Some Apple rumors just don’t go away, hanging around in perpetuity either because they reflect things that Apple is actually testing in its labs or because hope springs eternal. A HomePod-like device with a screen? A replacement for the dear, departed 27-inch iMac? Touchscreen MacBooks? The return of TouchID fingerprint scanning via a sensor located beneath a screen? Maybe these things are coming, but they ain’t here yet.
However, few rumors have had the longevity or staying power of “Apple is planning a low-cost MacBook,” versions of which have been circulating since at least the late-2000s netbook craze. And yet, despite seismic shifts in just about everything—three distinct processor instruction sets, two CEOs, innumerable design changes, and global trade upheaval—Apple’s cheapest modern laptops have started around $1,000 for more than two decades.
Last week, supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo (whose Apple predictions aren’t always correct, but whose track record is better than your garden variety broken-clock prognosticators) kicked up another round of these rumors, claiming that Apple was preparing to manufacture a new low-cost MacBook based on the iPhone’s A18 Pro chip. Kuo claims it will come in multiple colors, similar to Apple’s lower-cost A16 iPad, and will use a 13-inch screen.
When Apple put a notch on the MacBook, I was immensely excited about the functional possibilities, the same kind you see built around the Dynamic Island on iPhones. Expanding live updates, current activities, and navigation guidance are just a few of the examples.
I recently wrote about the Boring Notch and was impressed by with the premise of turning it into a hub for music playback controls, sharing files, calendar access, and even webcam preview. A week ago, I came across another notch-focused app to help you get focused work done using a familiar technique.
What is FocusNotch?
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
FocusNotch is a dual-purpose app. First, it turns the notch into a Dynamic Island where you see a persistent progress timer. Second, it lets you block certain websites (read: social media) at a network extension level and get focused work done.
The setup is fairly straightforward. You download the app from the Mac App Store, launch it, grant it network extension permission, and you’re good to go. Next, all you have to do is take the cursor close to the notch area, and it will expand to show you more controls.
The app lives entirely around the notch. There is no dedicated window running in the background. You don’t even see an active icon in the menu bar. Up front on the home section, you see a large digital stopwatch timer that you can set according to your routine.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
Next to it is the section where you can add websites you want to block during focused work, such as YouTube, X, Instagram, or whatever corner of the internet that distracts you. You can add multiple websites in one go, but you can’t whitelist as long as a focus is active.
Does it work?
Well, to be fair, whether this app works depends on your own discipline. The underlying idea is similar to the Pomodoro technique. Simply put, you set small targets where you engage in deep work, take a small break, and then return for another session.
Does it work? Well, it did, for me. The sight of a persistent task timer around the notch kept me from stepping away from my Mac. Only when I had finished one cycle of focused work did I take a small break, before returning for another session.
Taking pre-determined, systematic breaks during a study session had mood benefits and appeared to have efficiency benefits (i.e., similar task completion in shorter time) over taking self-regulated breaks.
Here is my suggestion, though. Don’t set too long focus sessions, as they will only give you fatigue and eventually suppress the benefits. Depending on your work, try sessions that are like 30 minutes, and then make gradual progress. For me, sessions between 45 minutes to 2 hours worked best to finish research or write an article.
What can it do better?
There is a certain charm in apps that focus on accomplishing one particular goal, and do it in a minimalist fashion. FocusNotch falls in that category. However, I wish it could integrate a few other tricks. For example, instead of setting a single timer, it should also allow the creation of multiple focus timers separated by a break.
TimeCraft, a beautifully designed macOS utility, lets you set multiple timer-based work targets and even color-code them, as you can see below. I also wish there were a route to automatically import a list of distracting websites and whitelist them automatically based on the focus duration with a scheduler tool.
Apps like AppBlock do a fantastic job at it, and for free. 1Focus is another neat option, offering users a block-based approach to restricting websites and creating multiple lists, as well. FocusFirewall is a rather pricey alternative that runs entirely in the Menu Bar and offers a Mac-native design.
I also noticed that the website blocking system in FocusNotch sporadically conked out on my M4 MacBook Air. Of course, I mentally sidelined the thought of opening X when a focus timer was flashing atop the screen, so there’s that helping hand from self-discipline.
