MacBook Air M4 Announced—With a New Color and Cheaper Starting Price

Nothing goes down in price these days. Especially these past literal days, after years of inflation have led to a looming trade war. And yet here we are with the MacBook Air M4, which starts at $999, $100 cheaper than last year’s Air M3.

not much different on specs

How much of a leap is the MacBook Air M4 when it comes to performance? Well, it’s a hop forward. Not a giant leap, but a respectable hop. Both the base-level M3 and M4 come with 16GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD, identical 13.6″ Liquid Retina displays, MagSafe charging port, 18 hours of battery life, and the same dimensions, right down to the tenths of an inch and tenths of a pound.

The star of the show is the Apple M4 chip nudging out Apple’s M3 chip. Both feature eight cores in their entry-level configuration, but the M4 raises the memory bandwidth from 100GB/s to 120GB/s, giving it a bump in speed.

The MacBook Air M4 is available with the same options of 512GB, 1TB, or 2TB SSD, as well as 24GB of RAM. Only the M4 gets the option to upgrade the RAM to 32GB. The M4 also gains two Thunderbolt 4 ports over the M3’s two Thunderbolt 3 ports.

Both Thunderbolt 3 and 4 allow for a maximum data transfer speed of 40 Gbps, but Thunderbolt 4 doubles the minimum transfer speed from 16 Gbps to 32 Gbps, so you’re guaranteed to get speeds at least that fast.

Being that it’s $100 cheaper, one year newer, and comes with a faster processor, it’s a no-brainer to go for the M4. You can pre-order it now, with a release one week from today on March 12.

new colors

Pour one out for Space Gray, a color that first got the boot when the MacBook Pro M4 was released last fall in only silver and Space Black. I’d held out hope that Apple would keep Space Gray, which I’m quite fond of, for the MacBook Air lineup, but it appears to be DOA.

The new MacBook Air comes in silver, Midnight (black), Starlight (gold), and an all-new color, Sky Blue. Other than that, the design is evolutionary. Barely. It’s less “next step on the evolutionary ladder of humans” and more like a MacBook Air that got its wisdom teeth.

Unlike what we saw with the MacBook Pro M4 launch in late October 2024, where only base-level units were stocked for a day-one release and optioning one out pushed back the ship/pickup date by a week, Apple seems to be stocking plenty of MacBook Air M4s of all RAM, SSD, and processor configurations.

I played around with Apple’s build-and-order configurator, and regardless of how I optioned it out, the furthest the ship date got pushed back was one day to March 13. With all the pent-up demand, I don’t expect that little curiosity to last for long.