M4 MacBook Air Review – 6 Months Later

By Josh Teder

The M4 MacBook Air is probably by now the world’s most popular laptop. And now that I’ve had it for 6 months, I’ll take you through whether or not I think this MacBook Air is worth owning, especially compared to the more expensive MacBook Pro and who I think this laptop is for.

Performance and Battery Life

Performance is the first highlight with this laptop. This MacBook Air has Apple’s latest M4 chip. And like the first MacBook Air with Apple Silicon, you don’t have to compromise on performance to get good battery life and vice versa. This MacBook Air continues that tradition.

The 15-inch version I bought is rated for up to 18 hours of battery life for video streaming and 15 hours for wireless web surfing. Its battery life easily lasts me through an entire workday when working from it. And often I can squeeze in two consecutive work days without needing to charge it.

The performance for this laptop, I think, is good enough for most general computing workloads. Whether you’re a college student writing papers, a professional on Zoom calls, or even doing some light photo editing, this chip can handle all of those workloads. Not only can it handle those workloads, but it’s also been able to handle having multiple tabs open, music apps, messages, AI programs—basically everything I’ve been able to throw at it during my normal use. And I haven’t experienced any glitches or slowdowns. And I bought the bare minimum 16 gigs of RAM version of this laptop.

“Its battery life easily lasts me through an entire workday when working from it. And often I can squeeze in two consecutive work days without needing to charge it.”

It’s only for things like graphics-intensive tasks like some serious Photoshop work and especially for things like video editing and motion graphics that I’ve stuck to Apple’s Pro line of computers like my M1 Ultra Mac Studio, which I’ve reviewed, for all of my video editing workloads.

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Keyboard and Form Factor

The next highlight is the keyboard and form factor. The MacBook Air has my favorite typing experience of any laptop. The key travel is minimal. I find I can type on it pretty fast with little effort.

The trackpad is still hands down the best trackpad out of any laptop thanks to the larger size and haptic feedback, which I find less taxing to use than other trackpads where you have to physically move the whole thing down over and over again, which can feel taxing, especially if you’re clicking towards the top of the trackpad where you usually feel a bit more resistance.

The trackpad size is also great for all of macOS’s multi-touch gestures, many of which are now also shared with iPadOS as well, making it easy to switch back and forth between the devices.

Display Quality

Display quality is another major highlight. The color accuracy is excellent, and True Tone continues to be an underrated feature of Apple devices. This feature automatically adjusts the white balance of the display based on the ambient lighting conditions around you, making the display more comfortable to look at.

And because the display is an LCD backlit display, while it won’t have the crazy good contrast you get with OLED displays, it generally doesn’t suffer from the same PWM flickering issues that affect some people with OLED displays, which rapidly turns the screen on and off to appear brighter or dimmer, which can cause some headaches, eye strain, and other health issues for certain people. The MacBook Air doesn’t have that potential downside.

Now, one weird thing the MacBook Air has is the notch, which unlike the iPhone’s Dynamic Island, which houses not just the selfie camera but also Touch ID components, the notch on the MacBook Air just houses the selfie camera. I really hope at some point they’ll be able to shrink down the Face ID components to the point where they can be embedded in MacBooks as well as the Studio Display for that matter.

After using Surface devices like the Surface Laptop I reviewed and the Surface Pro I’m currently reviewing, which both feature Windows Hello, I definitely prefer unlocking with my face. It’s just a more frictionless process.

The MacBook Air’s display is rated for 500 nits of brightness, which is fine for indoor use, but if you want to use it outdoors a lot, you might want the brighter display that you’ll get with a MacBook Pro, which can go all the way up to 1,600 nits of peak brightness in HDR and up to 1,000 nits in SDR, which is still double the brightness of the MacBook Air. The MacBook Pros can also be optioned with Apple’s nano-texture display, which helps reduce glare, and you cannot option the MacBook Air with a nano-texture display.

MagSafe and Transfer Process

Next up is the MagSafe port, another highlight. Why not just charge it via USB-C? Like, why have this proprietary plug? MagSafe has two main advantages. The first is its status light, which tells you when your laptop is charging versus when it’s completely charged. And the second is your computer won’t go flying across your room if someone trips over your charging cord thanks to its magnetic quick release.

Another highlight with this MacBook Air was actually the transfer process, which I thought was overall quite smooth. However, while doing it wirelessly is certainly convenient, it isn’t fast wirelessly. It said it would take me about 2 hours. So, I plugged my M3 MacBook Air into the M4 MacBook Air using a Thunderbolt 4 cable that shipped with my Studio Display, and the transfer took approximately 20 minutes to complete, transferring over 400 gigs of data.

More MacBooks should either come with this cable or give you a discount on adding one to your cart when you purchase a new MacBook for these way faster transfers.

Apple Ecosystem Integration

Now, the last and one of the most important features to talk about with the MacBook Air is actually how well it integrates with other Apple products. Some notable Apple ecosystem features I found useful have been its Passwords app, which now gives you an easy place on the Mac to find all of your saved passwords that you’ve saved across your Apple devices.

