The ultra-thin MacBook is back for another 12 rounds in the ring with a growing slate of stellar lightweight laptops. Apple took the sheet off its new M4 MacBook Air models Wednesday. Though the big news is that MacBook Air now supports the full M4 chip with its 10-core GPU, we’re more excited that you can finally get it in a lovely “sky blue” color, and not just black or gray.
It’s been more than 10 months since Apple debuted the M4 chip with the iPad Pro from 2024. Then, in November, the tech giant brought us the MacBook Pro with M4 along with the new M4 Pro and M4 Max chips. These have become my go-to Macs, even though the M4 Pro Mac mini remains an enticing proposition. Now, the MacBook Air completes the trifecta of user-end Mac products. There’s also an ultra-expensive Mac Studio, and the big news there is it comes with a M3 Ultra chip.
If the MacBook Air M4 is anything like the M3 MacBook Air, it will see MacBook Pro levels of performance in most benchmarks, though perhaps with worse graphical performance if it lacks a few GPU cores, as we saw with M3. Still, the thinnest MacBook models have proved to be solid workhorse machines, despite them sporting the same look and displays for more than two years.
It’s been an Air-filled week for Apple. The tech giant announced new iPad Air models sporting the M3 chip on Tuesday. Those devices are similarly sized to last year’s M2 models, though Apple promises they should be better at graphics processing tasks. There’s also a new version of the basic iPad with an A16 chip. Despite Apple’s talk about giving everything access to Apple Intelligence, that’s one of the few new devices in its current lineup that won’t support any of Apple’s AI.
