With the Apple M4 chipset, the MacBook Air 13 is now the best small laptop ever

Design

I’ve had plenty of hands-on time with the modern MacBook Air 13, with a construction that’s remained almost exactly the same since the introduction of the M2 chipset. And really, I can’t find any reason to fault Apple’s design here. The MacBook Air 13 is probably the thinnest 13-inch laptop available today at 0.44 inches, and it’s reasonably light at 2.7 pounds. In fact, the weight actually makes such a thin laptop avoid feeling flimsy thanks to an impression of density. And that makes sense, given that the MacBook Air 13 is CNC-machined from a single block of aluminum. It exudes quality, and while some Windows laptops are all well-made — like the Yoga Slim 9i 14 I mentioned above — none have quite the same feel. Note as well that I would fault Apple for making the MacBook Air 13 so thin if the battery life weren’t so incredibly good. While the display bezels aren’t the smallest around, they’re small enough that the overall size feels tiny enough.

Aesthetically, the MacBook Air 13 clearly belongs to a distinct family of laptops. It has the same simple, blocky look with rounded sides and sharp edges that’s immediately recognizable. I like the look as being elegant and minimalist, and while HP’s OmniBook and Lenovo’s various Yoga machines are more complex, I tend to prefer Apple’s understated design. There’s a new Sky Blue color way to go with the Silver, Starlight, and Midnight colors, and it’s a nice edition. That’s my review unit, and while I’d probably go for the Midnight model, I could certainly live with this one.

Of course, build quality is perfect. I dinged the previous couple of MacBook Air 13 generations because the lid was a little more flexible than I like, while the chassis and keyboard deck were as solid as always with Apple products. This time, though, Apple seems to have addressed that concern, because there’s zero give anywhere. This is a very well-built laptop that really makes you appreciate your investment. You can feel the quality with the hinge that opens smoothly with one hand. And, I mentioned its density above, which makes the MacBook Air feel like a solid chunk of metal that will last forever.

I’ve been a huge fan of Apple’s Magic Keyboard since they went away from the flawed butterfly switches. The MacBook Air 13 does nothing to change that. It’s a comfortable layout with copious key spacing and large keycaps, and the switches are perfectly light and snappy. I can type faster on this keyboard than I can any other. Somehow, Apple managed to make it just as easy to type on the MacBook Air 13 as it is on the much larger 16-inch model. For a writer, that’s incredibly important.

And I like the Force Touch haptic touchpad just as much. It’s as large as you’ll find on a 13-inch laptop, and it works better than any other I’ve used. The haptics are perfect, it’s super quick, and the Force Click feature adds useful functionality. I usually like touch displays on Windows laptops, but I don’t really miss it when I’m using MacBooks. The touchpad is just that great.

Maybe the biggest news with the MacBook Air M3 is the M4 chipset. It’s received a meaningful upgrade, which includes a base of 10 CPU cores compered to the M3’s eight CPU cores. The GPU options remain eight and 10 cores, and they’ve been upgraded as well with second-generation hardware-accelerated ray tracing and the same mesh shading and Dynamic Caching as before. I mentioned the faster Neural Engine above.

The result is a laptop that’s significantly faster, especially in single-core tasks where each M4 core is considerably faster than the M3 equivalent. In fact, the singe-core advantage over any Windows chipset is pretty amazing. If you’re doing typical productivity tasks that don’t utilize a bunch of cores, then the MacBook Air will be noticeably quicker — which is saying a lot given that modern laptops are generally fast enough across the board.

The M4 doesn’t break new ground in multi-core performance, but it still beats out the latest Windows competition of thin-and-light laptops. And remarkably, there’s no fan, so the MacBook Air 13 runs completely silent. That might have a penalty when running really long, demanding tasks, but given this laptop’s productivity focus and its overall speed advantage, that’s probably not going to be too much of a concern.

The M4 is also faster in GPU performance, enough so that the 8-core GPU on my MacBook Air 13 was only 3% slower than the 10-core GPU on the MacBook Air 13 M3. If you choose the 10-core GPU version, you’ll get a 13% upgrade. It’s not huge, but it’s enough to extend the MacBook Air’s advantage over its Windows competition.