Overall, FocusNotch is a neat little app that can help you get work done across short spells of no-distraction activity. And the fact that it gives a purpose to an otherwise useless notch, without costing you a penny, is just the cherry on top.
The battery packed inside your electronics gadgets — such as iPhones and MacBooks — is a perishable item. Over the course of repeated charge-discharge cycles, it loses its mojo due to electrochemical degradation. When that happens, the battery gradually loses its ability to retain electrical charge.
As a result, your devices tend to last fewer hours, even though MacBooks have a better record at it than Windows machines. As the battery loses its ability to provide enough juice for a sustained period of time, certain performance optimizations (read: slower performance) kick into action. Soon, you are left with no other option than getting a battery replacement.
Now, there is no magical pill to avoid battery degradation. What we can do, however, is somehow slow down the electrochemical degradation so that the battery lasts longer. Apple lets iPhone users do that by letting them limit the charging to the 80% level. Unfortunately, no such solution exists for MacBooks.
What’s the solution?
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
The Mac developer and open-source communities have created a handful of battery management tools over the years. But as Apple shifted from Intel to in-house silicon, many of those projects vanished, while the remaining few are pretty expensive.
One such tool that I recently came across— and which gets the job done — was Actually Mentor. This free and open-source application has one core objective, which is to limit your MacBook’s battery to the 80% level. Though it only works on Apple silicon, it has been forked with expanded silicon support and more features, too.
The app is as simple as it gets. It lives within the menu bar and only offers a small drop-down window as its user interface. Installation is fairly straightforward, and all you need to do is give admin access in order to get it running.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
As far as functionality goes, all of it revolves around the 80% charge limit. If the battery is above that level, the app can manually discharge it to reach the target, even if the charging cable is plugged in.
While charging, as soon as the battery reaches an 80% level, further top-up is paused. And as soon as the tank drops below that baseline, charging is resumed. In a nutshell, your MacBook will never go past a certain level.
Thankfully, the app’s functionality is active even if you close it, or the system reboots. If you seek more controls, I’d recommend an Actually Mentor fork named Battery Optimizer for Mac.
This one works with Intel and Apple silicon Macs, replaces the macOS battery icon with a hardware-based charging level indicator, allows periodic calibration, temporarily allows a full charge, creates a log, and shows status reports, as well.
Why do I need one?
Sam Lionheart / iFixit
There are two questions you might ask before installing an app like Actually Mentor. First, does maintaining an 80% charge baseline even matter? Second, what about Optimized Charging that Apple already offers? Well, let’s start with the first dilemma.
Research suggests that lithium ion batteries — the kind you will find inside laptops — undergo stress when subjected to high temperatures. Likewise, if a battery pack is constantly kept at a high voltage potential, the ionic composition is stressed.
Ideally, a lithium ion cell should not remain at the voltage ceiling prescribed for common electronics gadgets for an extended period. For lithium-based batteries, a reduction in peak charge voltage can help prolong their life by hundreds of cycles.
Then there’s the question of capacity loss, which depends on the depth of power discharge. Tests suggest that discharge beginning around the 85% level offers the best battery longevity, though the lower limit might vary.
“A laptop battery could be prolonged by lowering the charge voltage when connected to the AC grid,” says a detailed technical analysis. “To make this feature user-friendly, a device should feature a Long Life mode that keeps the battery at 4.05V/cell and offers a SoC of about 80 percent.”
This is where tools like Actually Mentor and Al Dente come into the picture. Now, let’s address the question about Optimized Charging, which is baked at the system level within macOS.
Well, it doesn’t technically limit the charging level to the 80% mark, but only slows down further top-up, a term commonly known as trickle charging. “Your Mac delays charging past 80% when it predicts that you’ll be plugged in for an extended period of time, and aims to fully charge the battery before you unplug,” explains Apple.
What’s the best way forward?
The folks behind Al Dente suggest that a charge limit between 50-80% should keep your MacBook’s battery in optimum shape for the long run. Actually Mentor, on the other hand, takes a more straightforward approach and locks the upper limit to 80% for charging without addressing the lower limit for discharging.
