro because I wanted the bigger display and great sound. [...]

I'm an engineer and my 13" M4 MacBook air is an amazing daily portable workhorse from around the house, inside the car, office, airplane, and to coffee shops! I did the thermal mod and it maintains performance much longer and better. I have a built rig with an RTX for very heavy workload.

ive been using adobe suites, heavy photo editing on macbook airs since 2018 and its always worked so well!! Still using my M1 mac from 2020 with only a small lag now (only noticeable in the past year) and so tempted to upgrade to the new M4

M4 MacBook Air review from a software engineer was very helpful since your workload represents the heavy use of a programmer! I used to think that a MacBook Pro is a minimum necessary point for coding but now I’m sure an M4 MacBook Air is more than enough! Thanks and I’d love to see more videos on your M4 Air!

use intel based i9 16 inch macbook pro 2019 model, when I bought it, it was the best that money can buy, but lately thinking about getting a new latop and 15 macbook seems really good what are your thoughts? is it better than my laptop or maybe better than m1 macbook pro??

[...] I have 13” m4 air, and I love it. [...] Not budget, but still amazing value given how fast it is. [...] I use iPad for secondary screen sometimes.

[...] My laptop is so good, the only way I see it ever leaving me is if I outlast the final wave of software support for it, cause it isn't even dipping in speed after a few years like Mac Laptops have been known to do. Like my 2011 MacBook Pro became extremely slow and hence getting my 2016 version. The hardware on the 2016 was fine enough (a little slow, but it could handle 20-30 audio tracks in Logic Pro X), but I had so many battery cycles with this thing, that it only works plugged into the wall. [...]

I don’t personally have a super hard degree to kind of compare with in regards to my m4 air starlight i got, but man this thing is fast. I bought it off of a lady who previously bought it for her son but wanted the smaller version instead and i got it in box unopened for $700!! It was such a steal and the battery life is seriously no joke. [...] It runs so well and just being able to be accessible with my phone or iPad helps so much with moving college documents or assignments. [...] It feels so well put together and it does not feel cheap at all. Overall 10/10 and the display is so well too!

[...] • Does the 256GB model struggle or slow down during full-stack projects? [...]

[...] • Does the 256GB model struggle or slow down during full-stack projects? [...]

I have used Dell Latitude and XPS, and Lenovo Thinkpads in the past. [...] I use it for running often 5+ instances of VSCode, docker containers, many dozens of Chrome tabs, Slack, Spotify, 1-2 2k/4k external monitors, and it never even gets warm much less turns the fans on. I bought the Macbook Air M4 with the 512GB storage upgrade last week for personal use and I think it is the best laptop I've ever owned, and is significantly cheaper than the last XPS and the last Thinkpad I got. [...]

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. [...]

As a student who was willing to pay the more pricier price of Apple lol I went with the base value of everything for the MacBook Air, and even though I've only had it for roughly a week, I am really blown away with it. It is so light, but also keeps a great charge, and there is no sign of struggle with working with multiple tabs or videos and stuff all at the same time. [...]

I was gonna get a refurbished, MacBook Air M3, 15 inch for $1799 with 2T SSD AND 24 GB RAM because I’m trying to save money. But something about getting the M4 MacBook Air with 2T SSD and 32GB of Ram was slightly a bit more pleasing to the eye. It was just $620 more to get M4 MacBook Air with 32GB OF Ram instead of 24GB on the M3. M4 has the upgraded camera so hey why not!!

[...] I have an M4 MacBook Air with 16 GB of RAM and a 512 GB SSD that cannot open its lid with one hand. It has a problem with a hinge issue that is partly a manufacturing defect or faulty hardware design. [...]

Guys, I have a budget of buying a Macbook Pro M5 16/512, but to be honest I'm a kind of person that still think about the worthiness of a product. [...] I had doubts between choosing the Macbook Air M4 16/512 and Macbook Pro M5 16/512. My main reasons to go with the pro are better screen and chip than the M4. However, the price difference in my country is pretty far, if I decided to go with the Air instead of the Pro, I could save around 500 USD which is a pretty good amount of money remembering that I'm currently still looking for a job. [...]

I just bought the M4 Air after having the M1 Air for 5 years. The biggest obvious improvement is the screen, it is pure liquid beauty, I can hardly believe how much Apple have made leaps on screen quality. [...] It is also nice to now have two USB sockets (that can also be used for charging in a pinch). I am not a power user but I do use Fusion 360 for 3D design work and even the M1 was good but getting quite sluggish, the M4 however is superb. [...]

[...] I love Apple platforms as an approachable way to run local models with a lot of RAM, but their relatively slow prompt processing speed is often overlooked. [...] At a 4K-token prompt, which doesn’t seem very long, it takes 17 seconds for the M4 MacBook Air to parse before we even start generating a response. [...] The time to first token (TTFT) charts don’t look bad until you notice that they had to be shown on a logarithmic scale because the Mac platforms were so much slower than full GPU compute.

[...] 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. [...]

[...] Nobody should expect BBEdit 6.5 that shipped on PPC Macs in the early 2000s to run on a M4 MacBook Air. [...]

