The MacBook Air M4 isn’t a surprise in any real way, but seeing a price drop is a quite welcome surprise, while the performance crowd can get excited about the new Mac Studio models.
It’s been rumoured for weeks now – and some had it coming last week – but overnight Apple announced the latest processor refresh for its MacBook Air line with the MacBook Air M4, following on from yesterday’s reveal of the iPad Air M3 and iPad A16.
As the name suggests, the big change here is the inclusion of an M4 processor under the hood of the MacBook Air, as well as a new “Sky Blue” colour option. This is very much your classic spec bump, bringing the line up to speed with nearly all of Apple’s contemporary Mac options. Well… nearly all of them, anyway.
The M4 chip in the MacBook Air is already something of a known quantity—I reviewed it in the MacBook Pro M4 as well as the M4 version of the iPad Pro that preceded it – and you can expect it to be faster than the M3 model, not that year on year replacements make much sense. Pretty clearly Apple’s looking to buyers who might be shifting from a MacBook Air M1 or earlier Intel-based model for the MacBook Air M4.
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One slight surprise here is that Apple’s cut the price of the entry level MacBook Air M4, which starts at $1,699 for a model with a 10-core CPU, 8-core GPU, 16GB of RAM and an integrated 256GB SSD. It’s also pleasing to see Apple lifting the external screen support for the new MacBook Air M4 up to two displays rather than one; that’s long felt to me like it’s more of an artificial limit to make the MacBook Pro appear more “Pro” in the lineup.
The casualties here are all models of the MacBook Air M2 and MacBook Air M3, because they’re no longer part of the MacBook Air lineup at all. It’s M4 processors all the way down in the MacBook Air world, though you can spec up all the way to a 15” MacBook Air with 32GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD if you’ve got a lazy $3,899 sitting idle.
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Mind you, if you’ve got $3,899 sitting idle, your other option announced overnight is the update to the Mac Studio, with local pricing starting at $3,499 for a model with an M4 Max processor with a 14-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 36GB RAM and a 512GB SSD. That’s a pretty serious machine for creative professionals, though it’s not the most powerful Mac Studio you can get. That’s the $6,999 Mac Studio M3 Ultra with a 28-core CPU, 60-core GPU, 96GB of RAM and 1TB SSD.
If you want the fastest of the fast, a fully specced-out Mac Studio M3 Ultra (32-core CPU, 80-core GPU, 512GB RAM and 16TB SSD) will set you back a wallet-busting $22,149. Mind you, if you actually need that much power in real life, your working situation is such that the price there is probably irrelevant relative to what it could do to your workflow.
Why M3 Ultra and not M4 Ultra? It’s being reported – and it’s rare for Apple to go “on the record” for this kind of thing, so we’ll have to wait and see – that the M4 Max that would have served duty as the M4 Ultra (which would be essentially two M4 Max chips superglued together) lacks the necessary UltraFusion connector to make that a feasible prospect. Which leaves us with the slightly odd situation where the fastest Apple Silicon Chip sits in a prior generation to its current theoretically “best” Apple Silicon chip.
Also slightly odd as of today; while even before I’ve been able to test one out (I’ll be chasing Apple about this later today), it’s essentially likely to be true that the MacBook Air M4 will represent Apple’s best value laptop (within the MacOS ecosystem). At the same time, it’s also pretty clear that the Mac Pro that still sits on an M2 Ultra chip is Apple’s worst value buy… at least until Tim Cook unveils a new model. Maybe tomorrow?
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