Apple MacBook Air (M4, 2025) review: Blue sky thinking

Apple kindly sent me the Sky Blue version of the M4 MacBook Air, the prospect of which I was initially quite excited by. Silver, grey and black laptops are all well and good, but I prefer my machines with a splash of colour.

Having extracted it from the box, however, any excitement I might have had quickly leaked away. Was this really blue? Had Apple sent me the wrong box? Two colleagues declared it was silver. One took it over to the window so he could hold it up to the light, and said: “I suppose you could say it had a hint of blue.” Which is all a very long-winded way of saying that the sky blue isn’t very sky blue at all.

Not that I care too much about that. The performance, battery life and build quality are all far more important to me than some hint of colour. But if, for some reason, you’d got into your head you desperately wanted a laptop coloured Sky Blue, then this one is going to be a big disappointment.

Apple MacBook Air (M4, 2025) review: What you need to know

If you were hoping for a radical overhaul over the M3 MacBook Air, then this MacBook may also not be the machine for you. Its most significant updates, aside from that disappointing new colour, are the new M4 chip and a sharper, smarter 12-megapixel Center Stage webcam. Apple also delivers 16GB of RAM in the base model, which is double the cheapest M3 had when it launched (although Apple did bump that up last year).

Elsewhere, you have the same 13.6in or 15.3in display – with matching resolutions of 2,560 x 1,664 and 2,880 x 1,864 respectively, the same aluminium chassis, which now uses 100% recycled materials and an identical lineup of ports and sockets. Two Thunderbolt 4 ports and a MagSafe 3 port are lined up on the left edge and one 3.5mm headphone port is opposite these on the right.

It runs MacOS Sequoia out of the box and comes complete with Apple Intelligence in its current form – but since older MacBook Air models also get Apple Intelligence, that’s not much of a selling point.

Apple MacBook Air (M4, 2025) review: Price and competition

Perhaps the most notable change with this year’s M4 MacBook Air is that the price has fallen since the M3 Air was first launched in 2024, while the specification has risen. The base 13.6in model is now £999 (around £930 on Amazon at the time of writing) and comes with double the RAM the cheapest M3 MacBook Air did when it launched at £1,099. The 15in machine costs £1,199 (around £1,099 at Amazon).

At these prices, you’re getting the Apple M4 chip with 10 CPU cores and 8 GPU cores on the 13.6in model (the 15.3in model gets 10 GPU cores), accompanied by 16GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD storage. If you compare the prices of the equivalent M3 MacBook Air (with 16GB of RAM) at launch, the M4 is a massive bargain.

It’s much less of a good deal, though, if you want more than the base RAM and storage; in typical Apple fashion, prices rise rapidly as soon as you start tweaking the spec. For instance, moving to 24GB or 32GB of RAM on the 13.6in model will cost you £300 and £500 respectively (these upgrades both include a hidden, enforced £100 upgrade to the 10-core M4 chip), while expanding your storage to 512GB or 1TB cost £200 and £400.

Say you opt for a reasonably middling spec of 16GB RAM with a 1TB SSD: this model will cost £1,399 for the 13.6in and £1,599 for the 15.3in Air, neither of which look particularly great value when compared to Windows machines of similar specifications. Speaking of which, here’s a small handful of alternatives you might want to consider. Competition is stiff for ultraportables around this price, so I’ve only selected a few of the very best.

• The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 remains our favourite Windows portable and for good reason. It’s beautifully made, it comes with a very nice touchscreen, it’s simple to repair and maintain and battery life – thanks to its Qualcomm Snapdragon X series processor – is exceptional. It is more expensive than the M4 MacBook Air, though, at £1,049 for the base 13.8in model with 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD

• Another recent favourite is the Asus Zenbook A14, an ultra-lightweight Snapdragon laptop with 20-hour battery life and a wonderful OLED display. You can pick one of these up for £1,200 – and it comes with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD; the M4 MacBook Air with these specs will set you back £1,799 but it is a stronger performer

• If you want the top performance and battery life in an Intel-powered machine, then the current gen Asus Zenbook S 14 (UX5406) is well worth a look. You can pick up the Core Ultra 7 258V model for around £1,280 (we tested the pricier Core Ultra 9 version) and it comes with a 120Hz OLED touchscreen, 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD – it’s more expensive than the base MacBook Air but much cheaper when it has double the RAM and quadruple the storage

Apple MacBook Air (M4, 2025) review: Design and new features

There isn’t much to speak about when it comes to the design of the M4 MacBook Air. Aside from that new so-subtle-you-can-barely see it Sky Blue colourway, nothing has been altered from a physical point of view. That’s comforting and surprising in equal measure.

Comforting, because the MacBook Air uses the same beautifully designed chassis as the M3 and the M2 before it. Even if this means it isn’t the lightest laptop you’ll come across, its beautifully minimalist exterior and stiff, unyielding rigidity lend it a high-quality feel that’s rare among laptops at any price.

And it’s surprising because of what hasn’t changed. Apple still hasn’t removed the weird webcam notch at the top of the display, notwithstanding the upgrade to a 12-megapixel Center Stage camera (more on that below). And it still hasn’t added Wi-Fi 7 or Thunderbolt 5. The latter is only available on M4 Pro and Max hardware in the current generation, and you can’t get an M4 Pro MacBook Air.

Apple MacBook Air (M4, 2025) review: Keyboard, touchpad and webcam

Both keyboard and touchpad haven’t changed either, but there is little to criticise here. Apple hasn’t messed with these since it made the move from the much-maligned butterfly switch of previous generations, and the result is a laptop that’s as pleasant to type on and mouse with as any on the market today.