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.

[...] I’m currently on a 2015 15.4" MacBook Pro (i7, 16GB) but it slows down over time (thermal throttling & general lag), so I’m planning an upgrade. One YouTuber suggested the M4 Air, but I’m worried it might slow down with heavy multitasking. [...] Which do you suggest — M4 Air or M4 Pro?

I'm a hardcore Android and Windows users, but I bought this Macbook Air in march 2026 because I got so frustrated by the battery management of Windows and the constant stream of shitty updates. I can safely say that the battery consumption is really good.

[...] I'm using a Teslabook 9 with macbook like quality (without true OLED and speaker quality) on a ubuntu based distro and to be honest my biggest complaint is the thermal solution and the poor GPU performance my laptop has. [...]

Audio comparisons on YouTube are quite misleading. When you watch these videos, you get the impression that the MacBook Air "sounds bad," but the reality is very different: it sounds very good, it's just that the MacBook Pro sounds better. I own both the MacBook Air M4 and a MacBook Pro, and under normal usage conditions the difference is minimal. To put it in perspective: my iPad Pro sounds better than my MacBook Pro, and that doesn't mean the MacBook Pro sounds bad. Similarly, if you place a MacBook Pro next to a Hi-Fi system with 5,000-euro speakers, the MacBook Pro will seem mediocre. [...] The same applies to displays. The MacBook Pro's screen is excellent, but the iPad Pro's is superior, and that doesn't make the Pro's display bad. The MacBook Air's display is also very good, it just doesn't reach the Pro's level. [...] My iPad Pro has 120Hz and honestly, I don't notice any significant difference when looking at my MacBook Air M4's screen. [...]

- I don't think you're correct about the gulf in single core performance. On battery, the Cinebench 2024 scores (single core) of the Ryzen 7 AI 350 are 97% of the score you get from an M4 MacBook Air. [...] (source: - Screen real estate does not equal resolution. Nobody is going to scale their MacBook Neo's smaller 13" screen down to take advantage of those pixels. I.e., if I have a 10 inch 8K screen that’s not really “more screen real estate” than a 27” 4K screen in practice. [...] IMO, macOS has weird resolutions like this because it sucks at scaling (e.g., 27" 4K monitors look worse in macOS than on Windows, which is why Apple goes with 5K) - Yoga 7 video playback on battery actually beats the Neo at almost 17 hours. (source: - Yoga 7 office productivity rundown is very close at 10 hours 54 minutes, I don't think anyone is going to be upset at that coming slightly behind the MacBook Air: - 2.7 vs 3.1 pounds is insignificant, not worth losing half your RAM over

Running the benchmark from the article on my laptop (M4 Macbook Air) had a few interesting results: when running the script with Node.js, the results are inline with the article (SoA is the fastest) Bun is slower than Node.js with both SoA and AoS. Bun has similar performance between SoA and AoS. [...] % bun bench.js AoS: 924.54ms SoA: 1148.57ms Interleaved: 759.01ms Bun's performance profile seems very different from Firefox and V8-based runtimes there. [...] The article didn't mention the CPU used either, the performance difference may be dependent on the architecture as well.

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.

I still have my Macbook Air from over 10 years ago and it works just as great as it did the day I got it. I check email, surf the web, watch videos, and there is no lag or anything what so ever.

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. [...]

My macbook air m4 13 inch base model battery health cycle after 1 year became 89%, it tends to overheat most of the time even just having multiple tabs and browsers opened, i do recommend to go to m2 or m3 pro instead of this.

[...] 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.

I host the models on my Mac Studio, an M1 Ultra with 64gb ram (I bought it when it came out, just happens to be good at LLMs). So when I work on my laptop, I have my oh-my-pi setup configured to use the models on my Mac over my local "bonjour" network or whatever Apple calls it. That way I have a nice cool lap, while using models that my M4 MacBook Air with its 16gb ram couldn't possibly run.

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. [...]

I have an M4 Macbook Air with 32Gb. These are my current results for my models: ┌──────────────────────┬───────────┬─────────────┐ │ Model │ Size │ Tokens/sec │ ├──────────────────────┼───────────┼─────────────┤ │ gemma-4-e4b-it-mlx │ 4B (MLX) │ 10.5 tok/s │ ├──────────────────────┼───────────┼─────────────┤ │ qwen3-8b-uncensor-v2 │ 8B │ 6.3 tok/s │ ├──────────────────────┼───────────┼─────────────┤ │ qwen3-14b-uncensored │ 14B │ 3.5 tok/s │ └──────────────────────┴───────────┴─────────────┘ I seem to be doing ok with the Gemma model for file parsing / handling.

[...] I doubt it'd scale very well (macbook air m4, measly 16GB RAM), but it works as intended.

[...] The M4 Macbook Air can be had for $750 often. It's superior in every single way as a laptop including vastly superior performance, battery life, screen, touch pad, build quality, portability. You can buy RAM and SSD for many other much cheaper Windows laptops too. I don't see why anyone should buy significantly overpriced Framework laptops. [...]

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