M4 MacBook Air Review (15-Inch, 2025): Best MacBook for Most People Gets Faster, Cheaper

9.0/ 10
SCORE

Apple MacBook Air M4 (15-inch, 2025)

Pros

• Optimal balance of screen size and system weight
• M4 processor provides good balance of performance and battery life
• Lower $1,199 starting price

Cons

• 256GB SSD is too small for the price
• $200 upcharge for more RAM or storage is steep
• Smooth ProMotion display still exclusive to MacBook Pro

After using the 15-inch MacBook Air for the past week, I’m not looking forward to returning to my usual work laptop, a 14-inch MacBook Pro. I’ve grown to appreciate the larger screen and thinner, lighter enclosure. If CNET offered me the choice, I’d gladly box up my 14-inch Pro and swap it for a 15-inch Air. My job doesn’t require the power of M4 Pro-level processing, after all. And I like to move around my house when I work as well as make frequent visits to my local coffee shop, so I don’t use an external display. The 15.3-inch display gives me more room to juggle my many open windows and Chrome tabs during the workday, and I like watching YouTube TV, MLB.TV and Netflix better on the bigger screen.

The 15-inch Air acts as the bridge between the 13-inch MacBook Air M4 and MacBook Pro line. It gives you the option of getting a bigger display without needing to pay the MacBook Pro premium. And with Apple dropping the price by $100 for the M4 MacBook Air models, the Pro premium is even greater. The 13-inch M4 Air starts at $999, and the 15-inch M4 Air starts at $1,199. Even with the semi-outrageous charge of $200 to double the storage to a 512GB SSD, the 15-inch M4 Air still costs $200 less than the cheapest M4 MacBook Pro.

Watch this: M4 MacBook Air Review: What to Know About Apple’s Latest Little Laptops

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The M4 update adds incremental improvements to an already fantastic laptop that sits in the Goldilocks Zone of Apple’s MacBook lineup. With its roomy display, trim design and new lower starting price, the 15-inch M4 MacBook Air should be viewed as the default Air, with its cheaper and smaller 13-inch sibling a good alternative for students and others with tighter budgets and busy, on-the-go lifestyles.

The 15-inch M4 MacBook Air starts at $1,199, which is $100 less than what the entry-level M3 Air 15 cost. It has a 10-core M4 processor with four performance cores and six efficiency cores, and a 10-core GPU — that’s a step up from the $999 13-inch Air but the same chips in the $1,599 MacBook Pro. Each of these models comes with 16GB of RAM, but the Airs have only a 256GB solid-state drive.

Apple sent us the $1,399 15-inch Air with a 512GB SSD. The $1,599 model increases the RAM to 24 GB. You can customize the MacBook Air by adding up to 32GB of RAM (the previous M3 Air maxed out at 24GB). You can also increase the storage capacity up to 2TB, the same as before.

The M4 MacBook Air 15 starts at £1,199 in the UK and AU$2,099 in Australia. 

What else is new with the M4 Air update?

The latest MacBook Air models not only have the newer M4 silicon but they also have more CPU cores. The eight-core M3 chip in the previous generation is now a 10-core M4 chip in the latest models. The difference in performance is slight because the M4 chip doesn’t add more performance cores but two extra efficiency cores. Still, the more cores, the better.

With this update, the webcam gets a bump. The MacBook Air now has the same 12-megapixel Center Stage camera with Desk View support that was introduced last year with the M4 MacBook Pro and M4 iMac. The camera still captures 1080p video, as you got with previous MacBooks, but the 12-megapixel camera lets Center Stage pan and zoom to keep you centered in the frame while keeping the resolution at 1080p.

Desk View gives you a dual-screen FaceTime call. Your face appears in one window, and whatever is directly in front of the MacBook Air appears in the other. It’s meant to be a presentation tool, but I found it very awkward to use because I had to have the display positioned perfectly vertically for the top-down Desk View window to appear correctly. Even then, the image looked stretched and distorted. Plus, the second Desk View window had a much lower resolution than the regular FaceTime window.

Next to a MagSafe charging connector on the left are a spartan pair of USB-C ports, but they’re now Thunderbolt 4, which lets you extend to up to two 6K external monitors and still use the MacBook Air’s display — and keyboard and trackpad. The previous M3 Air lets you connect to two displays but only with the lid closed. You also get a headphone jack on the other side — same as before.

The last bit of newness with the M4 update is a new color option. You can now get the MacBook Air in sky blue, which takes the place of space gray. The overall effect is muted and underwhelming. It’s a subtle silvery blue that looks more silver under most lighting and very far from the bold blue (or red or orange or yellow or green or purple) of the M4 iMac. I still think the midnight black or traditional silver are the two best colors for a MacBook Air.

