It would be incredibly hard to argue that Apple's recently unveiled M4-equipped MacBook Air is the company's best value laptop in quite a while. With a lower starting price and twice the memory, the refreshed MacBook Air sure does a great job enticing students and casual users. The system has recently made its debut on the popular benchmarking platform Geekbench, boasting CPU and GPU performance that is right around what one might expect from the M4 SoC, which we have seen previously in the iPad Pro as well as multiple Macs. In single-core, the M4 MacBook Air managed a score of 3,680 points, and in multicore, the M4 raked in 14,924 points. Of course, the fanless MacBook Air will almost certainly struggle to keep up with its actively cooled siblings in sustained workloads.

In GPU performance, the MacBook Air raked in 54,864 points in Geekbench's Metal GPU benchmark, which is marginally lower than the M4 SoC's average of 57,000 points in the Mac mini and MacBook Pro, both of which are actively cooled. Considering the starting price of $999, the M4 MacBook Air with 16 GB of unified memory is plenty performant for the vast majority of laptop users. Of course, the entry-level storage of a paltry 256 GB is a borderline deal-breaker in 2025, compounded by the fact that Apple refuses to grace its products with user upgradeable storage. For those who can look past it, the M4 MacBook Air sure has a lot going for it.