Apple unveiled a revised MacBook Air with an M4 chip inside Wednesday. It comes in a beautiful new sky blue color, at an even lower price point — with the same incredible 18 hours of battery life.
“MacBook Air is by far the world’s most popular laptop,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said in a press release, “and today we’re giving everyone even more reasons to love it, including a big boost in performance with the M4 chip, a new Center Stage camera, and a beautiful new sky blue color.”
The M4 MacBook Air starts at $999 and will become available on March 12.
M4 MacBook Air introduced with big boost in performance and beautiful new sky blue
Photo: Apple
The M4 MacBook Air brings big power to the entry-level MacBook. It can now drive two external 6K displays, like Apple’s Pro Display XDR, in addition to its own built-in display. The M4 delivers the same 18-hour battery life as before, for getting work done all day long. It can also be upgraded to 32GB of unified memory, up from 24GB.
MacBook Air in sky blue
Photo: Apple
Sky blue replaces space gray in the color options, joining midnight, starlight, and silver. Apple describes it as “a beautiful, metallic light blue that creates a dynamic gradient when light reflects off of its surface.”
All options come with a color-matched MagSafe charging cable. If you’re looking for the best deals, check out the latest iPad Air sale to see what’s available.
Smart new features
Screenshot: Apple
The improved 12 MP camera supports Center Stage and Desk View. Center Stage dynamically zooms and pans around to make sure you — and the whole family — are perfectly framed on a FaceTime call, while Desk View presents a top-down view of your workspace for others to see.
Like all Apple silicon-powered MacBook Airs, it runs Apple Intelligence, Apple’s suite of AI-powered features. This brings Writing Tools, Image Playground, Genmoji and integration with ChatGPT to the Mac. The Neural Engine in the M4 chip performs up to three times faster than the M1, “significantly increasing speed in tasks like automatically enhancing photos and removing background noise from a video,” according to Apple.
The M4 chip is a big leap forward
Image: Apple
Apple emphasizes in its press release that the new MacBook Air is significantly faster than its last Intel predecessor from early 2020, noting that it “delivers up to 23× faster performance.” Spreadsheet calculations in Microsoft Excel are “up to 4.7× faster,” and “video editing in iMovie is up to 8× faster.”
Even with all that extra oomph, it has “up to 6 more hours” of battery life. Apple sold a lot of Intel MacBook Airs in early 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Joswiak, this new model is “the perfect moment to upgrade.” If you’re wondering about the macbook m4 release date, check out our detailed review of the M4 MacBook Air. If you’re considering external display capabilities, learn more about the MacBook Air M3 dual monitor support and how it compares to previous models.
Say hello to the new MacBook Air! The world’s most popular laptop now features M4, Apple Intelligence capabilities, and a beautiful new color—sky blue. pic.twitter.com/CZzHpVvIhO
— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) March 5, 2025
The M4 stacks up well against modern Intel offerings, too. Apple says that “compared to a PC laptop with an Intel Core Ultra 7 processor,” the MacBook Air is “up to 60 percent faster” at web browsing and “up to 2× faster” at more demanding tasks.
It’s markedly faster than the M1 MacBook Air as well, with “up to 2× faster” video editing in iMovie and photo editing in Photoshop.
The M4 is fabricated on a second-generation three-nanometer process by TSMC that is far more power-efficient than M3. Its CPU adds two efficiency cores for better multitasking performance. Compared to the M2, it is up to 50% faster. The GPU brings an even greater jump in performance, with speeds up to 4× faster, thanks to dynamic caching, hardware-accelerated mesh shading, and ray tracing. If you’re interested in learning more about the M4 MacBook Pro and its display capabilities, check out this detailed breakdown.
The M4 chip debuted in May 2024 on the M4 iPad Pro.
A lower price than before
Photo: Apple
The new MacBook Air now comes with a $100 price cut. The 13-inch base model now only costs $999 for 256 GB of storage, 16 GB of unified memory, and an M4 chip with a 10-core CPU and 8-core GPU. In the Apple Education Store, it costs only $899.
The 15-inch model, which automatically upgrades the GPU to 10 cores, gets a $100 price cut as well. It starts at $1,199, down from $1,299.
For the last few years, Apple kept older MacBook Airs for sale at this $999 price point; that is no longer the case. The current M4 model is the new entry-level model.
The M4 MacBook Air is the tail end of the M4 generation
Photo: Apple
Last fall, Apple updated the MacBook Pro, iMac and Mac mini with M4, M4 Pro and M4 Max chips. That left the MacBook Air on M3 — until today — with the Mac Studio getting revised as well. The Vision Pro and Mac Pro still run on M2 generation chips.
D. Griffin Jones is a writer, podcaster and video producer for Cult of Mac. Griffin has been a passionate computer enthusiast since 2002, when he got his first PC — but since getting a Mac in 2008, he hasn’t turned back. His skills in graphic and web design, along with video and podcast editing, are self-taught over 20+ years. Griffin has a bachelor’s degree in computer science and has written several (unpublished) apps for Mac and iOS. His collection of old computers is made up of 40+ desktops, laptops, PDAs and devices, dating back to the early ’80s. He brings all of these creative and technical skills, along with a deep knowledge of Apple history, into his work for Cult of Mac.
