MacBook Air M4 Review: The 8GB Tax Is Finally Gone

The 16GB base is the upgrade Apple should have shipped years ago

Marques Brownlee called this the "most capable, most powerful version yet," and the headline reason isn't the silicon — it's the memory. Starting RAM is now 16GB across the board, up from the 8GB that quietly bottlenecked the cheapest Airs. For the way most people actually work — browser, mail, Office or Google Docs, a photo edit, a video call — that is the difference between a machine that feels fast on day one and one that feels fast three years in. The M4 chip on top of it is genuine headroom rather than the whole story.

Speed, in daily use, reads as instant. A Team-BHP owner upgrading from not one but two M1 Airs described the M4 as "blistering," with "everything opens in milliseconds including the laptop itself." That is the honest bar for this machine: not synthetic scores, but the absence of waiting. Derrick Story, a working photographer, ran Capture One Pro, Lightroom and Final Cut on the Air after trading in a 2021 MacBook Pro — the kind of professional load the Air was never supposed to shoulder — and reported it had "all the horsepower I need, and more."

Heavier than the M1 — and better for it

Pick it up and the M4 Air feels more substantial than the featherweight M1 it replaces for most upgraders. Our Team-BHP reference owner, holding it next to his older Airs, called it "slightly on the heavier side... more sturdy and more polished and upmarket," with an "added steel edge" along the display that reads as premium. The 15-inch model lands at 1.51kg on Apple India's spec sheet — still a bag you forget you're carrying. The Touch ID button is larger now, easier to hit, and the screen is visibly brighter than the older Airs.

The display is worse than a Pro's. In practice, it holds up.

Here is the compromise the internet loves to shout about: the Air's Liquid Retina panel is dimmer and less capable than the mini-LED screen on the MacBook Pro. On the spec sheet, that's true. In the field, it mattered less than expected. Derrick Story recounts working in a Hyatt Regency atrium when "the sun burst through the clouds and illuminated the entire area" — his laptop "bathed in bright light," effectively working outdoors. Two taps on the brightness key and he carried on. After a month across varied conditions, he had no complaint about the display. Apple offers the Air in two sizes — 13.6-inch and 15.3-inch — both Liquid Retina with a billion colours.

The Pro's screen is better on paper. After a month working in a sun-drenched hotel atrium, our reference reviewer never once wished for it.

Battery, and the little magic tricks

Brownlee noted the M4 gets a "sneaky slightly larger battery" than the M3 — a small gain on a machine that already treated all-day life as a given. This is a laptop you charge overnight and stop thinking about. The bigger surprise is the setup. Our Team-BHP owner migrating from an iPhone 16 Pro Max watched the Air pull his data across — Safari bookmarks and all — in "under 10 seconds," his new laptop becoming "a mirror of my iPhone." If you already live in Apple's ecosystem, the first ten minutes with this machine are the best argument for it. Four speakers with Spatial Audio, Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 round out a package that leaves little to complain about at the price.

What you give up

The ports. There are two Thunderbolt / USB-C connectors and a headphone jack — that's the lot, plus MagSafe for charging. No HDMI, no SD card reader. Derrick Story flagged exactly this when photographer friends questioned his switch: "what about the ports? And there's no SD card reader!" His answer was that he researched the trade-off and chose to travel light anyway — but if you offload camera cards or drive external displays daily, price in a dongle before you buy. It's the one genuinely dated thing about an otherwise modern laptop.

The India math — and an honest caveat

This is where we have to be straight with you. At the time of our research, the closest configuration actually listed on Amazon India was the 15-inch MacBook Air (16GB / 512GB, Silver) at ₹1,65,990, holding a 4.4-star rating. That specific unit runs the previous M3 chip, not the M4 — Apple's newest Airs sell through its own store and offline channels here, and we won't quote an M4 street price we can't independently verify. What we can say is that the M4's value case doesn't rest on the chip at all. It rests on 16GB becoming the floor, which erases the single worst reason to skip the base Air. Buy the configuration you can verify the price on, and check for bank offers before you check out. Our affiliate links never move the score — the verdict below is the same whether you buy through us or not.

The verdict

The MacBook Air M4 is the most quietly sensible laptop Apple has made in years. The M4 chip is fast, the build is more premium than the M1, the battery outlasts your day, and the ecosystem tricks still feel like magic. But the change that actually reorders the buying advice is the 16GB base memory — it turns the cheapest Air from a compromise into the right call for most people. Buy it if you want a thin, long-lasting laptop that will still feel quick in 2029, and you can live within two ports. Look elsewhere only if you need a brighter Pro-grade screen, or if daily SD-card and HDMI work makes the port situation a non-starter. And if MacBook money was never on the table, our best laptops under ₹50,000 guide maps the honest Windows picks. Gamers should look at the best gaming laptops under ₹60,000 instead — integrated graphics included, honestly labelled.