Apple MacBook Air M4 (13-inch) Australian Review

It’s one of the most popular laptops on the planet, but its alluring veneer can often blur the lines between form and function for buyers who think it can do things it can’t. Regular MacBook buyers will buy it anyway but how does it compare to the best Windows-based laptops on the market? Should Apple users switch? Or, should users who are sick of Microsoft’s attempts at turning Windows into Malware make the switch to Apple? In this 13-inch MacBook Air M4 review, we won’t just go over what the current model can do but make an, erm, apples-to-apples comparison to the Windows-based competition. So, should you buy the ultraportable laptop that once redefined what an ultraportable laptop can be?

Apple MacBook Air M4 Specs

Features, Ergonomics & Design

The design of 2025’s Apple MacBook Air M4 hasn’t changed much over recent years. The understated lines are smooth and rounded, the aluminium chassis feels very high quality and the Apple logo on the lid is mostly discreet except for when the light hits it just so. It’s available in four colours: Sky Blue, Silver, Starlight (a golden hue) and Midnight (dark blue/black). Our review sample was the latter and, as you can see in the pictures, it can look different in different lighting.

It feels smooth and luxurious and our only gripe is that it’s one heck of a fingerprint magnet (but few laptops don’t suffer from this to, at least, some degree).

Opening up the MacBook Air M4 reveals the 13.6-inch ‘Apple Retina’ display. It has a high, 2,560 x 1,664 resolution which provides plenty of MacOS Desktop real estate. It’s bright (500-nit rated) and so can be used outdoors. However, while the glossy screen’s coating does an impressive job of fending-off reflections in most conditions, it can still turn into a black mirror when viewing dark content or you’re in a bright environment, like outdoors.

Screens that use IPS technology (rather than OLED) can be good or bad when it comes to multimedia performance. For the most part, the M4 MacBook Air displayed vibrant colours with impressive contrast when watching movies. It’s HDR compatible meaning details are (mostly) visible in both bright and dark areas at the same time but we did find that they could often blow-out and disappear in particularly bright areas. HDR also means that both colourful and monochromatic gradients are rendered smoothly without blocky artefacts or banding. Movies (and compatible, cinematic games) look very good.

The main downside is that a slow pixel-response time marries with the standard, sluggish 60Hz refresh rate to leave fast-moving objects looking rather blurry. That’s mainly an issue for FPS gamers, but this isn’t really a laptop for gaming… that’s one area where Windows laptops have the MacBook Air M4 well and truly beat.

Below the screen is Apple’s low-travel, Scrabble-tile keyboard. Apple invented this style of keyboard and it’s not only been copied by the rest of the market, but remains one of the very best implementations: it’s particularly comfortable and accurate to type upon all day. My main gripe is the squished arrow keys, but at least they’re segregated in the corner and not too hard to instinctively reach for.

Another area where MacBooks (arguably) win is with the trackpad. Not only does it work very well with multi-touch gestures, its one-button, two-pressure-level actuation feels good and works very well.

A more controversial element of the MacBook Ari M4 is the embedding of the webcam within a notch at the top of the screen. It might seem like it’s saving space, but rival Windows laptops often have higher-resolution webcams in even-thinner bezels than this and so I’m not convinced this is the best implementation. Still, the Full HD webcam and mic array provide some of the very best image quality on the market, with very little grain appearing in low light and good noise cancellation.

Inside the svelte, 11mm-thick body are four speakers (two tweeters and two woofers). For whatever reason, thin ultraportables like this often provide the best audio quality and the MacBook Air M4 is no exception. Audio gets loud, music has good fidelity from the top to the bottom end and there’s even some punchy bass. Impressive.

For non-MacBook users it’s worth highlighting some other features that you don’t get with Windows laptops. The fingerprint reader uses Apple’s Touch ID technology which can verify your identity online and authorise secure payments – not just log you in.

