Apple MacBook Air 15 (M4, 2025) Laptop Review

The Apple MacBook Air 15 M4 is available in four colors: Sky Blue (which replaces Space Gray), Silver, Starlight, and Midnight. See the bottom of the laptop.

The Apple MacBook Air 15 2025's build quality is exceptional and among the best on the market. Its all-aluminum chassis feels solid. The display, lid, and keyboard deck all feel rigid, exhibiting little to no flex when manipulating or using them. The finish is scratch-resistant, and the Silver model isn't prone to accumulating oil or fingerprints with regular use; fingerprints are more visible on the Midnight colorway. Finally, the feet feel solid and stick well to the bottom of the laptop.

The hinge feels exceptional. It feels smooth when adjusting the display and has enough resistance to keep it in place, even when typing aggressively. You can easily open the display with one finger and adjust the angle with one hand.

The Apple MacBook Air 15 M4's serviceability is bad. You need to remove four screws to access the internals, then use a prying tool and a fair amount of force to unclip the rear panel from the chassis. Once inside, you can only replace the battery.

• 35W dual USB-C power adapter
• USB-C to MagSafe charging cable (color-matched)
• Documentation

Note: You can choose between a 35W dual USB-C or a 70W single USB-C charger when purchasing through Apple. Unfortunately, Apple no longer includes stickers in the box.

The display is extremely sharp and clear. Its 16:10 aspect ratio provides some additional vertical real estate over a traditional 16:9 display, minimizing the need to scroll while web browsing or working with spreadsheets. There isn't a huge difference in terms of screen real estate between the 15.3-inch display and the 13.6-inch display on the Apple MacBook Air 13 (M4, 2025) for general productivity tasks. That said, split-screen multi-tasking is much more comfortable on the larger 15.3-inch display. You can hide the notch but know this costs you screen space, resulting in a thicker bezel at the top.

The Apple MacBook Air 15 M4 only has a 60Hz display option. It has a slow response time, with noticeable ghosting behind fast-moving objects, so it isn't ideal for viewing fast-moving content. It also lacks any VRR implementation, so you can expect screen tearing while gaming.

The display has a decent contrast that aligns with most IPS panels, though it's low compared to OLED or VA display technologies. This level of contrast makes blacks look gray in dark settings.

The display is bright enough for use in most settings. However, you may have trouble seeing some content in direct sunlight, especially dark-colored content. The display gets remarkably dim, making it ideal for preventing eyestrain in dark environments.

The display's reflection handling is fantastic. While you can still see reflections when viewing bright content, they aren't noticeable unless you're outside in direct sunlight. Direct, mirror-like reflections are slightly more visible than on the Apple MacBook Air 15 (2024); the display still does an excellent job of reducing their intensity.

The display's horizontal viewing angle is okay. The image dims and washes out fairly quickly when moving to the side. You'll want to position yourself more or less directly in front of the display when performing color-critical work as a result.

The vertical viewing angle is okay. Again, the image looks dimmer and more washed out from above or below. You need to look at the screen more or less straight on to see an accurate image.

The Apple MacBook Air 15 M4's out-of-the-box color accuracy is exceptional and performs almost identically to the Apple MacBook Air 15 (2024). The color and white balance inaccuracies are essentially imperceptible, while the color temperature still leans slightly cool, giving the display a very minor blueish tint. While very dark or bright scenes are slightly too dark, the gamma follows the curve almost perfectly.

The Apple MacBook Air 15 M4 display's color gamut is fantastic. It offers complete coverage of the sRGB and DCI P3 color spaces, making it appropriate for color-critical work in online and HDR content production. While it has excellent Adobe RGB coverage, it can't reproduce the saturated greens that define the color space. Most people editing professional photography will be fine, but you may need an external display, depending on your use.

The backlight technically flickers, but the flickering isn't noticeable to most people as the frequency is very high.

