M4 MacBook Air: More power, more battery, less price

Having sold us the dummy with the new iPad Air, Apple eventually got round to delivering the new M4 MacBook Air and, what’s more, shaved $100 off the price.

Yours from a starting price of $999, the new M4 MacBook Air is an impressive looking laptop that now also comes in a new, fetching color of sky blue. 

Available in 13- and 15-inch sizes, it’s also now capable of an impressive 18 hours of battery life, thanks to the optimisation possible from that M4 chip. That itself features a powerful 10-core CPU, an up to 10-core GPU, and support for up to 32 GB of unified memory, making the new MacBook Air up to 2x faster than the M1 model and a whopping 23x faster than the quickest Intel-based machine.

Here come the benchmarks.

• Video editing in iMovie is up to 8x faster than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Air, and up to 2x faster than the 13-inch MacBook Air with M1.
• Photo editing in Adobe Photoshop is up to 3.6x faster than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Air, and up to 2x faster than the 13-inch MacBook Air with M1.

It also features a new 12MP Center Stage camera, a brilliant 13.6- or 15.3-inch Liquid Retina display with up to 500 nits of brightness, enhanced display support enabling you to drive up to two 6K external displays, Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3,  MagSafe charging, and two Thunderbolt ports. There is also a three-mic array and enhanced voice clarity on audio and video calls and an immersive sound system that has support for Spatial Audio along with Dolby Atmos.

That $999 is $100 less than the previous generation, and gives you a base spec 13-inch  machine with 10-Core CPU, 8-Core GPU, 16 GB Unified Memory, and 256 GB SSD Storage. You can pimp that all the way up to 32 GB and 2 TB, as well as adding 2 GPU cores if you feel the need. It's going to be available next week.