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Apple has just dropped the M4 MacBook Air, and today we're unboxing it, testing its performance, and seeing how it stacks up against some serious competition. Specifically, we'll compare it to the M4 Mac Mini, M1 MacBook Air, and M3 Pro MacBook Pro to see if this new ultra-portable powerhouse is worth the upgrade.
If you're new here, welcome to the channel. My name is Jeff Fagan. I'm a filmmaker and content creator based in South Florida, and on this channel, I talk a lot about tech related to filmmaking, because that is not just my passion; it has been my career for over 15 years now. And when I talk about gear like the M4 MacBook Air, I am going to relate it a lot when it comes to video editing. If you're an everyday casual user or a heavier user than I, I'm going to give you my experience using these budget-level machines and let you know what I think about them. And maybe from my experience and from these videos, it will help you decide if this is the right machine for you. So if you do find value in today's video, please hit that like, subscribe, and notification bell to keep up to date with the latest videos from the channel.
Now, I originally bought the M1 MacBook Air because I needed a modern, compact travel laptop to bring on video gigs. I used it to transfer footage from my cameras to external drives and even edit on the go. For a machine that's small, it actually held up really well. But after 3 years, I moved away from it for two key reasons: one was I needed Thunderbolt for faster speeds for transfers from my camera media, and the other one was I was consistently using swap memory because the M1 MacBook Air only had 8 GB of RAM, which is not really an issue on the M4 MacBook Air. That's when I switched to the M3 Pro 14-inch MacBook Pro—a bit bigger, but it was the smallest pro-level laptop I could buy at the time. Lately, though, I've been missing the smaller and lighter form factor of the MacBook Air. And after testing the M4 Mac Mini these past few months and seeing how well it handled a lot of the issues I had with the M1, I started wondering, could the M4 MacBook Air replace my MacBook Pro as my main travel machine? So let's find out.
Now, remember, this is the base model MacBook Air, so this is the $999 base model with the 10-core CPU, 8-core [Applause] GPU. Boom. Got the nice sleek box, the normal packaging Apple puts their laptops in. Looks really, really small. I mean, just the box itself is just incredibly small. Can't wait to open this thing. All right, so now remember, this is the straight-up base model, so this is the 16 gigabyte, 10 CPU, 8 GPU, 256 gig version. Let's do this. Let's do that. All right, so we got the laptop right here, and right away this completely reminds me of why I went—I'm going back to the Air. This thing is so incredibly small. Holy smokes. So we got that. Then we've got the braided MagSafe cable right here—not too bad. We've got paperwork, and then we've got the charger. Now, this is the basic charger that comes with it. We'll look at it in a second, um, but to be honest, probably not going to use this; probably going to replace it with one of my Anker chargers. I'll show you in a bit. That's it; that's what comes in the box. So let's take a look at the laptop here. Let's move everything out of the way. Wow. So I see what everyone means. This is the new sky blue color, and although it's blue, you could definitely tell it's blue against this somewhat white-marish counter right here, but it definitely looks more silver than blue off the bat when you just first see it. Um, so do be aware of that. Got the bottom here. Now, this is my first MacBook Air of this new body style. My last MacBook Air was the M1 MacBook Air, and uh, I love that computer. It's part of the reason why I wanted to jump back into the Airs because I missed how small these computers were. So got the computer right here. Open this puppy up. Got the little felt. Oh, and it's booting up. Oh, let's get this thing started. Uh, while this is booting up, let's look at some—or the other two accessories that come in here. So we've got the braided MagSafe cable, which is the same color as the sky blue, and just as sky blue is kind of muted, you almost can't tell the—bless on this uh cord. I mean, in the light you could see it's got a shade of blue, but it's definitely a small shade of blue. I almost wonder if they're going to end up getting rid of silver at some point, cuz this blue is so close to silver, but nice. And then here is the actual 30-watt charger. The—this is the basic one that comes with the base model. I'm trying to see where I can open it, so I'm opening it right here. As you see, it's not a huge charger, but the problem is it's big for a 30-watt charger. Compare it to this kind of charger from Anker. This is a charger that has uh 30 watts in the USB-C, and then it has 18 watts in the USB-A, and this offers more and is smaller than this. So this—this is going to be what I use. Anker also makes an even smaller one than this, believe it or not, that's just 30 watt, um, but I think this is kind of the perfect balance because it's nice to be able to have a USB-A to charge some of my older legacy devices. Don't ever think I'm going to be using this, but nice that, you know, Apple at least still includes these. Question is, like the phones, I wonder how much longer they're even going to include these chargers in the base model options. I mean, I guess they're not that expensive, but any who, going to be using this one. I'll put a link in the description later.
