Apple MacBook Air M4
The design stays the same, but a tempting price and speedy M4 chip make the Air a better choice than ever
ABOVE
The MacBook Air is unchanged on the outside, but the price has been slashed
SCORE
PRICE
13in, from £833 (£999 inc VAT); 15in, from £999 (£1,199 inc VAT)
from
apple.com/uk
H
ow do you make one of the best laptops in the world better? You could redesign it, but you risk disenfranchising passionate fans. In that case, making small changes, especially under-the-hood ones, is the smart move, and it’s clearly Apple’s strategy here.
The M4 MacBook Air is virtually indistinguishable from the M3 model. Apple has left the keyboard and trackpad almost untouched, and the same goes for the display. The weight of both 13in and 15in variants remains unchanged, so all that’s new is a Sky Blue colour option.
The significant changes are all inside. First up, the 12MP Center Stage camera replaces the 1080p FaceTime camera. It’s an ultrawide lens in a screen notch that can keep you in the frame during video calls. Then there’s the 10-core M4 chip, which adds cores and performance over the M3 despite being based on the same 3nm design.
Lower price!
The biggest change is to the price. Apple has doubled the base unified memory from 8GB to 16GB while reducing the cost to £999 inc VAT for the 13in model. That’s as shocking a turn of events as it is welcome, though Apple more than gets its money back if you want more than 256GB of storage: doubling that to 512GB costs another £200, albeit with an upgrade in GPU cores from eight to ten. Every upgrade to memory and storage from this point adds another £200, so if you spec the 13in laptop with 32GB of unified memory and a 2TB SSD you’re looking at a juicy £2,199.