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Laptops · Apple MacBook Air

Apple MacBook Air M4

56owners with an opinion
78%of verdicts positive
36/10positive/negative since 2024
1 yrslongest happy owner
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and portability; criticized for reliability and repairability.

What owners wrote

Doesn’t like itOwned 2.5 years
The trackpad on my Macbook Air stopped working after 2.5 years. The Apple warranty in only 1 measly year. Apple wanted nearly £500 to fix it. Caveat emptor.
Likes itOwned 1 year
I bought an M4 Air about a year ago for under 1000$, it beat out my 2019 Intel MBP by quite a lot. I fully expect the air to last me at least another 6 years or so for my use case. The thing is a beast. Compare this to a Dell laptop I bought when I started college, that thing was 850 dollars and died on me within 3 years. For Apple, I could justify spending more (maybe even 20% more) considering both Apple computers I’ve had feel extremely fast. The only reason I dropped the 2019 MBP was battery fatigue (and I probably could have repaired it for 100$ and gotten another 3-4 years out of it. But the new air was just too attractive).
Likes itOwned 1 year
> "From all the reviews, those of us who are skeptical of 8GB of RAM are very much wrong" Yes and no. I had a M1 MacBook Air for several years, with 8 GB. It's fine if your needs are relatively simple (ie: just a browser, with not too many tabs, and a few other simple apps). But try to run too many apps and it would tend to hit a wall and get very slow. One thing that did seem to help a lot was to keep the SSD relatively empty: the SSD seems to get slower once it has < 30% or so free space remaining, which would slow the whole system down because memory swapping takes longer) Last year I upgraded to an M4 Air and got 24GB, which makes a world of difference. But I gave the M1 to my niece and she seems very happy with it!
Likes itOwned 1 year
Fully agree. I used to have a company issued MBP M3 Pro, and when I switched roles I got myself base M4 Air. Can't complain at all in the past year, I do feel throttling at times when running longer tasks, but for 99% of the time I don't feel I need anything better. And I do work as a software developer, so anyone doing lighter usage not in this camp will feel the same. M5 Air should be pretty much the same.
Doesn’t like it
> But now I mostly use local models Do you have beefy hardware? i dream of using a local LLM, but neither my 24GB RAM M4 Air nor my PC with a RTX3080 and 16GB of RAM seem usable (yet). i could label them usable if "prompt it and then wait for 6 minutes for it to change a single line" is deemed usable, which i don't. spent the last weekend in a rabbit-hole of which models to use in what kind of setup, but i think with my hardware i'm just out of luck for now. for private matters I can use Cloud AIs, but not allowed to use it for work-related matters, which is where i could use it the most. they do provide us an isolated AI environment where we can use Claude etc. for work stuff, but heavily rated (about 20 prompts per week per Claude model).
Likes it
It's sorta funny, the existence of Windows' stranglehold has worsened so many generations of thinkpads. The push for the S0 mac-style standby made my 11th gen X1 carbon basically unusable for me in Linux. The standby battery life is so bad, it will burn through half the battery overnight with the lid closed. The battery life actually seems better when using the laptop opposed to standby. Other standby modes were removed on a firmware level by lenovo despite the processor supporting it. I still have my 4th gen X1 carbon, it was an amazing machine for 8 years and I really thought I'd get another 8-year laptop buying the latest X1, but now it sits off and only comes out for specific uses. Bought an m4 air for day-to-day laptop use.
Likes it
This is really the only reason I have a MacOS system around. The M4 Air feels like what I imagined a laptop could be 15 years ago. No fans to block, can grab it and carry it around almost like a tablet, works great as a thin client into a more powerful system over Moonlight, it's light enough that I don't even think about carrying it around in my backpack even when I'm also carrying my work laptop, and it was cheap enough that if anything happens to it I won't be too concerned. Compared to the last XPS I had, it's substantially better for my use case, since I'll generally be remoting into systems anyway.
