Apple MacBook Air 15 (M4, 2025) review: a near-perfect large-display laptop

Sometimes, you want a larger display but don’t want a larger laptop. That’s where thin-and-light 15-inch laptops come into play, and Apple’s MacBook Air 15 is one of the best members of that class. It’s been updated for 2025 with Apple’s M4 chipset, and that brings some important new benefits.

First, the M4 is meaningfully faster than the previous generation M3. Second, somehow, battery life has (probably) gotten even better. The upgrade helps the MacBook Air 15 take another step closer to being the near-perfect large-screen thin-and-light laptop. I didn’t give it a perfect score like I did the smaller MacBook Air 13, but it’s pretty darn close.

Specs and pricing

The base MacBook Air 15 M4 is $1,199 for a 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU M4 chipset (the only option), 16GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD. You can upgrade memory to 24GB for $200 and 32GB for $400, while storage upgrades range from 512GB ($200) up to 2TB ($800).

The most expensive configuration is therefore $2,399 for an M4, 32GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD. That’s more expensive than many competing laptops, although the Microsoft Surface Laptop 15 is in the same ballpark.

Design

The MacBook Air 15 is the thinnest 15-inch laptop you’ll find today, coming in at 0.45 inches thick that’s just a hair thicker than the MacBook Air 13. Its primary competition is most likely the Surface Laptop 7 15, which comes in at a much thicker 0.72 inches. The MacBook Air 15 is also lighter at 3.3 pounds compared to the Surface Laptop 7 at 3.67 pounds. That makes the MacBook Air 15 feel like a different kind of laptop, incredibly portable even though it sports a larger display that’s so much better for getting work done (and streaming media).

It’s also an incredibly well-built laptop, crafted out of a chunk of CNC-machined aluminum. The keyboard deck and chassis bottom are both solid as a rock, while the lid still has some of the slight bendiness I’ve noted in previous generations. That’s really the only knock against it, but it’s just enough (along with an issue I have with connectivity, see below) to hold the 15-inch MacBook Air from the same perfect score I gave to its 13-inch sibling. The hinge, though, opens up smoothly with one hand, which always gives an added air of quality.

Aesthetically, the MacBook Air 15 is just about perfect. I reviewed it with the new Sky Blue color way that’s available along with the same Silver, Starlight, and Midnight colors as before, and it looks great. I’d probably opt for the Midnight model, but this one would be fine, too. The MacBook Air 15 looks a lot like a blown-up MacBook Air 13 and a really slim MacBook Pro 14, and that’s on purpose. The entire MacBook lineup shares the same elegant blocky aesthetic with a minimalist design that stands out by not standing out. It’s a lovely laptop.

Keyboard and touchpad

If you’ve seen my reviews, you know that I love Apple’s Magic Keyboard. The company had a bit of a setback with its butterfly switches, but it made up for it with the latest version. The MacBook Air 15’s keyboard has a great layout with large keycaps and tons of key spacing, and the switches are perfectly precise and consistent throughout the keyboard. There’s simply no laptop keyboard around that lets me type as fast for as long without fatigue.

The Force Touch touchpad is also perfect. It’s very large, to begin with, and the haptics are natural and quick. And the Force Click feature, where you can press a little “harder” and kick off additional functionality, also works well and adds real value. Some Windows laptops have haptic touchpads as well, and they’re pretty good. But none match up with this one.

The MacBook Air 15 doesn’t have touch, of course. That’s something Apple doesn’t seem to want to add to MacBooks. Normally, I miss touch, but the touchpad is so good that I soon forget it’s not there.

Webcam and connectivity

The MacBook Air 15 has the same connectivity as its smaller sibling. While two Thunderbolt ports, a 3.5mm audio jack, and a MagSafe 3 power connector work well with the 13-inch machine, it’s a little less acceptable on a larger laptop. The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7, probably the MacBook Air 15’s most important competitor, has has a USB-A port to go with its two USB-C ports, but those aren’t faster versions, and it also has a separate charging port and a microSD card slot. The Acer Swift 16 is a little larger, but it has two USB4 ports, two USB-A ports, an HDMI 2.1 port, and a microSD care reader. Wireless connectivity is also a generation behind with Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. In a few years, Wi-Fi 7 might be common enough that you’ll miss it.

The webcam has been bumped up from 1080p to 12MP, and it has Apple’s usual excellent low-light performance and overall image quality. In addition, there’s Apple’s new Center Stage functionality that shifts the image to keep the user in the center, and it works really well. While not as widely useful, the new Desk View feature lets you show a top-down view of your desktop with a picture-in-picture video that you can share to other participants. It works well, too.