The keyboard on the Apple MacBook Air 15 M4 is great. There are no changes to the keyboard from the last two Airs. It feels spacious, even for people with larger hands; compared to the 13-inch model, there's more space on the keyboard deck, so you don't need to worry about the edge of the laptop digging into your palm. The layout is standard for MacBooks and shouldn't require much adjustment if you've used one before. The ABS keycaps feel smooth, but they get smudged, pick up oil easily, and tend to develop a shine with normal use. The keys are stable and require little force to actuate, but the very short travel combined with a stiff keyboard deck can feel harsh; as a result, some people may find this keyboard fatiguing to use for long periods. Typing noise is minimal, making it appropriate for use in quiet environments like libraries. You can adjust backlighting manually in the settings or let the system change it automatically based on the amount of ambient lighting.

The Apple MacBook Air M4's touchpad is outstanding. Apple hasn't made any changes to the size compared to last generation's Apple MacBook Air 15 (2024), and it's still around 33% larger than the Apple MacBook Air 13 (M4, 2025). It's large, responsive to all movements and gestures, and easy to use. The haptic engine provides clear and tactile feedback when simulating physical clicks, and you can click anywhere on the touchpad. The feedback is quiet, so it won't be annoying to use in noise-sensitive settings, like a library.

The Apple MacBook Air 15 M4's speakers get quite loud with minimal compression artifacts at higher volume levels. They sound clear and natural, with a good amount of bass, which is impressive considering how thin the laptop is. While not as full-sounding as the speakers on the Apple MacBook Pro 14 (2024), they're still among the best speakers available and better than most Windows ultraportable laptops.

The Apple MacBook Air 15 M4 has an excellent webcam. Colors look true to life, and the image looks detailed and well-exposed. The webcam also features the new Center Stage function; see Apple's website for more details. The microphone is equally impressive, as voices sound full, loud, and clear, with no audible background noise.

The Apple MacBook Air 15 M4's USB-C ports offer USB4/Thunderbolt 4 support. This provides data transfer speeds up to 40Gbps, DisplayPort, and charging. The biggest upgrade from its predecessor, the Apple MacBook Air 15 (2024), comes in Thunderbolt 4's external display support—you can now use the built-in display simultaneously with two external displays at a maximum resolution of 6k @ 60Hz.

We can't confirm which wireless adapter the Apple MacBook Air 15 M4 uses. Wi-Fi 6E gives access to the 6GHz band, providing faster speeds, lower latency, and less signal interference than previous Wi-Fi standards. However, you need a router that supports Wi-Fi 6E to benefit from these features. See our recommendations for the best routers if you want to upgrade your home's Wi-Fi.

The Apple MacBook Air 15 2025 is only available with the base M4 SoC with a 10-core CPU. Compared to the previous generation base M3 SoC on the Apple MacBook Air 15 (2024), the M4 features two additional efficiency cores and greater memory bandwidth at 120GB/s relative to the M3's 100GB/s. The NPU (Neural Processing Unit) has the same 16-core count on the M3 and M4 SoCs, and both offer support for hardware ray tracing and the same encoders and decoders.

The base M4 SoC is ideal for general productivity tasks like spreadsheets, video playback, and word processing. It also has enough performance to handle more demanding tasks like programming or rendering but with some caveats. The laptop uses a fanless design, which limits the thermal headroom for intensive workloads before thermal throttling. You can do video editing, thanks to the dedicated video decode/encode engines, but again, video rendering times will be noticeably longer than on a laptop with active cooling, like the M4 Apple MacBook Pro 16 (2024).

See Apple's press brief for specific information about the M4 SoC's available on the MacBook Air.

The M4 on the Apple MacBook Air 15 2025 is only available with a 10-core GPU SoC. The GPU is powerful enough to handle some demanding tasks like 3D rendering. Just know that as a result of the laptop's fanless design, there's some thermal throttling that limits performance. You can play some demanding games at 1080p with low settings, but performance will vary, depending on the game's optimization and whether it runs natively on Apple silicon or through Rosetta 2

You can configure this laptop with 16GB, 24GB, or 32GB of RAM, and the RAM isn't user-replaceable.