The MacBook Air M4’s Apple MacOS platform also comes with heaps of bespoke, high-quality software including Pages (word processor), Numbers (spreadsheet) and Keynote (slide-show presentation) software for free. That’s something to consider if you’ve had a gutful of Microsoft Office’s increasingly annoying Ai-saturated bloatware. Still, if you need MS Office, it runs natively on MacOS and has fewer Ai annoyances, which will be a boon.

Apple’s Mail app hasn’t sought to overcomplicate email like Outlook has. Meanwhile Messenger and Facetime are two of the most popular messaging applications in the world (although they’re locked into the Apple ecosystem). Then there’s Garage Band which is a high-quality, intuitive, music-making tool plus numerous other bits and pieces. On top of that, many of the most important (mainly design-focused) ISV (independent software makers) like Adobe make all of their apps run natively on MacOS.

The main downside is that when you want to run something that doesn’t fit into the ecosystem, you’re in trouble. Macs don’t support anywhere near the number of applications that Windows does – especially when it comes to games. But, few ultraportable laptop buyers buy their computer for gaming. Also remember that once you’re locked into the Apple ecosystem, it’s hard to extricate yourself and things can get expensive, quickly.

Still, many casual, ultraportable laptop buyers won’t miss what’s on Windows.

Ports and Connectivity

Inside, there’s Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. These are the same connections as the MacBook Air M3 and so I’m a little disappointed that Wi-Fi 7 isn’t included. Hardly any buyers will notice the performance loss, though.

I always rail against Windows laptops leaving out USB-A ports which are used by everything. Work-based laptops should also offer HDMI ports. The alternative is having dongles, but these are annoying an get lost. It’s not quite so bad in the Apple ecosystem as Apple and its partners make hardware designed to be used exclusively with Apple devices and USB-C, but it’s still shutting out countless numbers of useful peripherals – especially mice – which are often superior/cheaper to Apple’s own models.

All in all, though, the more I use the MacBook Air M4 (when out and about), the less I miss Windows. It’s a very good productivity and multimedia laptop that does most things mobile computer users want, very well indeed. There are plenty of Windows rivals that do too so let’s see if performance is a key differentiator.

Features, Ergonomics & Design Score: 3.3 / 5

Performance

In the past, dedicated MacBook reviewers would criticise Apple for supplying underpowered base models whose lack of RAM and universally fast storage (and lack of upgradability) meant that buyers choosing the cheapest options were left with laptops that didn’t perform as expected. While that’ becoming less of an issue, it’s apparently still rearing its head with lower-end SKUs with MacBook Air M4’s using 256GB hard drives. Our review unit arrived with options including a 10-core GPU, 16GB of ‘unified’ RAM and a 1TB hard drive.

While MacOS doesn’t support everything in our primary benchmark suite, we’ve been adding plenty of multi-platform applications to it (which will be folded into next year’s How We Test Laptops update) that can actually give us comparable, apples-to-apples performance results.

General Computing & CPU Tests

I’ve recently tested many ultraportable laptops that look and function (largely) like an Apple MacBook Air M4 and so I’ll post results from comparable Windows laptops that use Intel, AMD and Qualcomm (SnapDragon) chipsets. Included are:

Intel Core Ultra 7 258V “Lunar Lake” – Lenovo Yoga 7i 2-in-1 (Gen 10)

AMD Ryzen AI 7 350M – Lenovo Yoga 7 2-in-1 (Gen 10)

Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 – HP EliteBook Ultra G1q

At the risk of deluging people with numbers, I’ll also add the scores from our 15-inch MacBook Air M3 review.

To help visualise where performance sits within the whole laptop market, in addition to the raw benchmark scores we include a mathematically derived Five Star Rating where 1 is the least good result we’ve seen and 5 is the best (on every laptop we’ve tested since the beginning of last year).

That’s a lot of numbers but they do tell a tale. All of these laptops will run office-like applications with few hiccups. If you’re doing Adobe Photoshop-focused design work, only SnapDragon-based laptops will really struggle as they’re not optimised for the software… yet. However, the M4 chip beat everything else in image editing, illustrating both its potency and the close relationship that Apple has always had with Adobe.

