First Impressions: 15-inch MacBook Air (M4)

First Impressions: 15-inch MacBook Air (M4)

One of my favorite things about working in IT is getting to play with new toys, and this week I had the opportunity to unbox and begin testing the brand-new 15-inch MacBook Air (M4). Short take: the new MacBook Air is the best MacBook Air ever, and there’s never been a better time to buy one.

First, let’s talk about the color. This model came in the new Sky Blue color. As you can tell from the photo, it’s very subtle. You might look at the above image and think that it’s silver, but that the light reflecting off of it gives it a blue tint. In fact, in an office environment with fluorescent lighting, that’s how it mostly looks. Many people have made the joke that they should have called it “Barely Blue.” Personally, I’d love to see Apple embrace the kind of bold colors they did twenty-five years ago with the iMac and the iBook, and what they’ve done for the last few years with the M-series iMacs. Sky Blue strikes me more as “blue, but not so blue that it will scare away corporate IT purchasers.” Just for fun, I even took it outside to compare Sky Blue with the actual blue sky. This was the result:

But speaking of corporate IT purchasers, the new MacBook Air now supports up to two external displays with the lid open, a change from the previous-generation MacBook Air, which could only power two external displays with the lid closed. That will make this an easier sell to companies whose standard employee desk setup involves two external displays. And while two external displays could eat up both USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 ports, you could get around that with a multiport adapter or displays that support Thunderbolt daisy chaining.

What really makes this the best time to buy a MacBook Air is that the price/value equation has never been better. For $999, you get a 13-inch MacBook Air with the M4 chip, 16 GB of RAM, and 256 GB of storage. For the same specs in the 15-inch model, it’s $1199. For $1199/$1399 more, you get 512 GB of storage, and for $1399/$1599, you get 24 GB of RAM. While many people could operate just fine with the base models, I think spending the extra $200 to double the storage is the smart move for most purchasers.

Apple has long called the MacBook Air “the world’s best-selling laptop,” and these new models are only going to grow the unit sales of the ultimate laptop for the average student, home, or business user. I like this new MacBook Air an awful lot.

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