Apple
As a user, I would prefer the latter approach, as it keeps things simple. Moreover, you can choose to enable or disable this limit without going through any technical hoops. If you are someone who intends to get the most out of their Mac’s battery life, Actually Mentor is the cleanest utility for your Apple laptop.
Of course, it goes without saying that you should stick with the official charging brick, or prefer only those third-party options that meet Apple’s voltage and current criteria to juice up a MacBook’s battery. Poor quality chargers often lead to overheating and suffer from unregulated voltage fluctuations, which can quickly turn into a fire hazard, as well.
In a nutshell, don’t stray too far from Apple’s hardware bundle. And where there are software gaps, fill them with functional utilities such as Actually Mentor. It’s just a sweet bonus that this is an open-source project that is constantly evolving from the feedback of an average user like me, and you.
Microsoft is turning a new chapter for the Surface hardware, one where it competes against the best of Apple across different form factors. The latest from the company is a MacBook Air-wannabe laptop (down to the looks) and a tablet that borrows from the iPad formula.
The new 13-inch Surface Laptop and the 12-inch Surface Pro tablet are curious additions to Microsoft’s lineup. The most perplexing part? Microsoft again went with Qualcomm (and Windows on Arm) instead of picking Intel and AMD, both of which now offer silicon ready for Copilot+ machines.
An exception can be made for the tablet, but the new Surface Laptop is gunning straight for the MacBook Air’s crown. And it’s got some substance, too. It’s the thinnest and lightest Surface Laptop Microsoft has made to date, and it even eclipses Apple’s competing laptop with a better port situation and asking price.
Microsoft
Yet, despite all the on-paper finesse, it falls barely short of emerging as the better option, despite having the price advantage on its side. I quite like the package, but I wish Microsoft had gone the extra mile and given its latest a definitive edge on a few crucial parameters.
A barely missed display edge
The MacBook Air’s panel gets the job done without any major red flags. With some workarounds, you can even get past the controversial notch. But it’s not the best out there, neither qualitatively nor quantitatively.
Microsoft
The likes of Asus offer an OLED panel for less, and you can find a panel with a higher refresh rate for a lower ask. Unfortunately, the new Surface Laptop failed to surpass its Apple rival at either metric by going for a 60Hz LCD screen.
It’s pretty surprising to witness, because the 13.8-inch variant offers a faster 120Hz screen with a more resilient glass layer on top, HDR support, and automatic color management.
It’s not a bad panel, if my own personal experience with the 15-inch Surface Laptop is anything to go by, but there’s nothing standout either. If only the new 13-incher could go with a higher refresh rate, or OLED-type panel, it would’ve instantly scored a meaningful leg-up over the MacBook Air.
The bad storage situation
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
Apple continues to get flak for its stingy storage situation, and rightfully so. If you’re paying a thousand dollars for a laptop, you deserve more than a paltry 256GB of storage. The status quo hasn’t changed all the way into 2025 for Apple.
Unfortunately, Microsoft is not doing anything different either. I was hoping that the company would finally make a course correction with its next-gen hardware, but that didn’t happen aboard the new 13-inch Surface Laptop.
Another issue is the storage type. If you pick the 256B model, you get an SSD storage, but the 512GB variant serves a UFS storage module. It’s not user-replaceable and will require a visit to a service center, if the need arises.
Microsoft
I have learned the storage lesson the hard way, and would never make the mistake again. By picking a 256GB laptop, it is almost a certainty that within a year, or two, you will need an external storage drive.
Unless your work is heavily cloud-based, you shouldn’t go below 512GB if you intend to use a laptop in the long run. That’s a holy rule, more so in 2025 than ever, due to the space taken by AI modules required for local processing of tool such as Copilot or Apple Intelligence.
Limits itself to only the Snapdragon silicon
My experience with Copilot laptops — and Windows on Arm machines, in general — has been fairly smooth. But I fall in the lucky class of users where app compatibility is not an issue, and the raw emulation hit on performance doesn’t take a toll on my workflow.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
There are tangible benefits to picking up an Arm chip. They are definitely more efficient, and the core reason behind the stunning battery life of laptops. Their single-core performance even leaves the likes of Apple’s M4 silicon behind on certain benchmarks.
