Tim Cook Teases New MacBook Air: Here's What We Expect
Apple has just confirmed that new hardware under the "Air" branding is coming this week. The company's CEO and chief visionary, Tim Cook, shared a brief teaser on X, confirming an impending hardware launch. Bloomberg's managing editor, Mark Gurman, subsequently confirmed that the devices in question are the refreshed MacBook Air with the M4 silicon inside.
Wonder what it could be...
As reported in Power On yesterday, the M4 MacBook Air is coming this week. https://t.co/mbRLNzl4AC https://t.co/ZxN36MTtzm
— Mark Gurman (@markgurman) March 3, 2025
The fantastic, expensive M3 series MacBook Air was introduced in March last year, and almost on clock for a yearly cycle, Apple is bringing the updated version. So far, all leaks suggest that the design will remain identical, but we might see a splash of new colors. The big upgrade, of course, is the M4 silicon powering the laptop.
Apple has already offered the baseline M4 processor inside the MacBook Air, alongside iterations with the M4 Pro and M4 Max variants. Moreover, alleged benchmarks suggest that the M4 MacBook Air just might go toe to toe with its Pro sibling, despite offering a fan-less design.
What to expect from the M4 MacBook Air
Apple's M4 silicon delivers a 10-core central processing unit, split between four high-performance and six efficiency cores. For graphics-intensive tasks, there's a 10-core graphics processing unit, a notable lift compared to the 8-core GPU that Apple offered with the entry-level MacBook Air last year. To recall, Apple first put this silicon inside the iPad Pro, which itself is due for an M4 upgrade soon.
The company claims that the M4 silicon is 1.8 times faster than the M1, while also offering up to a 3.4-times speed boost in demanding tasks like Blender rendering. Moreover, the next-gen neural engine delivers a 3-times performance increase at AI tasks. With the push being given to Apple Intelligence on macOS, and its integration with ChatGPT for more demanding workflows, a faster AI accelerator chip makes sense.
All those performance claims sound interesting, but it's worth pointing out that even though the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro might have the same M4 chip, they don't perform equally. The Air doesn't have a fan to cool the processor, so when it gets too hot, it slows down. In my own experience with the M3 MacBook Air, it does well in short bursts, but it struggles with sustained push at demanding tasks.