this is the M4 MacBook Air and right now it might just be the best laptop that you can buy not only is this the most affordable MacBook on the market but after testing it over the past couple of weeks there's almost nothing this machine can't handle even with lower specs and on top of that Apple has introduced several upgrades in here that not only bump up the Air's performance but can add to your everyday experience today I'm going to go over what exactly is is new what's improved and why the M4 air is likely the perfect laptop for most folks let's get into [Music] it hey everyone Kyle Erikson here I've used almost every Mac over the past few years and without a doubt the air has been the most impressive to me for a couple of reasons for one the M series chips all the way back to the M1 series have been super performant and keep getting better and better and I know that the M4 isn't the highest performing model on Apple's lineup but looking outside of Apple it still beats almost every other laptop on the market in one way or another I've tried various laptops over the last year that claim to match the new MacBooks in certain aspects but there's always a tradeoff somewhere being made and a lot of those machines are priced quite a bit higher than the air that really leads into what impresses me the most about this m MacBook which is what you get for the price because this really is the king of value and it's only gotten better this year the M4 MacBook Air still starts at a price of $999 or $13.99 Canadian which is kind of wild considering last year you were paying that for the M2 air that only had an 8 course CPU and GPU and 8 gigs of RAM where the B M4 has a 10 core GPU that is much faster and starts at 16 gigs of ram in fact if you look at the M3 air that I bought last year versus this new m4 model these have the exact same configuration with the GPU bumped up to 10 cores 16 gigs of RAM and a 512 gig SSD but the new M4 is $300 USD cheaper than it was last year you also get more configuration options this year where you can bump up the ram to 32 gigs where previously it topped out at 24 and you get one new color option with sky blue which is the color I decided to go with it's really hard to convey what it looks like through photos or video and you almost have to see it in person but sometimes it looks blue and sometimes it looks silver or almost pearlescent but I've ended up liking it quite a bit more than I thought I would it doesn't show dust or fingerprints nearly as much as the darker black or midnight color and apple also provides a color matched mag safe charger with the same two USBC ports with Thunderbolt 4 speeds which haven't changed and like always the overall build quality is outstanding this is one thing that I've come to appreciate a lot more having recently tried other brands laptops where there always seems to be one or two things that are a letdown design wise but everything about the M4 air feels premium from the full aluminum body to the keyboard trackpad and even the display this particular model is the 13.6 in variant with a liquid Retina Display which I know isn't as good as the mini LED xdr displays in the pros but you still get the same outstanding color accuracy covering 99% of the P3 gamut and I found this to have slightly better contrast over the M3 air with around a, 1500 to1 contrast ratio where the M3 air topped out at around 1,300 to1 150000 to1 is outstanding for an IPS panel like this and there are no black uniformity issues at all so this is a really solid all-around panel for anything where you're relying on color accuracy like photo or video editing and the M4 air has one other trick up it sleeve that the M3 air doesn't have where if you do plan on hooking this up to external monitors it supports an additional two external displays up to 6K at 60 HZ to go along with the MacBook display where the M3 air only supports two displays with the MacBook screen closed powering in additional 2 5K displays on here feel surprisingly smooth where I don't really notice any lag the M4 air does warm up a bit which is to be expected given it does not have a fan but in terms of General performance it still runs almost everything that I throw at it without any issues to be honest I never really had much trouble with the M3 air in that regard and I ran my entire workflow on that machine for 3 months but for just strictly looking at measurable results like benchmarks the M4 air performs between 17 to 20% better on the CPU and about 10% better on the GPU versus the previous gen Translating that into real world performance in CPU intensive tasks I can notice things are a little faster say if I'm compiling large code bases and things of that nature where you can shave off a couple of minutes here and there but for the most part these feel largely the same for things like web browsing or watching media the M4 air is obviously more than powerful enough even if you've got a bunch of tabs open and I generally don't notice any slowness doing design work or coding or even video editing for that matter which is probably one of the more demanding things that you can do on these machines I also just want to say that I have heard some people say that 16 gigs of RAM isn't enough on these machines even for just regular usage I'm not exactly sure where they're getting that from but I don't find that to be the case at all editing last week's iPad video on here which was just shy of 20 minutes feels virtually no different than on my M4 Pro Mac Mini with 48 gigs of RAM and they actually export in around the same time which makes sense given that they have the same media engine which is going to be the bottleneck there and not the chip performance if you're using it for things that are less demanding I don't really understand why it couldn't get by with this machine but that being said there are a few cases where things do start to bog down on the M4 air like using resource heavy effects or plugins or anything that starts to push the GPU for me that's normally related to some of my audio plugins where the M4 Pro normally kicks the fans on and because this doesn't have fans it will warm up quicker and throttle the chip performance a bit where I definitely notice a performance hit but those instances are quite rare now if I really try and lean into the GPU with things that take up a boatload of resources like 3D modeling super complex scenes are undoubtedly going to struggle but anything basic is quite smooth and honestly there really isn't a perceivable difference on the M4 Air versus the M3 air in that regard which makes sense given that they're essentially running on the same Graphics architecture rendering IM is in blender you might notice that the M4 error is a second or two faster and the same goes for gaming where you only see 3 to four more frames per second over the M3 err but it's still more than enough to play titles like Boulders Gate 3 or civilization 7 smoothly and for just north of 1,000 bucks it's punching way above its weight class for instance this Asus tablet laptop I looked at a couple of weeks back is roughly double the cost of the M4 air and has a brand new top of the line AMD AI Max chipset which on battery power performs roughly the same as the M4 a and when it comes to the battery life it doesn't even come close to matching it where that machine would get maybe five or 6 hours of screen on time with light to moderate usage I find I can get almost two full days out of the battery on the MacBook Air M4 with light use which feels very similar to the M3 air in that regard Apple advertises that you can get up to 18 hours of video streaming on both the M3 and M4 a so that does make sense and just like the M3 air if you start to ramp up that usage doing more demanding things that I've mentioned here like 3D modeling or video editing it will chew through the battery a lot faster but the same could be said for almost any other machine and it's still excellent overall similarly most other components in the M4 a aren't going to be a whole lot different than the version before it the SSD speeds are identical the wireless connectivity remains excellent with Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 where I've had absolutely no issues and there is a minor Improvement to the webcam where you have a new 12 megapixel camera with Stage manager and desk view desk view I would say is kind of gimmicky in my opinion and while the camera might look slightly better it's not earth shattering by any means it's still fine for calls and the air still has the same great audio quality both in and out of calls with media and overall this is just an outstanding machine with unreal value the amount of things that you can do on this new Macbook Air is incredible and I know for myself between video editing modeling 3D Parts coding and doing design work I could easily use this as my primary machine sure there will inevitably be some pain points if you're doing anything super resource intensive and I don't think that the error is the machine that you want to buy if you have crazy workloads or really lean into GPU heavy tasks but for 95% of people this will be an amazing machine and you really can't go wrong with it especially given the price that being said I am going to do a comparison between this and the new Macbook Pro M4 Pro probably next month because I do have a couple videos planned with the new Mac Studio first so stay tuned for that and if you guys have any other questions about the M4 air let me know in the comments down below but that's all I have for you today if you found this video useful or enjoyable feel free to hit that like button if you'd like to see more Tech related content or help me design a robo vacuum that can easily detect and avoid ghosts with AI Please Subscribe thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next upload