But limiting users to the Arm experience is not the most thoughtful approach, especially for creative professionals who seek the full x86 ecosystem of apps. Moreover, Intel and AMD are now both making chips that meet the baseline NPU performance criteria for Copilot PCs, ultimately offering a wider diversity for users to pick from.
Games continue to be a prominent chink in the Windows-on-Arm armor, and so is the spotty situation with the availability of Arm64 drivers for peripherals such as printers. The status quo is not all doom and gloom, but it’s not universally smooth either.
Microsoft may not have managed to send shockwaves in the laptop market with its portfolio, but the Surface hardware has always been in a league of its own. The signature wedge-shaped look with sharp angles and flat sides gave them an unmistakable visual identity.
The Alcantara keyboard is one of my favorite laptop design elements of all time. It looked stunning and felt fantastic to touch, though it was also a repairability nightmare. Microsoft has experimented with an all-metal approach, too, but without tweaking the fundamental looks.
Microsoft
In its quest to seemingly one-up the MacBook Air, Microsoft has unfortunately ditched its signature design and nearly aped its Apple rival. The 13-inch Surface Laptop goes for an industrial look that embraces curved sides on the base, an all-metal chassis, and some familiar colors, just like the MacBook Air.
The latest from Microsoft doesn’t look bad. Far from it, actually. A fresh design is always a welcome change, but not when it goes back to a tried-and-tested formula on the very object you aim to surpass. The only positive takeaway is that the proprietary magnetic connector is gone in favor of USB-C and an extra USB-A port.
Hopefully, Microsoft will manage to rectify a few of the internal missteps and give the next-gen model a tangible leg-up over its Apple rival, assuming it’s on the company’s roadmap.
A few months later, I upgraded to the M2 MacBook Air. And there it was. Doing nothing, except looking like a dark oddity. Apple drilled a hole in the iPhone’s screen and then built a whole functional system around it called the Dynamic Island.
The MacBook’s notch didn’t get any such love. That’s a glaring failure. How can I say this? When Apple adopted the notch on iPhone X, the entire industry copied it. Yet, when it did the same for laptops, no major brand was intrigued. Four years later, the notch remains the same.
Thankfully, the enthusiast community has brought it to life by building a whole functional world around it. NotchNook is fairly popular, but a tad too expensive for a notch utility. Then I jumped into the wonderful open-source community and discovered Boring Notch.
What is Boring Notch?
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
The Boring Notch is a free app that you can download directly from the developer’s website or pick up the latest release from its GitHub repository. The app is currently not available on the App Store, so you might want to chip in a few pennies to the developer team behind it.
Before you set up the app, especially if you are running macOS Sequoia, you will have to go through a couple of extra steps. The app doesn’t load directly after dragging the DMG file into the native installer. You will have to walk this path first:
Settings > Privacy & Security > Open > Open anyway. This path for running Borning Notch will require you to authenticate your identity, so there’s that obvious confirmation to deal with, as well.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
Once the app is installed, all you need to do is launch the app, and it will automatically add a shortcut to the menu bar as a four-pointed star icon. In order to access the notch bucket, just hover the cursor near the notch edges or click behind it.
I love it
Why do I need the Boring Notch? Well, it lets the notch serve a purpose. Second, it makes a few frequent computing chores easier, instead of handling them via dedicated apps. Third, it consolidates a few tasks in a single spot, without any overwhelming complexity.
Now, you can open the notch container by moving the cursor or using a keyboard shortcut. The shortcut is customizable, so t̆̆̆here’s that sigh of relief for power users. You can choose to take a sneak peek or open the full control button to make adjustments.
The app’s most obvious utility is making the core music playback controls within easy reach. Play/pause, skip, and rewind are what you get, paired with zesty animations to go with the playback.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
I wish it had volume sliders, but then, it’s already one extra tool compared to the music playback bar in macOS’ control center. Plus, there are dedicated volume buttons at the top of the keyboard deck, and I prefer them instead of dealing with a slider.
