Review MacBook Air (M4, 2025) review: Blue skies ahead

[Admin]

The 15-inch MacBook Air with M4 is powerful and efficient. It comes in a new sky blue color, and, more importantly, a lower price.

MacBook Air (M4, 2025) review: Blue skies ahead : Read more

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

I hope in the future you use Surface devices as one of the comparison devices. They are first party Microsoft and include ARM Snapdragon models so it's as close to apples vs apples as it gets, and will be a quick way of seeing how over the years ARM on Windows performance and efficiency improves vs Apple.

 

[Giroro]

Apple is still doing it's annoying decoy pricing thing where they make the highly-nerfed base model's price seem semi-reasonable so they can steal headlines about how the new Mac is a "good value", and "They slightly dropped the price of their horrendously outdated base model, buy now, buy now! (through our specific link)". It's a cynical and obvious algorithmic hack so when people look up MacBook Air they see free-marketing headlines about "price drop (THIS IS THE ONE TO BUY)" instead of "horribly overpriced unmaintainable hardware (AVOID)". Because here In reality Apple is gouging so hard on their soldered down RAM and DRM'd Storage that lawyers should be in court arguing that its a violation of property rights.

It cannot be overemphasized that they are charging $200 per 8GB of memory, and $600 to go from a 512GB SSD to 2TB - which are both 10x the going rate. And if you buy-into this product there is absolutely nothing you can do to independently upgrade nor reasonably extend the life of this designed-obsolescence, disposable eWaste. Then they try and gaslight you into thinking that's supposed to somehow be good for the environment.
If a PC tried doing that it would get obliterated by anybody who bothered reviewing it, and completely ignored by everybody else. That pricing isn't just bad, it's sickening. I feel nauseous just thinking about it.
Just look at how that works out for the Mac Mini: the $599 model has 16GB memory and a 256 GB SSD. To add an additional 16GB of memory and 256GB SSD, costs exactly $600. So by that math they are paying you $1 to take the rest of the computer off of their hands.
The numbers just don't work out.

Maybe only the base model (of only the 13" version) could have been a 4.5/5 if it didn't have a 2010-sized SSD and less RAM than a midrange phone, but the max configuration is more like a 1/5 for anyone who has to work for a paycheck.
I don't get it. Why should Apple keep getting a free pass on this? Windows 11 might be horrible, but that doesn't magically make Apple better. It's totally possible for 2 differently anti-customer products to independently exist at the same time.

How bad should the pricing be before Apple products get any real criticism instead of raving reviews and universal recommendations? If next year they decide to charge $300 per 8GB and blame it on some BS, would that move the needle? $400?

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Apple is still doing it's annoying decoy pricing thing where they make the highly-nerfed base model's price seem semi-reasonable so they can steal headlines about how the new Mac is a "good value", and "They slightly dropped the price of their horrendously outdated base model, buy now, buy now! (through our specific link)". It's a cynical and obvious algorithmic hack so when people look up MacBook Air they see free-marketing headlines about "price drop (THIS IS THE ONE TO BUY)" instead of "horribly overpriced unmaintainable hardware (AVOID)". Because here In reality Apple is gouging so hard on their soldered down RAM and DRM'd Storage that lawyers should be in court arguing that its a violation of property rights.

It cannot be overemphasized that they are charging $200 per 8GB of memory, and $600 to go from a 512GB SSD to 2TB - which are both 10x the going rate. And if you buy-into this product there is absolutely nothing you can do to independently upgrade nor reasonably extend the life of this designed-obsolescence, disposable eWaste. Then they try and gaslight you into thinking that's supposed to somehow be good for the environment.
If a PC tried doing that it would get obliterated by anybody who bothered reviewing it, and completely ignored by everybody else. That pricing isn't just bad, it's sickening. I feel nauseous just thinking about it.
Just look at how that works out for the Mac Mini: the $599 model has 16GB memory and a 256 GB SSD. To add an additional 16GB of memory and 256GB SSD, costs exactly $600. So by that math they are paying you $1 to take the rest of the computer off of their hands.
The numbers just don't work out.

Maybe only the base model (of only the 13" version) could have been a 4.5/5 if it didn't have a 2010-sized SSD and less RAM than a midrange phone, but the max configuration is more like a 1/5 for anyone who has to work for a paycheck.
I don't get it. Why should Apple keep getting a free pass on this? Windows 11 might be horrible, but that doesn't magically make Apple better. It's totally possible for 2 differently anti-customer products to independently exist at the same time.

How bad should the pricing be before Apple products get any real criticism instead of raving reviews and universal recommendations? If next year they decide to charge $300 per 8GB and blame it on some BS, would that move the needle? $400?

Not defending Apple too much, but all phones and most Windows laptops are like this in that they have very limited to zero upgrade abilities, and all will charge a premium for a spec boost of memory and storage, especially ones with soldered components.

Also remember the Air is aimed at students and other applications where the priorities are portability, battery life, and price, and like it says at the end of the reviews, there's not really anything Windows has at the moment which ticks all the boxes the Air does at $1000, or less than that because of trade in values of $300-$500 of an M1 or M2 based MacBook Air at BestBuy ($300 for a good condition 8/256 M1), and basically 30% back for a 5 year old laptop is not something you can say about many Windows laptops that aren't Surface or Galaxy Books (if then).

My $1000 2020 era Lenovo Slim 7 isn't even worth $300 today...

 

[bit_user]

I think this graph should stipulate that "Lower is better". Yes, it follows that being measured in seconds and "faster is better" means lower is better, but it'd be easier just to say that.

​