M4 MacBook Air reviews: Best MacBook at an unbeatable price

After introducing the M4 MacBook Air last week, journalists and influencers published their reviews ahead of its release on March 12. While it looks similar to its predecessor, it has a better chip, an improved camera, and an unbeatable price. Here's what everyone is saying about the M4 MacBook Air in their reviews.

CNN calls this a boring update, but that still makes this laptop the best for most people:

 It’s still both the best laptop for most people and the MacBook I recommend to family and friends. And this year, the only physical difference is the new Sky Blue color option that brightens up the color palette, though it’s such a muted hue I would have argued to call it Ice Blue.

The Verge mentions the upgraded 12MP Center Stage camera. After years with a terrible camera, Apple upgraded the MacBook Air's lenses twice in just a few years:

The Center Stage webcam offers a sharp image that works well in most lighting conditions, including low light and strong backlighting like a bright window. Compared to the M3 Air, it shows a little more detail in hair and is less prone to flares and ghosting from a strong light source. The 12-megapixel webcam sensor has a wider field of view and follows you so you stay in frame during video calls — or, if you’re picky, allows you to manually choose your composition. Desk View remains a shrug-your-shoulders “better than nothing” tool for sharing a book or what’s on your desk, though it’s still quite distorted and awkward-looking.

ArsTechnica's MacBook Air M4 review, the publication talks about the impressive performance of this computer despite not featuring a fan for cooling this device:

The Air's M4 performs identically to the actively cooled versions in many of our lighter benchmarks, including Geekbench, single-threaded Cinebench tests, and even most of our graphics benchmarks. It's only in heavier, longer-running tests like our Handbrake video encoding tests that it begins to slow down significantly compared to the actively cooled versions of the chip. This is pretty consistent with what we've seen in the other Apple Silicon MacBook Airs; the kinds of workflows that will really challenge the Air are the ones that you don't really buy a MacBook Air to handle regularly.

SixColors praises an important tweak for those who like to work with multiple screens:

I’m also happy to report that at last, an Apple silicon-based MacBook Air can fully support driving two external displays while also driving its internal display. Support for two external displays—a feature Intel-based MacBook Airs supported—was completely lacking in the M1 and M2 generations, frustrating people who rely on docking their laptop to two monitors. In the M3 generation, the Air picked up the ability to drive two displays with its lid closed. I plugged my Apple-supplied M4 MacBook Air into two Studio Displays and ended up with a whole lot of pixels. If you’ve been holding out for this feature—and believe me, I hear from plenty of people who have been—it’s now your time to shine.

You can also read reviews by Wired and Tom's Hardware.

M4 MacBook Air reviews in video

These are the hands-on, unboxing, and reviews of the M4 MacBook Air in video:

The post M4 MacBook Air reviews: Best MacBook at an unbeatable price appeared first on BGR.

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M4 MacBook Air reviews: Best MacBook at an unbeatable price originally appeared on BGR.com on Tue, 11 Mar 2025 at 09:38:08 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.