You can configure the Apple MacBook Air 15 M4 with 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, or 2TB of storage; the storage isn't user replaceable.

The Apple MacBook Air 15 M4 delivers exceptional scores in the Geekbench 5 benchmarks. Single thread performance is around 14% faster than its M3 predecessor, while the M4's two extra efficiency cores culminate in a larger uplift for multi-threaded workloads, delivering 24% more performance. The Air is really designed for general productivity tasks like video playback, web browsing, or text processing, but the M4's raw performance means that intensive workloads are also feasible. As for demanding tasks like video editing, remember that the video encoders and decoders do most of the heavy lifting, so these synthetic benchmark scores aren't fully representative of the performance. The GPU is 21% faster than its M3 predecessor, bringing it in line with older entry-level discrete GPUs like the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 released in 2019.

The Apple MacBook Air 15's base M4 achieves outstanding single and multi-thread performance in Cinebench R23. It delivers a 15% uplift in single core performance, and an impressive 30% uplift over the base M3. Some of this uplift can be attributed to the two additional CPU cores found on the base M4's 10-core CPU. While this level of performance is appropriate for intensive, multi-threaded tasks, the Air's fanless design isn't ideal if you need a machine that's constantly rendering as it thermal throttles. There are laptops with better cooling solutions and significantly faster processors on the market, like the Dell Alienware m18 R2 (2024) with its Intel Core i9-14900HX and the Apple MacBook Pro 16 (2024) with its M4 Max SoC.

The base M4 SoC's GPU renders images in Blender relatively quickly, and using the GPU provides a notable uplift over the previous generation's base M3 SoC. The real limitation for 3D rendering comes with the thermal solution; as the Air uses a fanless design, it thermal throttles and isn't the best choice if your workflow requires sustained performance. If you want significantly faster rendering times, consider an Apple MacBook Pro (14- or 16-inch) with an M4 Pro or Max SoC, or a Windows laptop with a powerful dedicated GPU like the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070.

The M4 SoC scores decently in Basemark and provides similar performance to the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 mobile discrete GPU, originally launched in 2019. While it has decent graphical horsepower that's on par with recent iGPUs like the Intel Arc Graphics 140V, real-world performance is inconsistent. The gaming performance depends heavily on each game's optimization and whether they run natively on Apple silicon or have to run through Rosetta 2 emulation. This benchmark in particular sees very little uplift over its direct M3 predecessor.

There are frequent frame drops and large stutters in Borderlands 3 that make the game unplayable on the Apple MacBook Air 15 M4, even with the lowest settings.

Civilization VI is very playable on the Apple Macbook Air 15 M4. Compared to the previous generation's M3, the base M4 SoC delivers significantly faster turn times and generally smoother gameplay, providing a comparable experience to other laptops with modern CPUs from Intel and AMD. If you prefer a more fluid gameplay experience, you can turn down settings to achieve higher frame rates.

Valve doesn't support CS2 on macOS.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider doesn't run well on the Apple MacBook Air 15 M4 at 1080p. Despite averaging over 30 fps on high settings, the gameplay is choppy with frequent frame drops. You can achieve higher average framerates by turning down some settings, but the gameplay still won't be smooth.

The laptop is silent while in use, thanks to its fanless design. However, the keyboard gets hot under load and can be uncomfortable to use. While the bottom of the laptop also gets warm, reaching 42.4 °C (108.3 °F), it's much better than the keyboard. You may want to keep the laptop on a table rather than your lap if you plan to use it for extended periods while under load.

This laptop comes with macOS Sequoia. You can learn more about macOS Sequoia on Apple's website.

There aren't any pre-installed applications other than those that typically come with macOS; you can see the list of built-in apps on the Air's product specifications on Apple's website.

The Apple MacBook Air 15 M4 has a fingerprint sensor in the power button at the top right of the keyboard. You can use it to log in and authorize purchases from the App store and payments with Apple Pay.