Apple's MacBook Air is one of the bestselling laptops in the world and if
anything, one of the most ubiquitous. You've seen one at a university. You've
seen one at a coffee shop. And today, we get another new MacBook Air. This is the
MacBook Air M4, now upgraded with, as I
just said, M4, their latest and greatest
chip. Look at that. There's also, if you're seeing right here, this
sexy new color. What is this called? sky blue or something like that. Sky blue.
Wow, that looks pretty sharp. Hey, I just need to mention here that this is
pretty much the same color as my M3 uh
which is Silverstone and they call it sky blue and it looks pretty much the
same. Just saying. Just saying. In the box here, we've got uh typical Apple
propaganda. I miss Apple stickers. I
know that they don't do them anymore, but I think honestly that's kind of a
crime. We've got a sleeved MagS safe to USBC cable here, which is about this
long. And then a power brick. What is
this 30watt USBC power adapter that
comes by default, but if you upgrade from the base model, which is what we
have here, you can get a 35 watt dual
USBC power brick or a 70 watt, which is the max charging rate that this thing
can handle. Um, but by default, you get that 30. I like this because in like
direct light and honestly on this top down camera this the color of this thing
looks like almost OG just Mac gray
especially like there but then looking at it in person offaxis it looks it's
super blue offaxis. Yeah, it really it doesn't show up well on camera but it
genuinely is pretty blue. Now, right off the bat on the top here, this thing, as
far as I can see, is identical to last
generation. Uh, in terms of dimensions, in terms of weight, aside from the new
color, you could totally fool your friends saying, "Oh, I've got the new
MacBook Air. It's so nice." Even the M2 look the same. So, there's not so much
of that like I need to flex on my friends factor um these days with Apple,
which is kind of interesting. Now, speaking of being identical, the IO is
also uh practically identical. 3.5
millimeter headphone jack on one side, two USBC ports, and the MagSafe charging
port. Outsidewise, man, they might as well be the same laptop. But inside,
huh? Just kidding. It's also the same. We've got the same size trackpad, the
same size screen, the same specs on the screen, same resolution, same
brightness, no high refresh rate, which h man, I really thought this year was
going to be the year, but no, we still have the same 60 Hz liquid retina
display that's around 500 nits brightness and not the fancier screens
from any of the MacBook Pros. No high refresh rate to be seen, unfortunately.
Now, in terms of what is inside the insides of this laptop, that new M4 chip
is coming with two more cores, which is pretty nice. Um, they're efficiency
cores, so nothing too crazy in terms of performance buff, but you will seemingly
some amount of performance increase. There must be we'll get into the Labs
testing in a bit. And then we're also getting a bit of a RAM bump, which is
yes and no. Apple when they launched the M3 Air had an 8 gigabyte base model
option uh which they later discontinued so that the base model was actually 16
gigs and didn't change the price. This new generation they're not making that
same mistake again. The base model is 16 gigs but you can also go higher this
time around. So instead of the max being 24 gigs on the top spec model, you can
actually go all the way up to 32 which is a nice buff. It also technically has
a tiny bit bigger battery. you're talking like 1Wth hour difference. Uh,
and they don't rate the like listed battery performance any differently. And
at least based on what I know from the M4 MacBook Pro, uh, the M4 chips tend to
draw a tiny bit more power. So, I suspect that's probably just trying to
compensate for that. Now, speaking of the M4 MacBook Pro, uh, compared to
that, you're getting a lower starting storage, uh, 256 instead of 512. You're
getting two less GPU cores at base. It's only eight instead of 10. And then
you're also, like I mentioned before, getting a lower refresh rate, less
bright screen. That being said, it's a fair bit cheaper. This new laptop, 100
bucks less, $9.99 USD, which is still a
lot of money, don't get me wrong, but we're in a different era. I was talking
to Belle, our ShortCircuit producer, a little bit earlier. He's got an M1
MacBook Air. I'm like, aside from the looks and a couple other things
performance-wise, do you really desire for a new one? and he was like, "Me,
this laptop is going to last a long time." So that $1,000 US, while it is a
lot of money, is an investment that I actually think will have decent returns
in the long run if you just need a laptop to do stuff. And it's it's no
slouch. It's it's not just a spreadsheets and email machine. This
thing can cook a little bit. Other than that, I just got to show you this. Our
sponsor. Just kidding. It's not on the screen. Bam. It's actually right here.