Beyond that, AMD processors lead the pack when it comes to processor-based rendering grunt but Apple is not far behind. Intel’s Lunar Lake processors struggle in this regard owing to their low Performance core count. SnapDragon struggles too, owing to it having to run a non-native application.

When it comes to just raw silicon power, the MacBook Air M4 leads everything for single-core performance (as determined by Geekbench 6 results – that’s including high-end gaming laptops). It leads the ultraportable field when multi-core is factored in but the competition isn’t too far behind.

Ultimately, unless you’re regularly rendering (which isn’t something you’d by a MacBook Air M4 for), most of the target market won’t notice any difference when using most general applications. The problematic issues lie with SnapDragon laptops which struggle for native support for anything beyond Microsoft Office. While Apple software compatibility quickly falls off a cliff once you look beyond the big-name Office and Design applications, few casual buyers will need to stray far beyond its ecosystem. Consequently, it’s fair to say that the MacBook Air M4 performs brilliantly in an ultraportable laptop market filled with excellent rivals.

General Computing & CPU Score: 2.3 / 5

Graphics & Gaming Performance

The MacBook Air M4’s application compatibility issues reared their head when it came to testing the GPU’s performance and gaming potential as many of the benchmarks and games simply weren’t compatible with it. Nonetheless, we do have enough scores to make another more direct comparisons.

It should be noted that while Apple calls both its CPU and GPU the M4, Intel, AMD and Qualcomm do not. I’ll leave the processor names in for easy comparison, but the integrated graphics chips within these processors are:

• 1.95GHz 8-core Intel Arc 140V
  
  
• 3GHz 8-core AMD Radeon 860M
  
  
• 1.5GHz Qualcomm Adreno X1-85

On paper, there’s not a big difference between these integrated GPUs beyond noting that the AMD is the weakest in the field (AMD certainly does know how to make integrated graphics, as demonstrated by premium models including the outstanding HP ZBook Ultra G1a 14 workstation and the Asus ROG Flow Z13 gaming tablet). None of them work particularly well with eye-candy-rich games so you’ll likely have to drop to Full HD resolutions and lower detail settings to keep compatible games smooth.

More importantly, very few games work with Apple (or SnapDragon) laptops with fewer-than one per cent of Steam titles being available for MacOS. It’s a shame because Intel’s Lunar Lake processor can ably play AAA games like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. Having said that, MacOs isn’t a total gaming graveyard nowadays.

Remember too that all of the above rival laptops are available with different tiers of processor, so the performance spread between brands will be tighter.

Ultimately, if you want to play games, then a Windows laptop is the better choice because of the faster screens and basic compatibility. However, in terms of raw, ultraportable GPU performance the MacBook Air M4’s graphics capabilities lead the category.

Cooling

The MacBook Air M4 has no air vents or active cooling (i.e. fans) whatsoever. Under general usage, that’s fine, but the base can get somewhat warm (albeit not uncomfortably hot). There is some measurable thermal throttling because of this, but only under heavy workloads. We determined this by running the 30-minute version of Cinebench R23 and saw the score drop by almost five per cent. While rivals rarely drop more than two percent, this isn’t a dealbreaker and the benefits of not having noisy, dust-prone (and doomed-to-fail-eventually) fans in a device, arguably outweigh the downsides. It also looks better with no fan grilles.

Graphics & Gaming Performance Score: 1.5 / 5

Portability & Battery Life

Apple puts the MacBook Air M4’s battery life at around 18 hours depending on what you’re doing. That’s on a par with AMD but some way behind SnapDragon and Intel Lunar Lake rivals which are pushing 30 hours more often than not. However, meaningful cross-platform benchmarks are generally horrible.

The most consistent we’ve seen is PCMark 10 Modern Office, but this isn’t compatible with MacOS. UL’s Procyon Office benchmark sorta kinda works well across platforms (ish). It only runs for an hour on MacOS and we ran it multiple times and saw a drop in battery charge of between five and eight per cent. That would suggest a comparable battery benchmark lifespan of between 12 and 20 hours. To be frank, we’ve see some significant fluctuations with this benchmark when run on other laptops (which is probably what’s also happening here).

Ultimately, after looking at all of our historical test results, I’m inclined to agree with Apple at 18 hours rating, but it’s worth remembering that battery life will always depend on what you’re using the laptop for. Note too, that the 15-inch MacBook Air M3 that we reviewed recently, consistently only dropped two percent during UL’s test. This suggests that the larger battery (and potentially, the larger chassis) can boost battery life in a MacBook Air.

Fast charging means you can charge to 50 per cent in just 30 minutes anyway.

In terms of build quality, the MacBook Air M4’s solid aluminium chassis (which is made from 50 per cent recycled material) feels very robust and sturdy. There’s also barely any flex when a twisting force is applied to the screen, so I expect it to survive life on the road. Just note that business-grade laptops undergo significantly more torture testing, so if you want an ultraportable laptop that’s less likely to break, for work or school, check out our Business Laptop Group Test.

Its weight of 1.2KG is light, but nowadays, it’s not the lightest on the market. Fortunately, you don’t need to lug a big charger(s) around as the magnetically attached, phone-style ‘MagSafe 3’ power connector only weighs 183g and has an extra USB-C port to simultaneously charge your phone.

The whole package places that the MacBook Air M4 is into the top 10 most portable laptops on the market.

Portability & Battery Life Score: 4.6 / 5

Price, Value & Availability

Our review unit of the MacBook Air M4 had a 10-core GPU, 16GB ‘of ‘Unified Memory’ and a 1TB hard drive. It’s available in the Apple store for $2,299. That’s very good value when compared to rivals which have RRPs around $3,000.

The main issue that buyers will have is that rivals often appear in massive sales for over $1,000 off which can dramatically boost their attractiveness, depending on the time of year. Apple never has major sales.

You can save or spend more money on a MacBook Air M4 by pushing the memory to 24GB, adjusting the hard drive size or selecting a slightly weaker 8-core GPU. I suspect that the latter is an option purely to avoid throwing-out functional 10-core chips with a failed core or two. Nonetheless, you can save some money for a minor hit to performance. Just note that the 256GB hard drive has been reported to suffer bottlenecking problems (especially for tough workloads), so we’d recommend steering clear of that.

Price, Value & Availability Score: 4.2 / 5

Conclusion: Should You Buy The Apple MacBook Air M4?

Doing a deep-dive performance comparison on the MacBook Air M4 has been very cathartic for me as it washes away all kinds of historical prejudices born from things like dodgy marketing claims and suffering armies of mindless Apple zealots, over the years. The numbers born from our exhaustive testing don’t lie: this is a high-performing, well-featured ultraportable laptop by every measure.

What stops me jumping ship to it personally is my demand for wider software compatibility – but that’s from my daily, desktop work computer which needs to use Windows. When I’m out and about, I’ve started to bring the a MacBook Air with me because, well, it’s really good for out-and-about computing.

There’s still a great deal more choice from ultraportable Windows laptops, including models with faster screens, more power, superior gaming chops, business-class build quality or convert into tablets. There are also models which are much cheaper (and nastier). You can find the best in our monthly group test.

However, none of them offer the elegant simplicity of the Apple ecosystem and its highly polished (often free) software offerings. It also works seamlessly with one of the most popular phones in the world. Oh, and it’s a style icon. So, overall, I’m more than happy to recommend Apple’s MacBook Air M4.

Overall Score: 4.3 / 5

Pros

– Thin, light and well built
– Great ergonomics
– Part of the Apple ecosystem

Cons

– Slow screen for gaming
– General software & games compatibility
– Fingerprint magnet

Awards

Last Updated on 18 November 2025 by Nick Ross