It didn’t take a lot of time making my mind up as I was open to the idea, but I wasn’t necessarily looking for a change right then and there. Every now and again I’d look up the different ‘Books especially while writing technical articles for this site’s index – keeping an eye on what’s out there and how the M1 Pro would compare to newer things. Actually now that I think about it.. I stumbled into a few eBay listings for 16″ M3 Pro MacBook Pros at around the same price as a 15″ MacBook Air and it sparked my curiosity, so I looked into those for a bit.
After realizing I didn’t wanna go through the hassle of selling the M1 Pro MBP on eBay and hoping I get enough toward the newer one, I settled on keeping it until Apple dropped the new M4 MacBook Air on March 5th.
Affordable Yet Cutting Edge
It was a leap of faith, excitement, and a little research. Once I found the M4 CPU benches ahead in Single Core and Multi Core performance, saw the new sky blue color, along with LPDDR5X-7500 3570 MHz RAM.. it was a done deal. All that mattered was the screen was large enough and “good enough”. I can tell the difference between the Air and Pro’s screen when looking more closely but the Air doesn’t feel lesser – It’s more than good enough, really.
- If you’re unsure whether to buy a new Mac, or if you should replace your M1/Intel Mac, this is a great option to look into. The new M4 chip really kicks things up a notch and makes it a good time to upgrade.
If anything, it was also a leap of convenience too. Trading in the M1 Pro MBP was the only way to realistically get a comparable replacement – I’m not at all replacing this with a 13″ ‘Book, it would be difficult and inefficient to do anything on a screen that small. I like to have a desktop that has more oomph and sits at a desk, as well as recent of a laptop as possible that performs well and has good screen real estate. The M1 Pro MBP was purchased refurb a few years back but with a 1 TB hard drive, I didn’t need anything newer since the hardware accelerated video exporting was “good enough” for me. Costing only several hundred on top of a trade in to get current-gen tech that outperforms what I have in almost every way felt.. like a good choice!
First Boot
This is what the desktop looked like when I first got it. Click on the image itself to enable zooming in, you will be redirected to a separate page.
- This shows most (if not, all) Early 2025 MacBook Airs shipped with Sequoia 15.2 Build 24C2101)
- Random side note: According to the Battery section in System Preferences when I first got it, it was last charged in the same timeframe Apple says they were testing the MacBook Airs on their website. Coconut Battery says the Air was made exactly 30 days before that.
What were the differences between M1 Pro and M4?
I didn’t have a chance to bench an M4 GPU until after purchase, but I knew the CPUs were better on the M4 than even the M1 Pro. The CPU performance increase is certainly noticeable with the responsiveness of apps opening, pages loading in safari, and mostly any actionable “thing”. The M1 Pro MBP and M4 Air take about as long as each other to boot into Sequoia with the M4 being a pinch ahead, but once you’re in you can tell/sense the M4 “blinks” faster.
- On the images below, click right on them to enable zooming in. You will be redirected to a separate page.
- As it turns out while the M4 CPU pulls way ahead of the M1 Pro CPU, the M1 Pro GPU still commands strength.
(Above: OpenCL M1 Pro MacBook Pro GPU outperforms M4 GPU, but the M4 GPU has Ray Tracing)
(Above: Metal benchmarks between M1 Pro and M4 GPU)
Links to: M1 Pro vs M4 OpenCL / M1 Pro vs M4 Metal
Despite the difference in GPU performance, I can’t say I’ve noticed it much. I’m not a particularly heavy gamer although the few games I’ve tried on here seem to run quite well. Minecraft loads astronomically fast as it’s more CPU based and plateaus at an acceptable 40 fps with every single video setting turned to max, unlimited frame rate/render and all. If you turn the video settings down quite a bit you can actually get ludicrous fps.. to the tune of 400-500 fps even while in the air!
Testing out Minecraft
I’ve stuck to this game/app as a sort-of benchmarking tool since it’s introduction as it’s widely popular and supported so it’s relatively easy to get it going on many kinds of old Macs. I don’t play Minecraft like I did when I was younger, but every now and again I’ve dabbled into building structures.
(Above: Walking on ground with all settings cranked up gets you a steady 35-53 fps.)
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(Above: Now, let’s turn the settings all the way down and see what happens!)
(After turning the settings down, you get crazy FPS on an M4 chip.)