A new, much faster Neural Engine is included with the M4 chipset, and it ups the speed from 18 tera operations per second (TOPS) to 38 TOPS. While Apple is struggling with its Apple Intelligence AI initiative, there are still machine learning tasks that will benefit from the faster Neural Engine. Note that contemporary Windows laptops start out at 40 TOPS and ramp up as high as 55 TOPS. We’ll have to see how important AI becomes, though, because as of right now many users — me included — seem fairly underwhelmed.

Performance

For 2025, probably the biggest upgrade to the MacBook Air 15 is the new M4 chipset, which is a meaningful upgrade from the M4 (including the faster Neural Engine mentioned above). The M4 now starts at 10 CPU cores, with the same eight or 10 GPU core options, and each CPU and GPU core is significantly faster than before.

As we can see, the Apple Silicon single-core advantage is more impressive than ever, with the MacBook Air 15 completely demolishing every chipset available for thin-and-light Windows laptops (and really, there isn’t another chipset with cores this fast). Its multi-core performance has also receive a significant bump, and it now leads the field.

The M4 GPU cores are also 13% faster than the M3 GPU cores. That’s not a huge uptick, but it’s enough to push the MacBook Air even further past its competition. None of these are bona fide gaming laptops, but the MacBook Air 15 can do some light gaming. Apple is pushing gaming more lately, and more modern titles are coming out for macOS. I’ll be testing things as time goes on to give more of an impression of how gaming is on modern MacBooks.

Also, the M4 has various CPU optimizations that speed up various tasks in apps like Adobe’s Creative Suite. That makes the MacBook Air 15 a surprisingly good and highly portable creative workstation. It won’t break any speed records, but it can get the job done for moderately demanding users.

Overall, the MacBook Air 15 is a great performer. You won’t find another thin and light laptop that’s quite as fast.

Battery life

So, MacBooks have led the way in efficiency since the advent of Apple Silicon. In fact, MacBooks have dominated so strongly in battery life that Intel and Qualcomm introduced brand new chipsets just to make Windows laptops more competitive. We last reviewed the MacBook Air 15 with the M2 chipset, and it was a very good performer. The M4 model elevates things a bit. And I discovered after running the video looping tests that I had the display set at 124 nits, above our usual 100-nit standard for battery tests. So, that result is arguably a bit lower than it might have been.

In a word, battery life was excellent. I had to use a different tool for measuring web browsing battery life, because Google deprecated our previous tool in Chrome. I suspect that it negatively impacted that score, because video looping battery life went up on both of the M4 MacBook Airs that I reviewed but the web browsing results went down. Even so, the MacBook Air maintains its overall lead against all but the Acer Swift 14 AI, which benefitted from a larger battery.

Also impressive was the MacBook Air 15’s longevity running the demanding Cinebench R24 benchmark. Even while maintaining its higher performance, it lasted significantly longer than any Windows laptop. And it’s slightly up from the M3 (on the 13-inch model, anyway), meaning the chipset got more efficient and faster, which is impressive.

The MacBook Air 15 will keep you working for multiple days. There’s really nothing like it.

Display and audio

Display technology has improved dramatically over the last several years. Not only have OLED displays become a lot more common, including on 15-inch laptops, but IPS display quality has gotten a lot better. Apple is using the same Liquid Retina IPS panel as in previous MacBook Air laptops, and as usual it’s a bright display with great colors and solid blacks. It’s not quite OLED quality, but it also affords much better battery life.

My colorimeter agreed. It’s very bright at 475 nits, which blows out our 300-nit standard (that probably needs revising). Contrast is very good at 1,170:1, better than our 1,000:1 threshold. And colors are wide at 100% sRGB, 83% AdobeRGB, and 94% DCI-P3, better than the (already good) IPS average of 100%, 75%, and 75%, respectively. Color accuracy wasn’t as great at a DeltaE of 1.84, but anything less than 2.0 is very good for productivity and all but the most color-accurate creative work.

Note that external display support remains relatively limited with the MacBook Air. You can connect two external displays and run them along with the internal display, but that’s a bit limited compared to comparable Windows laptops.

You’ll love the display for productivity, photo and video editing, and media consumption. And you’ll love the battery life tradeoff compared to OLED.

An unparalleled larger laptop that’s easy to carry around

The MacBook Air 15 is about as near to perfect as it can be without quite making it. It’s incredibly well built, it’s insanely thin and light but doesn’t feel flimsy, and it looks great. It’s fast enough for the most demanding productivity users, and it has multi-day battery life.

It’s also reasonably affordable, although it remains a premium laptop. The base configuration at $1,299 is all most people will need, and it offers up plenty of performance. Unless you’re a gamer or heavy-duty creator — both of which can be important in larger machines like this — or you really need Windows, you should just grab a MacBook Air 15 and save yourself a bunch of time.