Apple’s M4 MacBook Air bump may be just around the corner

Apple is readying its MacBook Air line for an update to M4 chips in March, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter. With the slim laptops’ spec bump, the MacBook line’s M4 transition will be complete.

Gurman didn’t provide timing beyond that the laptops are coming next month, but as usual before it launches a product, Apple is “preparing its marketing, sales and retail teams for the debut” and letting its retail stock of the laptops clear out. Both the 13-inch and 15-inch models are expected to come at the same time, like last year.

Since the Apple Silicon transition, the MacBook Airs have largely shared specs with the low-end MacBook Pro, just packed into a slimmer laptop with omissions like fewer ports and no cooling fan. The base model 14-inch Pro starts with 10-core CPUs and 10-core GPUs and feature 16GB of RAM — you can get a sense of that configuration’s performance from our review of the base M4 MacBook Pro. Ideally, the new Air models will also get the Pro’s key upgrade of being able to simultaneously connect to two external displays with the lid open.

That leaves only the Mac Studio and Mac Pro, which are still M2-generation machines, without M4 chips. Gurman has pegged the Mac Studio’s M4 bump for “between March and June” and the Mac Pro’s anywhere from June to this fall.