Was the 16″ M1 Pro MacBook Pro really good enough versus the 15″ M4 air?
The thing about the M1 Macs is, they’re really good as they are. The M1 Pro MacBook Pro wasn’t slowing down or experiencing a massive change in expected operation, no. But given my numbers-driven patterns-driven way of using computers, I set my expectations up with what the new chip could offer since there was an opportunity to have it for myself without spending much. Having a small collection of older/vintage computers where many individual items aren’t worth much is one thing – where you can hop on eBay, Amazon or your local marketplace to find stuff at mostly any time.
As for having more recent hardware, it tends to get quite expensive so if indeed it becomes so, I tend to stay a generation or two behind and try to find a “sweet spot” between powerful hardware, price, and software support. The M1 Pro MacBook Pro was losing value as it was aging (as does any computer), and Apple’s extra credit (Until April 2) toward Macs provided a short yet consequential window of opportunity to take advantage of. As a technology enthusiast first and foremost, I may have been sentimental over the M1 Pro but it was time to move on and get it while I could.It feels a bit unusual stepping over to an Air from a Pro, but the numbers speak for themselves, as does the performance.
It somehow feels like a spiritual successor to the TouchBar 2018 15″ MacBook Pro.
Maybe it’s just me, but certain angles and design cues remind me of the A1707/A1990. The A3241 clearly is a cut-down, smaller version of the A2485 there’s no question about it. What do you think? I believe they feel sort of similar. (Except the Space Gray, of course!)
The M4 tears through Virtual Machines like a rocket, and Emulates well too.
Part of why I kept around a 2018 15″ TouchBar MacBook Pro was for nostalgia, but it also serves as a very solid backup machine and as an x86/x64 hypervisor. Virtualization focuses on creating virtual machines using existing hardware, whereas emulation aims to replicate the behavior of a completely different system – hardware and software included. Intel Virtual Machines are way snappier on the 2018 MacBook Pro but run acceptably on the M4.
Conversely, Arm virtual machines run mind bogglingly fast on the M4 Air – to the point I don’t have time to take some of the screenshots I want to when booting Windows 11. That and the M4 chip doesn’t get as hot running an Arm VM as does when the 2018 MacBook Pro runs a native Intel Virtual Machine. I can load into Windows 11 arm x64 on UTM, hop into the browser and load the Apple webpage then shutdown the VM all in under 28 seconds on the M4 MacBook Air – this is precisely the type of ludicrousness I was looking for.
As a matter of fact when you use Windows 11 in UTM on this M4 MacBook Air.. you can forget it’s even a virtual machine. It runs as though it’s natively installed.
SSD and RAM disk Performance
So far it’s great in the 2 days using it since being made available to consumers. I haven’t had much time to test everything I’ve wanted to out so far, it’s gonna take at least a month to get a holistic set of expectations. The few things tested out so far were backups off the old ‘Book or easy to setup, and more setting up has to be done over time. Out of curiosity I wanted to see how fast the SSD was, and for fun I made a RAM disk also. The RAM disk blew me away – I had absolutely no idea LPDDR5X-7500 3750 Mhz could go that fast!
(Above: Internal SSD Performance)
(Above: One more ’round for SSD testing)
So.. how fast is that RAM disk? (Not that I’ll ever need one..)
(Above: 14,275 MB/s read on an M4 MacBook Air 15″ RAM disk!)
So far, so good
I like what’s going on with the M4 MacBook Air. It has some heft to it but it’s not heavier like a MacBook Pro – you’ll hold the air and though it’s lighter it feels just heavy enough to feel premium. The Sky Blue color drew me in, I probably would’ve went with Midnite if Sky Blue weren’t the new color – especially since the new Midnite is more black and fingerprint resistant. I’ve already made up my mind, even if I’m nostalgic for what the M1 Pro MacBook Pro was when I had it. Writing articles on here is a breeze even if the screen feels a bit more squished compared to an M1 Pro MacBook Pro 16″, and I haven’t had a chance to blast up the 6-speaker system yet. But wow.. this thing is wicked fast!
See More
- Tech specs on the two different notebooks highlighted in this article:
- Apple hardware and accessories released the same week as the M4 MacBook Air.
- 9to5Mac article: “I bought an M1 MacBook Air in 2025 – but can I resist the M4?”
