Apple's MacBook Air is one of the most popular laptops around, and soon it will be faster and, surprisingly in 2025, start at a lower price. Today, the company announced that the next iteration of our pick for best ultrabook will get bumped up to an M4 chip and feature a new color option, "sky" blue.
Outside of that new color, the M4 MacBook Air looks the same. It still comes in 13-inch and 15-inch sizes, and there are still a pair of Thunderbolt ports on the left side, along with MagSafe for changing, while the right side is home to the headphone jack. (What I wouldn't do for Apple to move one of those two ports to the other side).
There are other upgrades. The M4 chip has a 10-core CPU and goes up to a 10-core GPU. Memory goes up to 32GB of RAM, rather than the 24GB max on the M3 Air. Like the M3 laptops, M4 starts at 16GB of memory.
Ahead of the launch, Apple showed demos of a MacBook Air running 32GB. Some of them were heavy on machine learning and Apple Intelligence. These included using Pixelmator to take a profile picture using the Center Stage webcam, and creating a mask to remove the background and replace it with a different one. In another, Apple Intelligence was used in the Markdown notes app Bear to organize information into a table quickly.
Perhaps the most impressive was Blender, which made a 4K render with 12 million pixels in 18 seconds, about five times faster than with an M1.
M4 will let the MacBook Air power two external monitors with the display open, which is a bump up from M3, which could only do that with the lid closed. Apple is also boosting the webcam to a 12-megapixel Center Stage webcam that we also saw on the M4 MacBook Pro, including support for Desk View.
