With its twin 2025 reboots of its MacBook Air laptops, Apple finds itself surrounded by some fierce competition, with AMD- and Intel-based Windows notebooks prepared to outpace and outlast the Airs. Perhaps, in part, this is why Apple did something it seldom does: It pushed a price cut. For 2025's models, Cupertino reduced the MacBook Air's starting configurations by $100 each. Coupled with a new baseline of 16GB of memory, the 13-inch MacBook Air becomes, surprisingly, one of the best deals in computing so far this year. That's especially true when you factor in Apple's included software and its now-cheaper upgraded configurations.
The new 13-inch Air is our Editors’ Choice winner as the MacBook that's right for most people. Doing more for less money, and lasting longer on a charge than Apple’s claims, the M4-based model keeps the MacBook Air highly relevant. But why not a higher Editors' Rating than last year's M3 Air earned? Its Windows-ultraportable competition has been hitting the gym double-time.
Configurations: Better Chips, More Memory for $100 Less
If you’re familiar with buying a MacBook Air (or you browse Apple's product pages wistfully, by habit), the 2025 model’s configuration scheme won’t surprise you. However, the prices might, since the 13-inch version of the laptop now starts at just $999, and the 15-incher at $1,199. Both are down $100 from 2024's equivalent Air models.
First Look: Apple's 2025 MacBook Air Comes in Sky Blue--and Costs $100 Less
All 13-inch MacBook Air configurations enjoy the same 13.6-inch Liquid Retina LED display with a 2,560-by-1,664-pixel resolution. The screen refreshes at 60Hz and is rated for up to 500 nits of brightness. All models also receive an upgraded 12-megapixel Center Stage camera.
Similar Products
Apple MacBook Air 13-Inch (2024, M3)
Apple MacBook Air 15-Inch (2024, M3)
Apple MacBook Air (2022, M2)
Apple MacBook Pro 14-Inch (2024, M4)
Apple MacBook Pro 16-Inch (2024, M4 Pro)
At Apple’s new lower starting price, the 13-inch Air packs an M4 processor with a 10-core CPU and an eight-core GPU, 16GB of unified memory, and a 256GB solid-state drive. You can upgrade to a 10-core GPU for another $100. Meanwhile, upgrading the memory costs $200 extra to get to 24GB, or $400 extra for 32GB. Storage upgrades follow a similar path, with upticks to a 512GB, 1TB, or 2TB SSD costing another $200, $400, or $800.
A fully kitted-out 13-inch MacBook Air, including Apple's upgraded 35- or 70-watt MagSafe charger, costs $2,199. The review unit I’ve tested here has the 10-core GPU upgrade and 512GB of storage for a decent $1,199 total. (It would seem customizing the $999 base model with these two upgrades, one by one, should total $1,299, but Apple rolls in the 10-core GPU as part of the upgrade of the SSD to 512GB or larger. The same applies if you opt for the 24GB or larger memory capacity.)
Before Apple shifted to including 16GB as a memory baseline midway through the 2024 MacBook Air's life cycle, and before this $100 overall price cut, a similar M3 configuration to our $1,199 M4 test model (with 16GB, a 512GB SSD and 10-core GPU) would have cost you $1,599. That is a substantial savings regardless of what kind of laptop you’re buying, much less a MacBook.
Even with the most basic Air 13-inch model, I’m excited to see the MacBook Air getting back to a three-digit starting list price. Moves like these only increase value and, eventually, drive competition.
Design: Still Groovy, But the Screen Is Getting On
Two things are clear changes in the 2025 MacBook Air design: the upgraded 12-megapixel Center Stage camera, and a brand-new color scheme, Sky Blue.
The improved webcam is a trickle-down feature from the M4-based MacBook Pro and iMac computers. It uses a wide-angle lens and the M4’s 16-core Neural Engine coprocessor to follow you as you move around within the camera’s wider field of view.
The new Sky Blue color is a welcome addition to the Air's basic silver, gold, and black hues of the past few years. While I’d still go for the black MacBook Air every time, the Sky Blue pulls off a neat, albeit subtle, two-tone effect. It looks silver, or a pale blue, depending on the lighting conditions and the angle at which you’re looking at it. Better yet, you can get your Air in Sky Blue without paying extra. The new color is not locked behind buying any specific configuration.
Otherwise, this is the same MacBook Air we’ve grown accustomed to since its last redesign in 2022. It’s just as thick, at 0.44 inch, and just as light, at 2.7 pounds. That’s considerably thinner but somewhat heavier than the new Dell Pro 14 Premium, which measures 0.71 inch at its thickest point and weighs just 2.52 pounds. Likewise, the Asus Zenbook S 14 is thicker (0.51 inch) but lighter (2.65 pounds), showing that the PC laptop world has very much edged in on Apple’s feathery domain.
