{"id":14352,"date":"2025-03-12T03:05:48","date_gmt":"2025-03-12T03:05:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/?p=14352"},"modified":"2025-03-12T03:05:48","modified_gmt":"2025-03-12T03:05:48","slug":"15-inch-macbook-air-m4-2025-review-bluer-and-better","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/?p=14352","title":{"rendered":"15-inch MacBook Air (M4, 2025) Review: Bluer and Better"},"content":{"rendered":"


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The M4 also gives the MacBook Air its AI boost with Apple Intelligence. The 38 TOPS of local AI processing through the faster 16-core Neural Engine makes the M4 MacBook Air closer to the 48 TOPS on Intel\u2019s Lunar Lake chips and 45 TOPS of Qualcomm\u2019s Snapdragon X chips.<\/p>\n

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This is difficult to judge, because Apple Intelligence is very much still unfinished<\/a>, but there are some new third-party apps that Apple is showcasing that use Apple Intelligence right out of the box in third-party applications, such as the note-taking app, Bear. You can now do things like automatically format text into tables or summarize a report. It also comes with Image Playground, the updated version of Siri with ChatGPT integration, and lots more. On the other hand, you\u2019ve never needed<\/em> fast local AI processing to get Apple Intelligence, as AI tasks on older devices just get run on Apple\u2019s Private Cloud Compute system.<\/p>\n

The raw performance bump you\u2019ll see on the M4 MacBook Air over last year\u2019s M3 is 22 percent faster GPU, 31 percent multi-core, and 18 percent single-core, as measured in Cinebench R24. That\u2019s a really solid step up for one generation, particularly in single-core performance, where Apple silicon continues to dominate the competition. In terms of the graphics, that\u2019s also over double the performance from the M2. Whether you\u2019re photo-editing or doing 3D modeling, that\u2019s enough to feel<\/em> the difference if you\u2019re coming from an M1 or M2 MacBook Air.<\/p>\n

As with all MacBook Airs, it\u2019s a completely fanless machine. That feels incredible at certain points, especially when you\u2019re in heaving applications like a game. I whipped out Baldur\u2019s Gate 3<\/em>, and while it\u2019s far from ideal performance, the utterly silent system means you won\u2019t even need headphones to play. But at 1200p, medium settings, and upscaling, it wasn\u2019t too hard to find a balance of performance and image quality that felt enjoyable. Achieving that performance without fans is something that can\u2019t be done on any other laptop right now.<\/p>\n

The downside of being fanless, of course, is you\u2019re not getting quite as much out of the M4 as you would on a system with active cooling, namely the 14-inch MacBook Pro. The Air\u2019s system has to throttle frequencies down to prevent a meltdown, and even still, I recorded CPU temperatures as high as 102 degrees Celsius. Fortunately, the surface temperatures never got unbearable in my time with it, even while running under full load.<\/p>\n

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