The M4 MacBook Air was as inevitable as the sunrise. Now, a new report claims it’s close to release. It may not be the dawn of any real MacBook Air revitalization. We suspect it could be nearly as powerful as the M4 MacBook Pro, but at the very least, we can all but guarantee that it will finally include 16 GB of RAM.
Hot off the heels of its iPhone 16e announcement, Apple is gearing up to unleash another, non-” Pro” product in the form of its MacBook Air M4 13 and 15, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in his latest Power On newsletter. According to Gurman’s anonymous sources, the new Airs could arrive early in March. The Cupertino, California tech giant has already started prepping its marketing teams, all while the company is paring back current M3 MacBook Air stock in Apple stores.
This all checks out, as Apple first unveiled its M3 MacBook Air 13-inch and 15-inch models in March 2024. In our tests, we found the devices were practically on par with the 14-inch MacBook Pro M3 in terms of performance. Last week, leaked Geekbench scores for a “Mac16,12” model showed up with Metal graphics benchmark scores close to, but not exactly on par with what we saw in our tests. MacRumors cited Mac16,12 as one of the supposed MacBook Air models found referenced in macOS 15.2.
This supposed MacBook Air model has a 10-core M4 model with a 4.41 GHz base frequency running alongside 24 GB of RAM. The MacBook Pro M4 scored 57,449 running macOS 15.3 compared to 54,806 on the unverified Mac model on macOS 15.2. It scores much closer to the iPad Pro M4 with its less-capable graphics processing. M4 first debuted with the iPad Pro, and when it came to the MacBook Pro, there was a small but noticeable uptick in performance with the more powerful GPU. The MacBook Pro models have more space for a better cooling solution to the Airs. Still, the next MacBook Air M4 could be closer in specs to the iPad version, but we’ll need to wait and see more on that front.
We would be shocked if Apple had any real surprises besides the new chip in store for the MacBook Air. Apple has kept the same design language consistent from the M2 MacBook Air till now, essentially offering the same square, fanless frame as the Pro versions, all still including that damn notch hovering like a stalactite at the top of the display. Perhaps the next MacBook Air may finally allow users to use up to two external displays simultaneously with the lid open rather than closed like on the M3 models. The M4 MacBook Pro with its Thunderbolt 5 connections has that multi-screen capacity, so it would only make sense to bring that to the cheaper, thinner MacBooks.
At the very least, we can expect more memory on the new devices. The M3 MacBook Air sports 8 GB of RAM at its cheapest price, but things changed with the M4 MacBook Pro, which included 16 GB of RAM at base for no increase in price year-over-year. That memory uptick helps these computers handle more AI processing tasks, something that’s important to Apple with the advent of Apple Intelligence. Like the iPhone 16e, these devices are going to push AI hard. It will be up to the folks at the end of 1 Infinite Loop to give us a reason we would want to use it at all. As much as Apple is pushing AI with the latest updates to devices like the Vision Pro, we’re still waiting for the one feature that actually changes how we use the company’s devices.