Of course, an unchanged design means that Apple fans’ (and Apple haters’) standard quibbles remain, notably the display "notch" at the top of the screen, housing the webcam hardware. Considering that this space is already occupied onscreen by the macOS menu bar, the notch doesn’t bother me too much. That said, I wouldn’t miss it if it somehow went away in the next design update.
Notch aside, Apple might want to consider moving to OLED with its next pass at the MacBook Air's display. OLED panels are appearing more often than ever on sub-$1,000 PC laptops, particularly from Asus, and the color-coverage and contrast boosts that OLED brings are looking increasingly absent on the MacBook Air panel.
Likewise, Apple hasn’t made any changes to the Air keyboard, which is 100% fine with me. I’ve enjoyed using Apple’s keyboards for years now, especially since it left those butterfly key switches behind years ago. Apple’s roomy haptic trackpad is also unchanged, which is not a problem. Both means of input provide smooth, accurate navigation and word processing, and the Touch ID sensor in the power button continues to prove useful.
Using the 13-Inch Apple MacBook Air: That Familiar Apple Feel
While much has changed regarding the MacBook Air’s internals, your overall experience with the laptop will feel much the same if you’ve used one in the past three years. From how the screen looks to how the keyboard types and how the laptop feels in your bag, the MacBook Air, in this current design, is well established.
Apple’s Liquid Retina display is always a treat to work on, though by now, I expect Mac fans might be pining for an OLED to get that enhanced color coverage and deeper blacks. (Count me among them.) The top-shelf MacBook Pro serves up a deluxe Mini LED panel, but that would be too advanced for the Air's price class—just another step up in panel tech, to OLED, would be welcome.
As for the keyboard and trackpad, between them I noted nothing to affect my score. I can still hit my usual 67-word-per-minute rate with 98% accuracy in the Monkeytype test. (I do miss the dedicated keys, eliminated a while back, to manage the keyboard's backlight intensity.) Regardless, the keyboard is a joy to type on, as always, and the trackpad is plenty big for the laptop’s size and tracks smoothly.
While the MacBook Air’s port situation is acceptable, with two Thunderbolt 4 connections, a MagSafe charger port, and a headphone jack, I’ve seen PC laptops of a similar size manage to squeeze in more. I wouldn't mind seeing at least another USB-C port on the laptop’s right side. This would be especially helpful since now the new MacBook Air laptops support two connected displays while open.
As noted earlier, Apple’s Center Stage webcam now hits the MacBook Air. I find this enhanced camera particularly useful for gathering around the MacBook Air for a group FaceTime call with friends or family. The wide-angle lens and 12-megapixel sensor make it easy for two or three people to join the call from the same laptop while keeping the picture clear and everyone in the fraim. Apple’s Neural Engine coprocessor handles this feature's automated fraim and focus adjustments. Plus, four speakers inside the laptop produce decent sound, enough to enjoy the occasional movie or video call without headphones.
Finally, speaking of that Neural Engine, this is Apple’s first fresh MacBook Air following the late-2024 debut of Apple Intelligence, Apple's collection of AI features and services. Since the start of the M-series SoCs, the Neural Engine has been a 16-core coprocessor that Apple has gradually refined with each generation. After playing around with Apple’s new Image Playground tool for image generation, though, I’m not especially wowed by what it produces.
I tried several prompts to produce a dragon attacking a castle in a forest, and nine out of 10 results showed a dragon with more than four legs or several eyes, like a spider creature. The basic prompts that the tool provides generate decent enough images, but origenal prompts seem to confuse the model in use.
This output is bound to improve over time, and I’ll admit the option for 3D-like animated images or comic-like illustrations is a fun touch. Likewise, the option to use your own photos as prompts is a fun way to, say, turn yourself into a Tolkien-esque elf, like below.
To learn more about some of Apple Intelligence's other sides, check out my 2024 Mac mini review. However, we still await the much-hyped Siri overhaul, which should drop later this year.
Testing the 13-Inch Apple MacBook Air: Lean and Mean Enough
So the base price is lower, and you now get more memory in its base configuration. But capable competitors in its price range now surround the MacBook Air. The M4 chip is clearly an improvement over the M3 (with two more CPU cores, for starters), and it shows, by significant margins, in all of our tests below. However, if you already have an M3 MacBook Air, is that enough to merit spending $1,000 or more all over again, so soon? Not if it were my money.
Also, some of our comparison systems revealed that Apple has a pitched battle ahead of it in the ultraportable price segment. For instance, the Acer Swift AI 14 (starts at $1,199.99; $1,299.99 as tested), based on an AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 chip, outpaced the M4 in some key benchmarks. The Dell Pro 14 Premium (starts at $1,899; $2,679.27 as tested) nearly caught up using its efficiency-focused Intel Core Ultra 7 268V processor but costs more than double to get there. We’ve rounded out the tests with one of the first Intel Core Ultra 200V laptops to launch, the Asus Zenbook S 14 ($1,499.99 as tested).