The webcam is another matter. Here, Apple has replaced the 1080p FaceTime HD camera with a 12-megapixel Center Stage effort, with the ability to track your face and scan documents or demonstrate objects you place on the keyboard deck below the camera.

The face-tracking part is a tried and tested technology that has been around on the iPad Pro for some years now. It works well, employing the extra field of view and resolution of the new camera to crop in on your face and move a virtual camera around with it.

I’m less enamoured with Desk View; I tried it out on the M4 iMac last year and was distinctly unimpressed. It works better here as the camera is much closer to your desk surface, but you still need to tilt the screen down a little and push the laptop back to avoid giving your colleagues a close-up view of your crotch – and quality takes a big hit as you do so. I love the idea, but the hardware and optics just aren’t up to it.

Apple MacBook Air (M4, 2025) review: Display and audio

The display, however, is top quality. I’m not sure we’re ever going to see a touchscreen on a MacBook but that isn’t its biggest issue. The main problem is that it only has a 60Hz refresh rate when the best of the Windows competition is rapidly moving towards 90Hz or 120Hz. The Asus Zenbook A14, for instance, has a glorious 120Hz OLED display that leaves the MacBook Air’s screen in the dust.

That’s not to say the MacBook Air’s Liquid Retina screen is bad – far from it. It’s sharp (at 2,560 x 1,664 for the 13.6in and 2,880 x 1,864 for the 15.3in), covers 100% of the DCI P3 colour gamut in standard mode and has a peak brightness that reaches a healthy 522.6cd/m² – slightly higher than Apple’s claims for it of 500cd/m². The contrast ratio can’t match that of OLED laptops, but for an IPS display it’s no worse than you’d expect at 1,340:1. In a dark room, that essentially means black areas of the display will look very slightly greyer than on an OLED screen; most of the time, though, you won’t notice it.

Colour accuracy is spot on, however. Measuring in standard dynamic range, the default colour mode delivered an average Delta E of 0.66, while in DisplayP3 mode I saw an average Delta E of 0.71. Within the restrictions of it being a 60Hz IPS panel, it’s a fantastic thing, but I must say I did miss the inky black level of OLED whenever I moved from watching YouTube videos on my OLED laptop to this machine.

Where most Windows laptops can’t match the MacBook Air, however, is the quality of its speakers. Nothing has changed here – but it didn’t need to. The MacBook Air kicks out sound with an astonishing amount of body, with a level of warmth, depth and impact that means that I don my headphones a lot less frequently with this laptop than I do with other machines.

Apple MacBook Air (M4, 2025) review: Performance

The MacBook Air’s M4 chip is its biggest upgrade and it delivers in all areas. The CPU core count has risen by two from eight to ten over the M3, with four performance cores and six efficiency cores, and while the GPU core count remains the same as before, performance has improved here, too.

There’s also 20% more memory bandwidth in the M4 versus the M3 (120MB/sec vs 100MB/sec) and support for external monitors has been bolstered. With the M4 MacBook Air, you can connect up to two external 6K monitors and continue to use the MacBook’s display at the same time. With the M3, you had to close the lid or disable the laptop display to do that.

Across the benchmarks, the new chip returns the results you might expect. In the Geekbench 6 single- and multi-core CPU tests and our in-house media conversion and multitasking benchmark, the MacBook Air M4 is faster than the M3 by an average of 16%. Multi-core results tend to show a bigger advantage thanks to the jump from eight to ten cores, but it’s faster across the board.

The same holds for graphics-intensive tasks, which the M4 handled 16% faster in the Geekbench 6 GPU tests. Synthetic benchmarks only tell us so much, of course – but they do give an overall indication that performance has improved.

It’s also worth noting that, since the M4 MacBook Air is fanless, it will start to throttle under stress after around four minutes of running at full load. But since it’s quite difficult to find applications that push both CPU and GPU to their limits simultaneously, you’re unlikely to hit the buffers this quickly all that often. If you need to render large, long video files, then a MacBook Pro M4 with its active cooling will be the more appropriate choice.

On battery life, the M4 is slightly stronger than the M3, although not by much. Apple rates the M4 in its specifications as the same as the M3 MacBook Air: up to 15 hours of web browsing and 18 hours of video streaming, and in our tests it returned something in between. With local video playback and the screen set to a brightness of 170cd/m², it lasted an average of 15hrs 52mins.

There’s no getting past the fact, however, that the competition has caught up with Apple here. With laptops like the Asus Zenbook A14 getting around 20 hours in this test and Acer’s Snapdragon-based Swift 14 AI reaching a scarcely believable 24 hours, it’s clear Apple no longer holds the monopoly on laptop longevity. Even Intel-based laptops are now matching the MacBook Air, with the latest generation of Core Ultra chips delivering 15 to 20-hour results in our tests.

Apple MacBook Air (M4, 2025) review: Verdict

Ultimately, the M4 MacBook Air is a great laptop but it isn’t a revolution. Apple has reacted to Windows laptops catching up on battery life by dropping the price, upping the base specification and keeping the rest of the laptop as is.

That’s mostly good news and it means – after a brief hiatus – the MacBook Air is once more the laptop of choice, stripping that honour away from the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7. It’s the laptop I recommend most people buy if they want a reliable, do-it-all machine capable of everything from writing laptop reviews and watching YouTube to heavy-duty tasks such as 4K video editing and 3D design.

Whether it will stay there for long, however, is up to the big Windows laptop box shifters. Thus far, we’ve seen some lovely machines with great battery life, but pricing has largely stayed in step with Apple. If we see some movement on that front, with great design, battery life and performance combined at prices of, say, £800 or lower, then the MacBook Air may be under serious threat. For now, though, Apple is making all the right moves.