I review laptops for a living, and I think the MacBook Air M4 could be the best bargain of the year

This week Apple introduced us to the new MacBook Air M4, which offers more power than its predecessors for a lower starting price.

These new MacBooks also sport an upgraded 12MP Center Stage webcam and come in a new Sky Blue color, a first for the Air. All together, it's a compelling upgrade that reinforces the MacBook Air's place as one of the best laptops on the market.

I know because I've spent some time today looking over what other laptops of roughly the same size and price can offer you right now, based on rough estimations of how the MacBook Air M4 will perform.

While we can't say for sure how the M4 Air will handle until we have a chance to review it ourselves, based on the M3 Air's performance alone I think even the best Windows laptops will have a hard time matching the value proposition of the MacBook Air M4.

Gaming and heavy-duty content creation will probably leave you wanting more than the Air can provide, but if you just need a laptop for getting work done on the go it's hard to beat the Air's remarkable performance at that killer starting price of $999.

Let me show you why.

MacBook Air M4: General performance

One of the safest predictions I can make is that the MacBook Air M4 is going to be speedier than its predecessor, which is already one of the best 13-inch laptops you can get right now.

Getting the performance of Apple's M3 chip in a laptop that cost $1,099 to start was already a good deal, so the company's move to cut the starting price of the M4 Air by $100 makes it an even more compelling option.

Multi-taskers are also getting the upgrade to support for two external displays, which makes the Air an even more effective laptop for getting things done.

I quickly laid out some numbers from the Geekbench 6 CPU performance test we run on every laptop we review in the chart below, along with the starting price of these laptops.

I picked laptops that we've reviewed in the past year which are roughly the same price and size as the MacBook Air, but I also included some test results from comparable MacBook Pros to give you a sense of what kind of performance I expect from the MacBook Air M4.

As you can see, the MacBook Pro typically outperforms the Air even when the two laptops have the same chipset inside. This has to do with key differences like the fact that the Pro has active cooling (i.e. fans that spin up and make noise when the laptop is working hard) while the Air does not.

But even so, the difference between the performance of the M3 Air and the M3 Pro is pretty minimal in Geekbench 6 scores. So if we guesstimate that the MacBook Air M4 is weaker than the MacBook Pro M4 in roughly the same ratio, I expect the MacBook Air M4 to be putting up scores in the single-core CPU benchmark which far outstrip anything you can get in a comparable Intel- or Snapdragon-powered Windows laptop.

The one big question is multi-core performance, where you can see that Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chip has consistently outperformed the Apple M3 laptops we've tested. We'll have to wait and see how the MacBook Air M4 stacks up in this regard.

MacBook Air M4: Gaming performance

Another pretty safe bet is that while you'll be able to play some of your favorite PC games on the MacBook Air M4, it probably won't be a great gaming machine.

I know because we run a few basic games on every laptop we test, and lots more on beefier notebooks like gaming laptops and MacBook Pros. And while you can probably eke out a decent framerate playing older games on a modern MacBook Air, our testing reveals games that aren't optimized for Apple silicon run terribly on these lightweight laptops.

To show you what I mean, I gathered the game performance testing results from a few of the laptops I mentioned earlier together to show you why I doubt the MacBook Air M4 will be able to run even a 6-year-old game like Sid Meier's Civilization 6: Gathering Storm at a steady 30 frames per second.

As you can see, the MacBook Air M3 struggled to run that game half as well as the MacBook Pro M3. And the performance upgrade from M3 to M4 when running that game on the Pro has been minimal, suggesting we shouldn't expect any revolutionary performance leaps in the MacBook Air M4.

However, you can also see that the M4 Air is likely to be better at running games than many Snapdragon-powered Windows laptops, in part because even fewer games are optimized for the Arm-based architecture of Qualcomm's chips.

Apple is also upping its game when it comes to bringing more AAA titles to its platform. For example, Cyberpunk 2077 is finally coming to Mac this year, and Assassin's Creed Shadows is launching this month.

The bottom line, of course, is that if you care about gaming performance you probably want to seek out one of the best gaming laptops in your price range. One of our favorites is the MSI Cyborg 15, which starts at $999. But Macs are improving.

MacBook Air M4: Battery life

Lastly, it's a pretty safe bet that the MacBook Air M4 is going to deliver best-in-class battery life among laptops in its price bracket.

I say that because MacBooks have been some of the best laptops for battery life since Apple began outfitting them with its own Arm-based chips. Of course, now Windows laptops have caught up thanks to the debut of Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips, which use similar architecture to achieve killer battery life.

As you can see from our test results below, the MacBook Pros typically last an hour or three longer than their Air counterparts in our battery tests. So based on the fact that the M3 Air lasted roughly two hours less than the M3 Pro, and the M4 Pro lasted roughly 18 and a half hours, I think we can safely expect the MacBook Air M4 to last at least 16 hours on a full charge.

(Apple claims it can last up to 18 hours while surfing the web, but that's what they say about the M3 Air too!)

We'll have to wait to find out, of course, and as you can see the Snapdragon-powered laptops we've tested recently are likely to still outlast the M4 Air.

But despite the leaps and bounds Intel's made with power efficiency in its Core Ultra 200 laptop chips, I expect no Intel laptop we test this year will be able to meaningfully outlast the MacBook Air M4.

MacBook Air M4: Outlook

The fact that Apple is able to sell a new MacBook Air M4 this year with an upgraded chip under the hood, a new paint job on deck and a lower price tag to boot is very surprising — especially when you consider the concern over U.S. tariffs raising prices on electronics this year.

That's partly why I expect the MacBook Air M4's performance in our testing to be better than its predecessor, but a lackluster improvement overall. Apple's M-series chips have delivered incremental upgrades year-over-year, and there's not a ton of fancy new features coming to the M4 Air to help sell existing Air users on upgrading.

That's why I bet the lower starting price is Apple honing its supply chain to cut the price tag down by a digit and make the decision of whether to purchase an Air even easier as we head into 2025.

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