Neutral
I have a Mac Studio M2 Max as my main driver. It's fantastic. I will get the best M5 Studio I can afford when the higher RAM options come out because I am very involved with local inference. I find that with Tailscale I can either use screen sharing if I've got a good enough internet connection or just SSH and Mosh if it's a little bit laggy. That has been good enough for me. A Mac Studio and a Neo as a companion is a really good combination. My laptop is an Apple M4 Air but it basically does nothing except for running ScreenShare and a terminal.
Likes it
I use both the base M4 Mac mini and an M4 MacBook Air for Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, and Fusion, and while they're not as almost-always-perfectly-smooth as my Mac Studio, they're about 100x better than the experience I used to have on my old Intel MacBook Pros in the 2010s. I edit 4K ProRes and H.265 footage, sometimes with multicam (up to 4 streams) and color adjustments, titles, etc. It's only after stacking 3-5 effects before things can stutter, really. Or if you try doing something CPU-intense in the background _while_ running some heavy creative software. I just don't do that.
Neutral
I host the models on my Mac Studio, an M1 Ultra with 64gb ram (I bought it when it came out, just happens to be good at LLMs). So when I work on my laptop, I have my oh-my-pi setup configured to use the models on my Mac over my local "bonjour" network or whatever Apple calls it. That way I have a nice cool lap, while using models that my M4 MacBook Air with its 16gb ram couldn't possibly run.
Likes it
Apple seems to be content to sell shovels in the AI gold rush. Admittedly… what’s on my desk? A MacBook M4 Air, a Mac Studio, and there’s an x86 iMac in the corner. What goes in the travel bag? A MacBook Pro or the Air. Every time I look at buying something else the math doesn’t add up. The 5090 sits in a commodity PC chassis. It’s not like I need a model running on my own computer.
Likes it
I have an M4 Macbook Air with 32Gb. These are my current results for my models: ┌──────────────────────┬───────────┬─────────────┐ │ Model │ Size │ Tokens/sec │ ├──────────────────────┼───────────┼─────────────┤ │ gemma-4-e4b-it-mlx │ ~4B (MLX) │ ~10.5 tok/s │ ├──────────────────────┼───────────┼─────────────┤ │ qwen3-8b-uncensor-v2 │ 8B │ ~6.3 tok/s │ ├──────────────────────┼───────────┼─────────────┤ │ qwen3-14b-uncensored │ 14B │ ~3.5 tok/s │ └──────────────────────┴───────────┴─────────────┘ I seem to be doing ok with the Gemma model for file parsing / handling.
Likes it
In my personal experience, 13” M1 MacBook Air, 15” M4 Macbook Air, M4 Pro Mac Mini, and MacBook Neo, the Neo is the fastest for single threaded and strictly CPU bound tasks. E.g. calculating 200x200, 1000 max iterations Mandelbrot fractals it does ~785 in ten seconds compared to ~760 on the M4s and somewhere in the 600s for the M1. Given its RAM size I’m not going to be spinning up VMs, but in terms of general purpose computing it’s more than adequate. And, out of the box, you get a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, video editing, digital audio, web browser, and a bunch of other things. Xcode is free. This is easily a laptop you can buy and use for years in 90% of settings.
Likes it
Apple is in the process of fixing Tahoe which was a regression from Sequoia the previous release. Tahoe is decent with 26.4 though from what I am hearing. Either OS version is far far better than regular Windows 11 though. Apple’s real differentiator is their silicon. M series chips are just incredibly good and you get a full workday out of them on battery. The M1 Pro I still have at work is easily the best laptop I have ever used. For side projects I use an M4 air with maxed out RAM and it has no issues with anything I have thrown at it.
