Year 2024: The 13-inch MacBook Air with M3 had a starting price of ₹114,900. Year 2025: The 13-inch MacBook Air with M4 has a starting price of ₹99,900
You read that right. There is a substantial difference in the pricing structure. The new MacBook, which is available for pre-order, comes at a lower price but inside the slim chassis is a far more powerful chip.
MacBook Air — comes in 13- and 15-inch sizes — continues to be one of the best productivity laptops available for most users. Unless you are working towards becoming the next James Cameron and have a long film to edit, MacBook Air is a good option due to its weight, form factor and reliability. The new MacBook Air supports up to three displays at once — two external 6K displays, plus the laptop’s internal screen.
In some ways, it’s a straightforward update, with no major changes to the laptop’s physical design, screen specs, keyboard or ports.
Mac Studio was designed to pair flawlessly with the expansive 27-inch 5K Retina Studio Display, making it the ultimate studio setup.
Apple’s Mac line did well during the holiday season. The segment grew 16 per cent to $8.99 billion, topping the $7.94 billion estimated by Wall Street, reports Bloomberg.
Air update one
The MacBook Air, as usual, doesn’t have a cooling fan inside but it comes with the latest M4 chip, which is similar to the base 14-inch MacBook Pro, though here it starts with a 10-core CPU and 8-core GPU (there is also a 10-core GPU variant).
With M4, multitasking will be far more fluid and editing photos and videos will be quicker. There is support for up to 32GB of unified memory, making the new MacBook Air up to 2x faster than the M1 model. When compared to the fastest Intel-based MacBook Air, the M4 model delivers up to 23x faster performance. The powerful Neural Engine in the M4 chip, which accelerates AI-based tasks, is also up to 3x faster than on MacBook Air with M1, significantly increasing speed in tasks like automatically enhancing photos and removing background noise from a video.
Having 32 GB RAM option is a first for the Air, which was capped at 16 GB in the M1 generation and 24 GB for the M2 and M3 models.
Air update two
There is a 12MP Centre Stage camera, like the one introduced in the iMac and MacBook Pro last year. The feature makes the camera digitally shift around to follow people as they move and it supports some background removal and replacement effects that older webcams don’t. The new camera is an upgrade from the prior system, which was advertised as a 1080p sensor.
Air update three
Apple has added a new colour option: Sky Blue; it replaces space grey. Starlight, silver and midnight are still around from last year. The new colour has a metallic finish. “MacBook Air is by far the world’s most popular laptop, and today we’re giving everyone even more reasons to love it, including a big boost in performance with the M4 chip, a new Center Stage camera, and a beautiful new sky blue colour,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice-president of worldwide marketing.
New Mac Studio
After over a year and a half, Apple has updated the Mac Studio. Here’s the twist: It comes with an M4 Max for the base model and an M3 Ultra for the upgraded model.
Since the M3 Ultra is now in the Mac Studio, Apple may use a newer-generation chip in the next generation of the Mac Pro. Apple says the M4 Max Mac Studio is three and a half times faster than the M1 Max version from 2022, while the M3 Ultra model is 2.6 times quicker than one with the M1 Ultra.
The M4 Max chip in the standard configuration of the Mac Studio arrives after first coming to high-end MacBook Pros. It has a 16-core CPU and a 40-core GPU, up from the 12-core CPU and 38-core GPU in the M2 Max Mac Studio. The M3 Ultra chip has a 32-core CPU and 80-core GPU, compared with the 24-core CPU and 76-core GPU in the M2 Ultra it replaces. The upgrades make the machine a better option for AI tasks.
Pricing and availability
The 13-inch MacBook Air with M4 starts at Rs 99,900 while the 15‑inch MacBook Air with M4 starts at Rs 124,900. The new Mac Studio starts at Rs 214,900. All machines are in pre-order mode. Availability begins March 12.