I use AirDrop all of the time to move files from one Apple device to my Mac. I love being able to see all of my messages from my iPhone on my MacBook Air. You can even mirror your entire iPhone on Mac via screen mirroring, which I’ve actually found works really well and has been really useful, especially for authentication apps.

Having my Focus mode sync across all of my Apple devices has also been really useful, so I don’t get most notifications during work hours when I’m trying to concentrate on writing or filming. Because I have an iPad, occasionally I’ll open up a contract or something I need to sign on my Mac and via Preview just send it over to my iPad for a quick professional-looking signature.

“The trackpad is still hands down the best trackpad out of any laptop thanks to the larger size and haptic feedback.”

Also, I love the little icon that’ll appear in my MacBook Air’s dock if I have a Safari tab open on another one of my Apple devices or another app open and with just one click, I can open up right where I left off on the other device on the MacBook Air.

Now, this is by no means an exhaustive list of all of the Apple ecosystem features you can use with your MacBook if you have other Apple devices. I didn’t even go through automatic switching with AirPods or dragging things across two different Macs.

Features I Haven’t Used Much

So, what features have I not found myself using with the MacBook Air? First up is Apple Intelligence on Mac. I just haven’t found much use for it. And 6 months later, honestly, other than the new Siri animation, I completely forgot it was part of the Mac.

I also haven’t used the speakers that much, though they actually sound pretty decent on the 15-inch compared to the 13-inch, which I talk about in more detail in my comparison video between those two sizes of the MacBook Air.

The Downsides

Now, let’s talk about the downsides I’ve encountered while using the MacBook Air.

60 Hz Refresh Rate

The first is the 60 Hz refresh rate. I do notice it when scrolling, mostly because as of this recording, it’s one of the only Apple devices I have that still uses a max of 60 Hz refresh rate. And at this current price point, I think it’s getting to be pretty inexcusable for the MacBook Airs not to have Apple’s ProMotion tech, which increases the refresh rate up to a max of 120 hertz, especially now that Apple has added ProMotion to all of 2025’s iPhones except for the 16e.

Webcam Quality

The webcam is still fine, not amazing quality. It’s a 12 megapixel camera with Center Stage that can autoframe you, but you can use your iPhone as the webcam if you want better quality as well as that Center Stage autoframe capability, plus the ability to have a top-down view with some iPhone models.

No Cellular Option

Another downside is there’s no cellular option built in. And now that more and more phone plans are allowing you to add a computer or an iPad onto your plan free of charge, like my Google Fi plans here in the US, I actually think now would be the perfect time to have a MacBook Air with 5G and eSIM, so you can skip the hotspot step and just connect directly to the 5G network when you need it.

Limited Ports

Now, the last downside with the MacBook Air is ports. You only get two USB-C ports. That’s only one less than a MacBook Pro. But if this is going to be your main computer, depending on your workflows, two might not be enough.

My Recommendation

So overall, do I recommend getting an M4 MacBook Air? Yes. I think in general if you’re looking for a laptop that’s really nicely designed, integrates well with the Apple ecosystem, has great battery life, an excellent keyboard, trackpad, and it looks stunning, and you don’t need the extra performance or ports that you get with the MacBook Pro, this would be a great laptop for you.

Configuration Recommendations

Now, if you’ve decided, okay, the MacBook Air is for me, there are some other questions you might have, like how much storage and RAM you should configure with it.

Storage

In general, if this is going to be your main computer and you plan to keep all of the photos and videos that you take from your phone backed up on here, which you probably should, I’d recommend at least 512 gigs of storage. 256 GB probably won’t be enough if you plan on keeping this laptop for several years and backing up photos and videos to it.

Now, if you plan to do a lot of work in Photoshop or even any light video editing on this computer, which it can technically do (though I personally would opt for a MacBook Pro for the video editing stuff), all of that can add to your storage in a hurry. For those workloads, that’s where I’d opt for 1 TB.

RAM

Now, what about RAM? Well, RAM has become a bit trickier with Apple Silicon Macs because these ARM-based chips are a bit more efficient with their RAM use. So, you typically get away with using less RAM than you would have a few years ago. That being said though, if you want to keep this laptop for 5 to 7 years, I would upgrade the RAM from 16 to at least 24 gigs. It might be a bit overkill, but it should give you more headroom for future OS upgrades or programs you use that might hog the RAM a bit more.

Power Adapter

Another question you might not have thought to ask yourself, but it’s actually really important is what power adapter to go with. By default, Apple configures the 8-core GPU model with a 30-watt adapter, while the 10-core GPU model includes the 35-watt dual USB-C adapter. But if you want to actually run any intensive program on your MacBook Air or just charge it up faster, you should absolutely go with the 70W power adapter instead.

And I’ve left purchase links to the base MacBook Airs and accessories in the product links for this video where you can compare prices at multiple retailers, including eBay, if you want to try and save some money and go for a used MacBook Air. Link to that in the description and pinned comment.

15-inch vs 13-inch

Now, the last question you probably have is, “Okay, should I get the 15-inch or the 13-inch version?” Well, I actually have an entire post dedicated to that topic.