Apple MacBook Air 13.6" M4 Silver 2025 Review

The M4 MacBook Air delivers blazing performance and truly all-day battery life in a 2.7-pound fanless design. It's nearly flawless for everyday tasks, but the limited port selection and high cost of extra storage might make some buyers pause. For most people shopping an ultraportable laptop, this is the one to get, especially if you can snag it around $999.

The Apple MacBook Air M4 is the kind of laptop that makes you wonder why anyone still buys a bulky Windows machine for everyday work. Apple shoved the M4 chip into the same impossibly thin 2.7-pound chassis, kept the fanless design, and bumped the base RAM to 16GB. If you're a student, a commuter, or someone who just wants a laptop that wakes up instantly and never gets hot, this is pretty much the default recommendation in the ultraportable category. The 13.6" 2560x1664 display hits 500 nits with wide P3 color, and the whole package starts at $999 from some retailers, though the price can climb to $1629 depending on the vendor. For most buyers hunting a compact laptop that can handle business, media, and schoolwork without breaking a sweat, the Air checks almost all the boxes. Social proof is off the charts, with a 4.9-star rating from over 9,000 owner reviews, and user reliability scores sit in the top few percent of our entire laptop database. That kind of trust is rare and, frankly, earned. But the M4 Air isn't perfect. The port situation is still stingy (just two Thunderbolt 4 jacks), the 60Hz screen feels a little behind the times if you're used to a ProMotion phone, and internal storage upgrades remain absurdly expensive. We'll break down where it shines, where it stumbles, and whether the base model is the real sweet spot.

With the M4's 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU, the MacBook Air posts numbers that land well above average in our CPU benchmark database. It's not going to threaten a MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro chip, but for tab-heavy web browsing, 4K video streaming, coding in Xcode, or slicing through large spreadsheets, this thing absolutely flies. The fanless design means sustained heavy lifting (like exporting a 30-minute 4K timeline) will eventually force the chip to throttle, but in our testing that takes a lot longer than it did on the M2 Air. The integrated GPU, however, is a weak spot, sitting in the lower 18th percentile among laptops in our database. That translates to passable performance for light games like Minecraft or The Sims, but you'll be fighting single-digit frame rates in anything demanding at native resolution. For everyday snappiness, though, the silent, instant-on character of Apple Silicon still feels like magic, and the 16GB of unified memory handles multitasking without the pressure you'd feel on an 8GB Windows machine.

Pricing for the base 16GB/512GB M4 MacBook Air swings from $999 to $1629 across vendors right now, so shopping around can save you serious cash. At the low end, this is one of the best laptops you can buy for under a grand, period. The real value killer is Apple's SSD upgrade pricing, which pushes many owners toward external drives. If you can live with 512GB and don't mind carrying a tiny Samsung T7, the entry model is a steal. For anyone who absolutely needs 1TB internally, a Windows ultrabook like the Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro often gives you more storage and a higher refresh OLED screen for similar money.

The most direct competitor is the Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro, which throws in a gorgeous 120Hz AMOLED display and a wider spread of ports, but it can't match the Air's battery life and silent operation. The MSI Prestige 13 is another solid thin-and-light Windows option with a slightly sharper screen and more connectivity, though the M4 chip still has an edge in efficiency and single-core speed. On the flip side, if you're daydreaming about gaming on your new laptop, you're looking at the wrong machine entirely; something like the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 will give you a much better GPU experience, but you'll trade away the Air's featherweight portability and 15-hour battery. For the creative crowd wondering 'can the Air M4 replace a MacBook Pro?', the Pro still crushes it in sustained performance and display fluidity, but the Air handles bursts of creative work far better than its skinny frame suggests.

Skip the M4 MacBook Air if you play any modern games beyond simple indie titles, need a high-refresh screen that scrolls buttery smooth all day, or work with large media files and refuse to carry an external SSD. Creative pros editing 8K video or heavy 3D rendering will hit the thermal and memory limits fast, so a MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro chip is a better fit. If you can't live without at least one USB-A port or an HDMI jack built in, a Windows ultrabook like the Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro or the MSI Prestige 13 will give you more connectivity without dongles.

If you want a laptop that feels effortless to carry, stays cool and quiet, and has enough muscle for almost any task that doesn't involve heavy 3D rendering or serious gaming, the M4 MacBook Air is the laptop to beat. It's the best ultraportable for students, writers, and business pros, and the jump to 16GB of RAM in the base config removes the biggest complaint about the previous generations. The display is beautiful, the keyboard and trackpad are top-notch, and the battery life makes other thin laptops look like they're trying too hard. Just know that if you're a photo or video editor working with massive libraries, the stingy storage and two-port limitation will pinch you, and if you play games at all, you'll want to look elsewhere. For everyone else, buy it, set it up, and enjoy forgetting your charger exists.