The best laptop for most people:
Apple’s smallest laptop still weighs just 2.7 pounds while packing the more powerful M4 chip in 2025, bringing another leap in performance and better battery life. Did I mention it also got a $100 price cut? This is the best laptop for most people in 2025.
The MacBook Air‘s 13.6-inch display remains one of the brightest in a consumer laptop in 2025, and True Tone ensures color accuracy. The only knocks against the Air’s display are its 60Hz refresh rate and the fact that it isn’t as vibrant as OLED competitors. These aren’t problems, but they are things you would notice if looking at it side-by-side with another laptop.
Apple didn’t touch the design this year, which is a good thing for the Air M4, which remains one of the thinnest laptops at 0.44 inches. That level of portability is great, but it’s the fact that it delivers nearly class-leading performance at that size that’s even more impressive.
Looking at the benchmarks, the MacBook Air M4 scored 14,849 on Geekbench 6, well above the category average. Our Handbrake video transcoding test took 5 minutes and 40 seconds to transcode a 4K video to 1080p. This area seemed vulnerable for the Air M3 last year, but this leap puts it near the top again.
Apple’s SSD performance is again outstanding, with a BlackMagic Write speed of 3,456.2 MBps and a Read speed of 3,018.4 MBps.
Thin, light, and powerful sounds like a recipe for battery woes, but the MacBook Air M4 lasted an average of 15 hours and 42 minutes in our Laptop Mag battery test.
