Looks like Apple’s gearing up to drop a new MacBook Air with the M4 chip, and it could happen as soon as next week. Bloomberg’s reporting that Apple’s got a Mac-related announcement in the works, which pretty much lines up with last year’s M3 MacBook Air launch in early March. So yeah, no surprises there.
The M4 chip is obviously the big deal here. Apple’s already rolled it out in the MacBook Pro, and now it’s coming to the Air. From what we’ve seen, the M4 packs 10 CPU cores—a mix of 4 high-performance ones and 6 efficiency cores—plus a 10-core GPU, which should mean a decent graphics boost. Apple’s talking about 1.8x the performance of the M1, and something like 3.4x the speed in heavier tasks, like rendering stuff in Blender.
Now, in theory, this puts the MacBook Air’s M4 chip close to the MacBook Pro’s, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The Air doesn’t have a fan, which means thermal throttling is still gonna be a thing. Benchmarks might look great, but real-world performance under sustained loads? That’s another story. If the M3 Air was anything to go by, expect it to run hot and throttle down when pushed too hard.
As for the design, don’t expect much to change. It’ll still come in 13-inch and 15-inch sizes, still look like the M3 version, and maybe—just maybe—Apple throws in a new color or something to shake things up. Pricing? No word yet, but if they don’t bump it up, the base 13-inch model should still start around $1,099.
So yeah, not exactly a revolutionary update, but if you were already looking at getting a MacBook Air, might as well wait a few days and see what happens.