Okay, so first impressions: this thing is incredibly thin. It still has that nice build that we got in the M2 MacBook Air, and it's got the new color that I have right here, the sky blue. The display is as gorgeous as ever. It's got the Liquid Retina display. The bezels are thin, and it has the new 12-megapixel Center Stage camera that sits right nicely in that top notch. Port-wise, we now get two Thunderbolt 4 ports. We do have the MagSafe charging port, like we got on the M2 MacBook Air, and we have a headphone jack, but that's it. It's very basic on the M4 MacBook Air, and that's not a bad thing.
Now, under the hood, that's where things get really interesting. The M4 chip packs more CPU and GPU cores than the M1 MacBook Air, and it now comes with 16 GB of RAM standard. Apple claims it's significantly faster, but how well does that hold up in real-world creative workflows? Time for some benchmarks. I'll be running Geekbench on these tests just to see how the M4 MacBook Air compares to the M4 Mac Mini and my M3 Pro MacBook Pro. As you can see from these tests, the M4 Mac Mini is actually the king here when it comes to single-core performance, and I'm going to assume it has to do with cooling because the M4 MacBook Air does not have any kind of fan. It also doesn't make any fan noise, which is really great depending on what situation you're in, but the single-core and multi-core performance is going to be better on the M4 Mac Mini over the MacBook Air, but the MacBook Air is very close in performance to the M3 Pro MacBook Pro, which is pretty insane for the price.
When it comes to testing DaVinci Resolve, I put some 6K footage from my Blackmagic 6K full-frame in RAW, and I also put some 6K footage from my RED Komodo in RAW, and it handled it really well. But I mean, this was to be expected because the M4 Mac Mini handled it really well, too. Now, you got to remember the kinds of editing I am specifically doing is really more you—YouTube videos and podcasting. When it comes to super high-end videos, for that I have my M3 Pro MacBook Pro. Most of the time, I am not the editor on those higher-end projects; I hire an editor or I work with an editor, so they have a much more heavily specced computer than I do. But that's part of the cool part of where I don't need the super heavy-spec computers to be able to edit my footage, and I could put my budget towards my cameras instead of my computer. Where editors, it makes more sense if you're going to really just only edit, put all of your budget towards the right computer for you.
Battery life is fantastic. Apple claims 18 hours, and I can get a full workday with the M4 MacBook Air, but it is really closer to 10 to 12 hours, which is still really good.
So should you buy the M4 MacBook Air? If you're coming from an M1 or an Intel Mac, yeah, it is a huge upgrade. If you have an M2 or an M3 MacBook Air, you may not notice the difference quite as much. For me, after missing the lightweight feel of the Air, I wanted to see if I could go back and use it as my main travel machine, and honestly, I think it may just work. Pairing it with the M4 Mac Mini, and that computer being only $600 for the base model, it's a really powerful synergy between both machines, where I can use the base model MacBook Air and the base model Mac Mini and have a permanent home-based machine where I don't have to plug in my MacBook Air every time when I want to use my multiple monitors—my home display. I can leave this thing as my travel computer, and I find that the ultimate budget setup for pretty much the same price as a base model M4 MacBook Pro—now regular M4, not an M4 Pro MacBook Pro. For the same price as a regular M4 MacBook Pro, you can get a base model MacBook Air M4 and a base model M4 Mac Mini. It really depends on what your use cases are.
So that's going to be it for today's video. Are you going to pick up an M4 MacBook Air? Let me know in the comments below. I plan on doing a ton more content on the M4 MacBook Air. I also plan on doing an SSD review because, as you can imagine, with the base model M4 MacBook Air, it only has a 256-gig drive, and for me, even bumping it up to 512 isn't enough, so I'm going to be using external drives with this machine when it comes to video editing. So I'll have some video content up here soon, so make sure to stay tuned for that. If you got knowledge and value out of today's video, please make sure to hit that like, subscribe, and notification bell to keep up to date with the latest videos and make sure to see the latest performance reviews and my actual review once I've had the M4 MacBook Air in my hands for more than a few days. I will let you know what I think about it long term and how it really stacks up for video editing. So again, my name is Jeff Fagan. Thank you for joining me, as always, and I will see you in the next video. [Music]