It's freaking Dbrand, baby. And look at these skins. Wow. Look at this crazy
design. This is their X-ray line of skins, which as the name implies, they
X-ray scanned these MacBooks. And that's what the internals kind of look like.
It's so high-tech. You can even see the Apple logo. That's a talking point they
gave us. So, I had to make sure that I hit it. You're welcome, Dbrand. Now, I'm
going to try to apply this live, but uh if you are bad at this, even though
Dbrand has some great instructional videos, it's a two for one deal. So, you
get both the dark skin and the light version. And you can kind of decide
which one you
want. Look, it looks kind of like Belle's but like more cooler. See, he's
used to being slightly less cool than me. So, get your Dbrand skin for your
MacBook Air M4 or any other of the devices that they make skins for at the
link down below or at shortlinus.com.
That's a great domain. Now, the MacBook Air 13 doesn't have top firing speakers.
So, if you are really into listening to music, you should buy
speakers or a 15-inch MacBook Air. I
guess that is also technically an
option. Oh, you know what? Maybe maybe you can
kind of say that they are kind of top firing cuz they come out of the like air
vent thing and like bounce off the screen. They sound honestly like pretty
damn good for not having like speaker grills here. Now, let's try the
keyboard. I'm not expecting anything
different since one group more. It feels
identical. The touchpad is still great. It's still an Apple touchpad and um
still a lot of Windows laptops need better touchpads. Is Is the camera any
different? It looks It looks the same.
Does it sound any different? I'm just going to say some stuff. I'm just going
to say some stuff. I'm just going to have to say some stuff and then you're
going to hear what it sounds like. And I suspect it's probably going to sound the
same. And it looks pretty much the same. Uh, it looks good. On to the Labs
testing then. Eh, now in terms of gaming
performance, it's not going to blow your socks off in terms of performance, but
it seems like there's depending on the game, uh, from a a frame or two to a
couple of frames of improvement there. uh anything that's CPU dependent like
Stellaris which is like a realtime strategy kind of top-own game uh there's
a big improvement and that also really shows up in productivity testing. So, in
Blender, uh, on the CPU timeline, it was like half the time, which to me didn't
seem like it made sense, but maybe this thing doesn't over thermal throttle as
much or something. And the GPU test, you know, 2 minutes down from 2 minutes and
45 seconds. That's a huge improvement.
Uh, Inbench multi-threaded scores going from 600 to 800. Singlethreaded scores
going from 140 to 170. Photoshop,
Premiere, good performance bumps there. And in terms of the power consumption,
like I mentioned with the M4 MacBook Pro, it's a little bit higher. They're
giving these things a sprinkling in just a little little bit more juice in there.
And then for battery, interestingly, Apple doesn't say that the M4 Air is
better on battery. They list both the M3 Air and the M4 Air as having 18 hours of
battery life. And while the laptops we tested didn't last nearly that long, in
the more realworld Plex video playback tests we do, both the M3 and the M4 Air
performed about the same. So those extra CPU cores shouldn't hurt battery life
very much. More battery life, more performance. Damn, girl. And then in
terms of the display, it does hit the rated 500 nits brightness. We actually
tested it around 520. So I mean, I don't know what else there is to say. It's
faster than the last generation. It's cheaper than the last generation. It has
more RAM than the last generation. It's got more CPU cores than the last
generation. It has more colorways than the last generation. All you get is more
uh except for the price, which is lower. Like I said, I don't know that if I had
an M3 Air, I would be running to the Apple store to upgrade. I don't know if
I would be running to the Apple store if I had an M2 Air. I don't know if I'd run
to the Apple store if I had an M1 Air. But if you had an Intel MacBook Air or a
Windows laptop or maybe your MacBook died, this is still excellent. It is a
really, really freaking great laptop and at an even better price than it was
before. It's not cheap, but if you need
something for work, you need something that do does stuff, you should probably
buy this. Most people I know buy MacBook Pros and they're stupid. They should
just buy MacBook Air. It's plenty enough for most people.