Neutral
I have an M4 Air and I just pre-ordered 3 Neos. One for myself, one for my niece as a present and one for my parents to replace their Windows laptop. I honestly don't understand people who complain about the lack of M5 Pro specs and features on a £599 Macbook. "Oh no, it's 1/3rd of the price of a Pro but I want the Pro specs on it." People seriously need to do think twice before pressing the submit button. And nobody in the right mind would buy a used Macbook for the same price, just because it's more powerful. I have an 8G M2 at work and it's more than enough and I have two browsers running with 20+ tabs, Teams, Outlook, Figma, VScode... If you are a power user buy a Macbook Pro, you can't reasonable expect Pro performance out of a device that costs a third. This Neo is going to sell like crazy because it's an amazing product for the price. That's how much Chromebooks cost but you actually get a full desktop OS rather than a web browser. And for students to buy a new Macbook for £499 come on, some of these comments are just ridiculous.
Doesn’t like it
I bought the M4 air given that the consensus was also that it was the best value for 1k, but I ended up returning it and went for pro base model for a few reasons (still valid for M5 AFAIK from a bit of research): - pro motion (120hz screen). - better display brightness which is important when there is a bright sun outside. - 1 more USB-C port and HDMI port (no dongle hell). - 20% more battery life. - This is more personal, but 13" is too small and 15" is too big, so 14" MBP worked best for me (~25 HFOV with a stand + KBM). It's hard to justify saving 400 bucks given the gap between the models, but the decision is closer since the air has 16GB memory by default since M4 AFAIK.
Doesn’t like it
The Apple Silicon fanless MBAs are great until you end up in a workload that causes the machine to thermal throttle. I tried to use an M4 MBA as primary development machine for a few months. A lot of software dev workflows often require running some number of VMs and containers, if this is you the chances of hitting that thermal throttle are not insignificant. When throttling under load occurs it’s like the machine suddenly halves in performance. I was working with a mess of micro services in 10-12 containers and eventually it just got too frustrating. I still think these MBAs are superb for most people. As much as I love a solid state fanless design, I will for now continue to buy Macs with active cooling for development work. It’s my default recommendation anytime friends or relatives ask me which computer to buy and I still have one for light personal use.
Likes it
I totally get it. I have the M4 Air, grabbed it for 700$ on sale. I also have a MSI Creator with Linux (wayland). Performance wise the base Air crunches through everything up until lots of things are open and gpu is roaring (encoding or streaming), and with colima, I have few incus linux containers up and running. Battery life is formidable. Nothing comes close. My linux laptop (32GB ram / beefy gpu) barely withstand 40 min on battery, but can handle very daunting tasks, and obviously gaming. These are 2 different use cases, but right now, for the ultra portable laptop, Air is the king, until x64 brings back the efficiency per watt. Even qcom can't compete. That being said, I am a big fan of the apple hardware and not the apple software, so whenever Asahi linux is ready enough (with good battery life), I am definitely jumping ship.
Doesn’t like it
Is it really 2x or is it 2x at max load ? Since, as you say, you're not peggig the CPU - would be interesting to compare power usage on a task basis and the duration. Could be that the 3D cache is really adding that much overhead even to idle CPU. Anyway I've never regretted buying a faster CPU (GPU is a different story, burned some money there on short time window gains that were marginally relevant), but I did regret saving on it (going with M4 air vs M4 pro)
Doesn’t like it
I've been doing this with my MBA M4 since day one: I turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to prevent the network and my connected keyboard and mouse from interrupting the computer's sleep. I configured Control+Command+S as a shortcut to put the computer to sleep. While playing a music video on YouTube, I pressed the shortcut and the music stopped. However, as soon as I moved the mouse or used the keyboard, the video started playing again, even while the computer was supposedly "asleep" (with the lid open or closed). So, at the end of the day, the best thing for me to do is turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, then use the shortcut to put the device to sleep, and finally close the lid before putting the MBA in my backpack.
Doesn’t like it
MacBook Pro M4 with Pro/Max CPUs are 3-4x faster on multicore benchmarks compared to Air's M4. Air M4 is not enough for my heavy usage of multiple browsers, agents, scripts, and different spinoffs of VS Code at the same time. What's the problem with your battery life? Check which app is draining your battery in Activity Monitor/Energy.