The Air family of Apple products are on a roll this week. Just yesterday, Apple announced the next generation of iPad Air that has been updated with the M3 chip, inching it closer to the performance of an iPad Pro despite maintaining its groundbreaking thin and weightless frame.

Today, Apple unveiled its update to the MacBook Air, which receives the M4 chip upgrade amongst a host of other improvements. This confirms speculations that the MacBook Air was next in line to feature the 10-core CPU already featured in the brand’s 2024 suite of iPad Pro, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini.

Available in two sizes, a 13-inch display and a 15-inch display, the new chip allows Apple to maintain the MacBook Air’s long-lasting battery life of up to 18 hours (that’s 6 additional hours for those who are still on the Intel-based models), yet outperform the performance speed and multitasking abilities of its current generation MacBook Air. The advantage of a more powerful M4 chip is that it makes AI-based tasks faster, 3x faster in fact than on the MacBook Air with M1, which increases speed in tasks such as Apple’s own photo enhancement and background noise removal from videos.

While the update maintains last year’s base configuration of 16GB of RAM, together with the M4 chip, it makes the new generation 2x faster than the M1 model, or 3.6x faster when editing photos on Adobe Photoshop compared to Intel-based models — a feat considering the portability of its design. Two Thunderbolt 4 ports are available on the new models, which allows users to plug up two external displays while keeping the built-in display running. The new MacBook Air features a MagSafe 3 charging port.

Yet, the biggest upgrade may be its 12MP camera with improved quality, which now supports Center Stage — Apple’s software feature that puts the user talking in the centre of the frame during calls. It also comes in a brand new sky blue colour, which joins the already popular midnight, starlight, and silver hues in now what are four options of colours to choose from. Plus, the lower starting price of $1,499 for the 13-inch model makes it hard to argue that this may be the most practical MacBook from Apple yet.

The new 13 and 15-inch MacBook Air are available to pre-order from today onwards. For more information, click here.

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