Nobody’s needed to upgrade their computer every year for a long time now. Like smartphones, they’ve matured enough that one is usually fine for a few years. Big leaps in performance are rare these days.
With rumors swirling that the MacBook Air M4 is set to launch no later than next month, the big question for buyers will be whether upgrading is worth it.
Performance evaluations of the MacBook Air M4 have begun to leak out, and they’re impressive. The Air M4 doesn’t just leapfrog over the head of the Air M3. It gets damn close to the base-level Pro M4.
near-pro performance for air money
Credit Wccftech for spotting the appearance of a MacBook Air M4’s bench test on Geekbench that was uploaded on February 19. Geekbench measures the performance of various computers and scores them on a linear “metal score” scheme.
The higher the number of the metal score, the greater the performance. If you were to compare two computers and one had double the metal score, it’d mean it had double the performance. The MacBook Air M4 scored 54,806 on Geekbench’s rating scale. That’s quite a jump compared to the MacBook Air M3, its immediate predecessor, which scored 41,045.
It’s such a big jump that it begins to horn in on the base MacBook Pro M4, which scored 57,596 with the entry-level version of the M4 chip.
While higher-end versions of the MacBook Pro with the M4 Pro and M4 Max chips provide enough of a performance boost over the MacBook Air M4 to justify the increased cost and bulk, the scant performance difference shown on these benchmark tests puts a big question mark over Pro.
We don’t yet know how much the MacBook Air M4 will cost, but we expect it to be not far off from the current MacBook Air M3 starting price of $1,100. Apple has a way of cannibalizing its own sales, and the base-level MacBook Pro M4, which retails for $1,600, was already a poor bargain next to the MacBook Air M3.
The MacBook Air M4 isn’t even out yet, and it’s already showing up the Pro M4. Perhaps we can forgive the Air M4 for taking its sweet-ass time coming to market, after all.
The post The MacBook Air M4’s Performance Scores Just Leaked—It’s Fast appeared first on VICE.