M4 MacBook Air performance

The M4 MacBook Air showed the expected generation-over-generation gains over the previous M3 models. It offers strong application and graphics performance for mainstream use and outperformed not only the M3 Air but also two recent Copilot Plus PCs, the HP OmniBook X 14 and Microsoft Surface Laptop 7, on our Geekbench 6 and Cinebench 2024 benchmarks. 

Copilot Plus PCs have the advantage, however, in battery life. Both the OminBook X 14 and Surface Laptop 7 feature Qualcomm Snapdragon X processors and ran for hours longer on our battery drain test than both 13- and 15-inch M4 MacBook Air models. The 15-inch Air has the largest, highest resolution among these four laptops, and powering all of those pixels consumes battery resources at a faster clip. Its battery life of 16 hours and 41 minutes in my testing is still plenty long enough to get you through a day or two without needing to recharge.

Apple says the MacBook Air’s Liquid Retina display is rated for 500 nits of brightness with 100% coverage of the P3 color gamut. My tests with a Spyder X Elite colorimeter confirmed those, and in fact, it measured a bit brighter than Apple says, reaching a peak brightness of 525 nits in testing.

The MacBook Pro feature I miss most

While we’re on the topic of the MacBook Air’s display, there is one thing I’d miss if I were to trade my 14-inch MacBook Pro for the 15-inch Air: the Liquid Retina XDR display. The XDR display is brighter with a higher resolution and has an adaptive refresh rate of up to 120Hz, which Apple calls ProMotion. And it’s this faster refresh rate that I miss most on the Air, whose display refreshes a steady 60 times per second. 

I don’t notice the difference between displays when watching videos, but I see it clearly when scrolling through web pages. Text stays more legible on the Pro as I scroll down a page. On the Air, letters and words blur, making it more difficult to keep reading while I scroll. It’s too bad that Apple doesn’t offer ProMotion on the larger Air as another sweetener for the $200 upcharge over the 13-inch Air. I suppose it is called ProMotion for a reason — a feature exclusive to the MacBook Pro. Heck, I’d settle for something called AirMotion that offered an adaptive refresh rate up to, say, 90Hz for the MacBook Air for a bit smoother scrolling and movement.

The other item missing from the MacBook Air is the optional nano-texture display offered on the Pro. It costs an extra $150 and gives the display a matte surface that significantly reduces glare and reflections. My MacBook Pro doesn’t have a nano-texture display, so I can’t compare it against the MacBook Air’s standard glossy screen. But I do review a lot of laptops, and I can say with authority that the MacBook Air has one of the better glossy-finish displays in terms of not being too reflective.

Last word on the display: The camera notch remains. It’s a shame that with the Air 15’s ever-so-slightly wider display bezels, Apple couldn’t find a way to tuck the camera under the top bezel and get rid of the notch. 

The 13-inch vs. 15-inch MacBook Air question

Most laptop shoppers kicking the tires on the 15-inch MacBook Air are also eyeing, I’d imagine, the 13-inch M4 MacBook Air. The MacBook Air is an excellent laptop in either size, so how do you decide which way to go? The 13-inch model costs $200 less and is roughly half a pound lighter, making it more affordable and portable — and the more popular of the two. But I’d argue the 15-inch Air is the better pick for most people since most people don’t use their MacBook connected to an external display.

The 15.3-inch display on the larger Air provides enough workspace to obviate the need for a multidisplay setup — even if the M4 Airs do offer better support for external displays. The 15-inch Air has a big enough screen to use on its own, making it the better choice for anyone who needs to move around with their laptop, such as hybrid workers who work remotely some days and head in the office on others while also taking their laptop to the coffee shop on the weekends.

At 3.3 pounds and less than half an inch thick, the 15-inch Air is still an easy travel companion. Students who live out of their backpacks, however, are still better off with the smaller, cheaper Air. The 13-inch, 2.7-pound Air is easier to toss into a backpack and tote around campus.

For the rest of us? The 15-inch Air’s larger display more than makes up for its heavier carrying weight compared with the 13-inch Air. So, what about the $200 extra you need to shell out for the larger Air? Apple sweetens the deal somewhat by including an M4 chip with two extra GPU cores with the 15-inch Air along with two extra speakers for slightly fuller sound, but the real reason to spend $200 more for the 15-inch Air is its roomer display. It’s so much better for multitasking than either the 13-inch Air or 14-inch Pro. 

The performance gains aren’t enough on their own to necessitate an upgrade to the M4 MacBook Air if you’re using an M2 or M3 model, but the lower price and bigger screen are two reasons to trade in a 13-inch M2 or M3 Air and step up in size to the 15-inch M4 Air. And the M4 Air in either size is a no-brainer if you’re limping along with an older M1 or Intel-based unit.