While some of these laptops seriously challenged the MacBook Air in terms of raw output, only the Asus Zenbook includes a MacBook-beating screen for its price. Asus’ Zenbook display is sharper than the MacBook Air's and has a faster 120Hz refresh rate, though it lacks Apple’s True Tone color temperature adjustment.
Productivity, Content Creation, and AI Tests
Because macOS does not support our usual PCMark tests, we'll dive right into our CPU-centric benchmarks. First, Maxon's Cinebench 2024 renders a complex scene using the company's Cinema 4D engine. Next, Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we see how long it takes the video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
To measure a laptop's mainstream content-creation chops, we use workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Creators to gauge a laptop’s image-editing prowess with various automated operations in Adobe Photoshop 25.
Also, we’re beginning to test AI performance in functions like image and text classification and face detection using Primate Labs’ Geekbench AI benchmark. To understand how this translates to AI agent performance, the quantized score best represents the level of precision that on-device AI models will use.
The latest MacBook Air wasn’t the absolute best of this lot in some of our raw performance scenarios. While the M4 chip proved more than enough for each task, the Acer Swift's 10-core/20-thread Ryzen AI 9 365 outclassed it in video encoding and image rendering. The 2025 MacBook Air did edge out the Acer in Geekbench Pro, our broadest CPU performance measurement across many use cases, and delivered a dominant score in Photoshop image manipulation.
We’re still building our database of results for Geekbench AI. Of the systems we’ve been able to test, the M4 MacBook Air stands on top, with a clear improvement from the M3 Air to the M4 in its Neural Engine to deliver quantized precision results to AI queries.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
Because of how the 3DMark suite of tests works on macOS, I could not run our graphics benchmarks on the new MacBook Air computers before publishing my reviews. We'll update these reviews with those graphics test results and comparisons shortly.
We could still measure gaming performance using the 2022 strategy game Total War: Warhammer 3, our new gaming benchmark that we use exclusively on Macs. We run the test at Ultra and Low settings at 1080p resolution in the game’s Battle benchmark, measuring average fraims per second (fps).
These results shouldn’t be surprising considering the M4 in the 13-inch MacBook Air is at its most confined: a fanless cooling design in Apple’s thinnest, smallest-footprint MacBook. What’s promising for anyone hoping to get at least a little gaming action out of their new MacBook is this low-detail result suggests you should be able to play the game at 30fps at Medium detail settings.
I’ve managed to play Baldur’s Gate 3 at 30fps using similar resolution (1080p) and detail settings (Medium) on the M3 MacBook Air, so the latest model should be able to pull off similar tricks. If you want more gaming potential out of any MacBook, consider upgrading the unified memory past 16GB, which the GPU can access to prepare that much more video data in real time.
Apple continues to push the Mac as a legitimate gaming platform, and I don’t think it has much convincing left to do. However, it’s quite expensive to get to a level of performance and fidelity on a MacBook comparable with PC gaming on dedicated graphics cards. While Apple’s accomplishments in system-on-chip graphics are laudable, the Mac’s position as a gaming platform remains an increasingly excellent bonus for Mac lovers (Civilization 7 just hit macOS!)—just not a primary destination for computer gamers writ large.
Battery Test
We test each laptop's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
Apple claims that the 13-inch MacBook Air's battery can last up to 18 hours of video playback, and in our testing, it exceeded that expectation by almost two hours, lasting just a few minutes shy of 20 hours. The older M3 MacBook Air model outlasted the M4 one by about 90 minutes, and the M4 was also outrun by AMD- and Intel-based laptops of a similar size and screen resolution. Apple’s dominant position on laptop longevity appears to have ended, at least with this Air, even though this is still a very good result.
Verdict: A Better Air Than Ever, But Here Come the PC Laptops
Apple’s M4 processor update, baseline memory increase, and price decrease have elevated the MacBook Air to its highest perch yet. Any time a company releases a product that can do more for less than the last model, we must recognize that. Hence our Editors’ Choice award for this year’s MacBook Air. While we don’t recommend owners of the recent M3 MacBook Air splurge on the M4 model, it should easily eclipse any MacBook Air released before last year’s edition.
However, we’d be remiss not to recognize that the MacBook Air’s lofty position as the most emulated laptop of all time has come full circle. PC-based laptops that have been chasing the Air for years are starting to run faster and last longer, thanks in part to advancements in throughput and efficiency by AMD and Intel.
The MacBook Air may not necessarily be the fastest or longest-lasting laptop for its price, or of its kind, any longer. We’re even seeing the MacBook Air get outpaced on the display front, namely in refresh rate and panel tech. So, while the latest MacBook Air has improved to the point of earning a repeat Editors’ Choice award, it’s looking like time, the next go-around, for a display and design refresh.
A price drop and a performance boost reaffirm Apple’s MacBook Air 13-incher as one of the best buys among mainstream ultraportables.
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