Jason Snell’s M4 MacBook Air Review

Jason Snell, last month:

The new M4 MacBook Air is the Mac most people should buy. [...]

That’s why perhaps the most important change in the M4 MacBook Air is its base configuration, which starts at $999. When Apple introduced a winning new flat-with-rounded-corners Air design in 2022, it had to keep selling older models in order to get down under a thousand dollars. Three years later, Apple is finally able to sell a brand-new Air — with a generous 16GB of unified memory — at that important price.

So: No more quibbles about stepping back a generation or two to an older model with a lower price. Apple has done away with that strategy for the MacBook Air: The latest and greatest model is the one most people shopping for a Mac should buy, especially if they’re coming from an Intel model.

I’d put off linking to Snell’s review for a few weeks while thinking about writing my own, but I’ve got nothing to add. The M4 MacBook Air is utterly unsurprising, but only in the best possible way. It’s the MacBook Air everyone wanted Apple to make. The $999 base model is now exceedingly recommendable. It even brings back the most notable feature that was lost in the transition from Intel to Apple Silicon — the ability to drive two external displays and its own internal display. Just aces all around.

★ Friday, 4 April 2025