The MacBook Air 13 M4 is a fast little laptop for even the most demanding productivity users. It will also do some light gaming, and the M4 chipset has some optimizations that make the laptop surprisingly capable for more intensive tasks like video editing.

Apple Silicon introduced groundbreaking efficiency. No matter which size laptop, MacBooks have led the way. In fact, it’s pushed Windows laptop makers, along with Intel and Qualcomm, to change architectures to try to keep up.

I did run into a bit of a snag running our web browsing test. Google deprecated the previous tool we used to create the script to run through our test web sites, and the version I found to replace it might not be working quite the same way. Although the M4 model lasted an hour longer than the M3 in our video looping test, it didn’t last as long in web browsing. I have to imagine that’s down to the tool and not the laptop, something I’ll be testing more as I move forward.

Note that the M4 chipset does just as well with intensive tasks, going for the longest we’ve seen when running the demanding Cinebench R14 multi-core benchmark. Not only does it last a long time, but it maintains fast performance. And, it’s slightly up from the M3, meaning the chipset got more efficient and faster, which is impressive.

The bottom line is that while Intel’s Lunar Lake chipset and, to a lesser degree, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chipsets, have narrowed the gap between Windows and MacBooks in terms of battery life, Apple Silicon is still incredibly strong. The Acer Swift 14 AI actually did better in our tests, which is a great result for Acer. However, the Swift 14 AI’s performance wasn’t nearly as strong, and it needed a 75 watt-hour battery to match the MacBook Air 13’s 53.8 watt-hour capacity.

You’ll get multi-day battery life out of the MacBook Air 13. That’s impressive given the size and performance.

The MacBook Air 13 uses a 13.4-inch display in a (roughly) 16:10 aspect ratio and a resolution of 2560 x 1664. That’s very sharp, and the display looks great out of the box. It’s the same Liquid Retina IPS display that Apple’s used on its MacBook Airs for several generations.

According to my colorimeter, it remains a quality panel. It’s very bright at 468 nits, well above our 300-nit standard, and its contrast is vary good at 1,150:1 (higher than our 1,000:1 threshold). Colors are wide at 100% sRGB, 83% AdobeRGB, and 94% DCI-P3, and accurate at a DeltaE of 1.34 (anything less than 2.0 is very good). The average IPS display has 100%, 75%, and 75% respectively and accuracy that’s closer to a DeltaE of 2.0.

More and more laptops are using OLED displays lately, and certainly, this one isn’t as colorful and doesn’t have the same inky blacks. But, for productivity work, all but the most demanding creativity tasks, and media consumption, this is a great display that adds the benefit of outstanding battery life. OLED is beautiful, but it’s a power hog.

In terms of external display support, you can connect two monitors to go with the internal display. That’s less than you can connect to modern Windows laptops.

The MacBook Air 13’s audio quality is the best you’ll find on a 13-inch (or 14-inch) laptop. There are four speakers, two tweeters and to force-cancelling woofers, and in terms of volume, mids and highs, and bass, there’s nothing better. This is one laptop where you won’t worry all that much about using headphones unless you want to immerse yourself in sound.

I’m going to go ahead and give the 2025 MacBook Air 13 a perfect score. It’s about time. To begin with, this might very well be the perfect 13-inch (or 14-inch) thin-and-light laptop design. It’s solid as a rock, looks great, and is eminently portable given its insane thinness. No, it doesn’t have OLED (yet), but until OLED can provide the same kind of efficiency, it’s not necessarily the best tradeoff for this class of laptop.

It’s also very fast, beating out its competition in multi-core performance and demolishing it in single-core speed. And, its battery life maintains the most attractive performance-efficiency ratio over the best Windows has to offer. With a starting price of $1,000 for a very usable configuration, the only reason to pass up the MacBook Air 13 is if you just simply can’t live without Windows. I suspect that this will be fewer and fewer people as time goes by.