MacBook Air (M4, Early 2025) Review

Apple releases a new MacBook Air nearly every year, and really only changes the SoC (system on a chip) running the thing. 2025 is no different, with the new MacBook Air 15 yet again being a chic little laptop that’s good for powering you through office work with incredible battery life and a gorgeous display.

Now, it’s not exactly going to handle PC games well, but it doesn’t need to. The new MacBook Air, as always, is the kind of MacBook you carry around everywhere to simply get stuff done. And that’s all it needs to be.

Design

In a lot of ways, the MacBook Air has become what many people think of when they hear “laptop”. It’s not hard to see why, even when the new MacBook Air looks identical to its last few predecessors. This is an extremely thin and light laptop, weighing in at just 3.3 pounds – basically nothing for a 15-inch laptop.

The low weight is thanks to the incredibly thin unibody aluminum chassis, which is less than half an inch thick. An extremely thin chassis isn’t new for the MacBook Air – it’s part of why the laptop has become so ubiquitous – but it is still a nice change to use such a thin device, especially when you consider I’m usually hauling a thick gaming laptop everywhere I go. But the MacBook Air is more than just thin – it’s an incredibly clean design, with even the speakers disappearing behind the aluminum.

Unlike the MacBook Pro, which has a speaker grille on each side of the keyboard, the Macbook Air instead has its speakers hidden away in the hinge, firing towards the display. On paper, this sounds like a terrible idea, and a good way to get muted and ugly sound, but Apple found a way to make it work. And it kind of makes sense; because the MacBook Air uses a fanless configuration of the M4, it doesn’t need to reserve that space for airflow. That speaker configuration also allows the lid of the laptop to serve as a sort of natural amplifier, which makes the speakers sound a lot louder than they otherwise would.

The fanless design also allows for a much cleaner design than many other laptops. Instead of needing multiple areas of the laptop to have holes to blast air into the machine, this is a completely closed off device, and it looks incredible. On the bottom of the laptop, all that you really see is the four little rubber feet, and those are just there so that the aluminum on the bottom doesn’t get scratched.

Back on the top of the device, the new MacBook Air is still using the same wonderful keyboard that it has for the last few years. It has remarkably deep travel, considering how thin the laptop is, and the days of Mac keyboards repeating keys seem to be truly over. Plus, in the top right corner of the keyboard there’s a TouchID sensor, which is fast and accurate, and usually lets me into the laptop within a second of placing my finger on it.

The touchpad is also excellent. It’s incredibly wide, covering the space between both ‘Command’ keys, but has good enough palm rejection that I never had to deal with the cursor doing weird things, even during long writing sessions. Apple has become known for making some of the best touchpads in laptops, and well, it’s keeping the crown for now, at least.

The sides of the laptops have the ports, and that’s where the MacBook Air’s winning streak comes to an end. On the left side of the laptop, you get two USB-C ports and the MagSafe connector, then on the right side you just get a headphone jack. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice that Apple still includes a headphone jack – if only it would do that for its phones and tablets – but it would have been nice to get an SD card reader or at least a USB-C port on the right side. Apple’s reasoning for this spartan array of ports is likely that it’s a thin laptop and there just isn’t room for the extra ports, but I’ve seen the MacBook Pro, and it’s not that much thicker.

Display

While the MacBook Air doesn’t need to have the same creative bonafides as the MacBook Pro, it still has a great display. It’s bright, colorful, and does a decent job at resisting glare – at least to a point. It’s not quite on the same level as the MacBook Pro, but it’s much better than many Windows laptops in the same price range.

In my testing, I found the 15.3-inch, 1880p display hits 99% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, and 100% of sRGB, which is incredible for a jack-of-all-trades laptop. It gets bright, too, reaching a peak of 426 nits. That’s a little short of the advertised 500 nits, but it still gets bright enough to be visible in a bright environment – though it does a lot better indoors.

It’s not quite as nice as an OLED display or anything, but the MacBook Air’s display is still more than enough for most people. I definitely binged quite a few shows on the laptop in the two weeks or so I’ve spent with it, and let me tell you, the excellent color performance has been doing wonders for my rewatch of The Clone Wars.

Performance

Benchmarking a MacBook is always a fraught experience. Most of the tests we here at IGN use to test laptops simply don’t work on MacOS, so it’s hard to get a really good grasp on how it actually performs. However, because this laptop is running on a fanless version of the Apple M4, it probably wouldn’t hold up very well against the gaming laptops we usually review here anyways.

Even in the games that do support macOS, the MacBook Air seriously struggles at 1080p. In Total War: Warhammer 3, the MacBook Air struggled to hit 18 fps at Ultra settings. That is a little ambitious for this thin and light laptop, and you can get up to 34 fps if you turn the settings down to medium, but I wouldn’t even recommend doing that.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows fared even worse, getting just 10 fps at 1080p with the Ultra preset. Changing it to medium settings almost doubled that performance, but even then I got 19 fps, which isn’t exactly ideal for any game. But at the end of the day, the MacBook Air isn’t a gaming laptop, and it just doesn’t need to be. Instead, this is a light productivity machine, and it kicks ass at that.

I carried this laptop around for a while, and it’s the perfect device for bringing to the little coffee shop down the road and getting some focused work done. Due to the nature of what I do for a living, I usually have something like 50 Safari tabs open, while listening to Apple Music in the background, and the MacBook Air has no problem keeping up with that.

That’s thanks in large part to the configuration Apple sent me for review, with its 32GB of RAM. Even with some heavy multitasking, I didn’t feel the system hiccup once, and that was on battery power most of the time.

The MacBook Air was also able to keep up with some light Photoshop work, though it did struggle when I tried to run a noise filter in Lightroom – something even my company-issued MacBook Pro runs into trouble with. It’s important to consider what to expect from this kind of laptop, no matter who makes it. The fact that something this thin and light can handle all my day-to-day work without breaking a sweat is huge, and so is its ability to last all day on battery.

Battery

Apple makes some serious claims about the MacBook Air battery, saying it’ll last up to 18 hours while streaming video and 15 hours browsing the internet. Now, the battery test I usually use doesn’t exactly run on macOS, but I was able to loop some video in VLC Media Player to get a rough feeling of how long this laptop can last. In that test, the MacBook Air lasted a whopping 19 hours and 15 minutes, breaking past Apple’s 18-hour video streaming claim.

There is a caveat though: this was based on local video playback, which puts a bit less strain on the battery than streaming does, though not by much. And even though I wasn’t able to run it through a specific office-based battery test like I usually would, I can attest that I was able to run this thing for multiple days without needing to plug it in, based on several 4-5 hour work sessions.

This is the exact type of laptop that’s perfect if you travel a lot – there aren’t many flights that last longer than 15 hours, after all. Plus, while the charger included in the box is tiny, it’s nice to be able to carry around a laptop that doesn’t need to be tethered to a wall when you’re just trying to check your email.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra