Performance and power: An M4, but fanless
Apple’s M4 is a thoroughly known quantity by now thanks to the M4 MacBook Pro, the M4 iMac, the M4 Mac mini, and (to a lesser extent because of the software differences) the M4 iPad Pro.
The M4 added two extra efficiency cores to its CPU, bringing the total number of cores to 10 (four P-cores and six E-cores). The number of GPU cores is still 10, the same as the M2 and M3. The basic $999/$1,199 models have an 8-core GPU instead, so note that the performance in our graphics benchmarks below will be slightly lower on those models.
The big difference between this M4 and the one in all the other Macs is that the Air still doesn’t include an active cooling fan. For Apple’s chips, this usually means that they can run at full speeds for a few minutes under a sustained heavy CPU or GPU load, but that performance can slow down a bit once the chip gets too hot to run at full speed.
Note that Apple provided us with the 15-inch version of the Air to test and that the 13-inch version may throttle a bit more aggressively, depending on how well its heatsink dissipates heat.
The Air’s M4 performs identically to the actively cooled versions in many of our lighter benchmarks, including Geekbench, single-threaded Cinebench tests, and even most of our graphics benchmarks. It’s only in heavier, longer-running tests like our Handbrake video encoding tests that it begins to slow down significantly compared to the actively cooled versions of the chip. This is pretty consistent with what we’ve seen in the other Apple Silicon MacBook Airs; the kinds of workflows that will really challenge the Air are the ones that you don’t really buy a MacBook Air to handle regularly.
Compared to older Macs, the M4’s CPU is about 15 or 20 percent faster than the M3 in single-core benchmarks and 20 or 30 percent faster in multi-core benchmarks, thanks to its pair of extra CPU cores. The GPU’s performance improvements are better in some tests than others, though somewhere in the 10-to-20-percent range is pretty typical. Apple is gradually working toward doubling the performance of the original M1, but we’re not there quite yet—the M4 is somewhere between 50 and 70 percent faster than the M1 across the board, depending on what benchmark you’re comparing. The M1 still feels good for most day-to-day computing, especially if you sprang for 16GB of RAM, but the M4 is noticeably snappier.