The M4 also gives the MacBook Air its AI boost with Apple Intelligence. The 38 TOPS of local AI processing through the faster 16-core Neural Engine makes the M4 MacBook Air closer to the 48 TOPS on Intel’s Lunar Lake chips and 45 TOPS of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips.
This is difficult to judge, because Apple Intelligence is very much still unfinished, but there are some new third-party apps that Apple is showcasing that use Apple Intelligence right out of the box in third-party applications, such as the note-taking app, Bear. You can now do things like automatically format text into tables or summarize a report. It also comes with Image Playground, the updated version of Siri with ChatGPT integration, and lots more. On the other hand, you’ve never needed fast local AI processing to get Apple Intelligence, as AI tasks on older devices just get run on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute system.
The raw performance bump you’ll see on the M4 MacBook Air over last year’s M3 is 22 percent faster GPU, 31 percent multi-core, and 18 percent single-core, as measured in Cinebench R24. That’s a really solid step up for one generation, particularly in single-core performance, where Apple silicon continues to dominate the competition. In terms of the graphics, that’s also over double the performance from the M2. Whether you’re photo-editing or doing 3D modeling, that’s enough to feel the difference if you’re coming from an M1 or M2 MacBook Air.
As with all MacBook Airs, it’s a completely fanless machine. That feels incredible at certain points, especially when you’re in heaving applications like a game. I whipped out Baldur’s Gate 3, and while it’s far from ideal performance, the utterly silent system means you won’t even need headphones to play. But at 1200p, medium settings, and upscaling, it wasn’t too hard to find a balance of performance and image quality that felt enjoyable. Achieving that performance without fans is something that can’t be done on any other laptop right now.
The downside of being fanless, of course, is you’re not getting quite as much out of the M4 as you would on a system with active cooling, namely the 14-inch MacBook Pro. The Air’s system has to throttle frequencies down to prevent a meltdown, and even still, I recorded CPU temperatures as high as 102 degrees Celsius. Fortunately, the surface temperatures never got unbearable in my time with it, even while running under full load.
Photograph: Luke Larsen