On the more fun side of things, you can enable color spectrograms, blur effect for album art, adjust slider color, turn on live music activity, and more. They don’t necessarily add a whole lot of functional bliss, but there are folks over there who appreciate these minor software perks.
Next to the music playback area is a minimalist side-scrolling calendar. Once again, there is not much to dig into, except a quick glance at the events on your calendar for that particular month.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
If there’s an event scheduled, you can tap on it to access more details in the Calendar app. Across four categories, you can select which calendar entries appear in the notch area. I disabled holidays and birthdays, and only enabled preview for work-related entries.
Next, we have a battery indicator. Now, by default, Apple doesn’t show the battery percentage of your Mac, save for the dynamic battery cell icon. You can, of course, enable it from within the Settings page. Thankfully, Boring Notch puts that information right at the top.
Just the right amount of granular controls
On the more functional side of things, if you are working on a multi-screen set-up, you can add the notch on all of them. It looks ugly, but hey, at least “this” notch serves a purpose. Right?
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
The app also has a feature called boring mirror. It’s essentially a small camera preview where you check your camera view and fix your hair, before jumping into a meeting. It’s pretty nifty, actually. I wish there were a clipboard function, but then, I suspect the UI would get too crowded.
Then we have the shelf, a place you can drop files for quick sharing. All you need to do is drag and drop the files into the notch area, and they will be added to a temporary shelf. I often exchange files with my iPad Pro and iPhone 16 Pro. The shelf made it a tad easier to handle them via AirDrop.
For added flexibility, you can set the virtual notch to match the size of the real thing on your MacBook, or increase it slightly to align with the menu bar. If you need something even bigger, there’s an option for custom size adjustments, as well.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
If you are forcing a notch on an external display, or even an older MacBook with a notch-free screen, you still get the aforementioned adjustment controls. I was not expecting a free open-source app to go deeper, but you can also adjust the duration of the cursor hover to expand the virtual notch.
I found my sweet spot at 0.2 seconds, but you can extend it to a full second, as well. There are a total of ten stop levels, so you can find the hover gesture delay that best suits your cursor activity pattern. You can even adjust the notch behavior for full-screen app window modes.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
Going a step further, the Boring Notch app also supports two-finger swipe up and down gestures to access the notch controls, instead of relying on cursor hover or keyboard shortcuts. You can also adjust the gesture sensitivity, which is neat.
What’s next?
The Boring Notch is a free utility that turns a useless physical element into a neat little functional powerhouse. There are no ads to bother you, and neither are there any intrusive details. You can choose to disable features like file and camera access at any given time.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
It’s not perfect, as some of the features are still in beta, and a couple of them can occasionally glitch out. Thankfully, the open-source community behind it is pretty active, reporting bugs and helping resolve them.
On the feature situation, the best is yet to come. The team behind Boring Notch is working on adding more controls, such as volume, brightness, and backlight, in the notch bucket. Browser download indicators, extensions, app switching, and custom function buttons are on the horizon.
It’s definitely worth trying out if you are someone who has a hard time ignoring the notch on your MacBook and wishes it could do more. I am one of those folks, and this app certainly toned down one of my top annoyances with Apple’s laptop.
The iPhone 17 lineup is expected to launch in September, assuming Apple sticks to its usual schedule and isn’t impacted by tariffs. The iPhone 17 Pro, in particular, could come with a new color never seen on an iPhone before: Sky Blue, the same finish that’s on the new MacBook Air units.
Majin Bu, a well-known leaker, shared the news on his website. According to Bu, “sources close to the supply chain confirm that several iPhone 17 Pro prototypes have been made in various colors, with Sky Blue currently the frontrunner.” Compared to the more muted colors Apple has gone with in its more recent devices, a Sky Blue option is a welcome (and brighter) change.
Image used with permission by copyright holder
The iPhone 16 has a lot of different color options, including a pink, green, and darker blue, but only for the base model and the 16 Plus. The Pro lineup’s Titanium color choices are on the duller side with only four choices: Black, White, Natural, and Desert Titanium. Sky Blue is a pleasant shift for users who want a higher-end iPhone in a more eye-catching color.
The iPhone 17 has garnered no small amount of discussion lately, especially with the rumors of a pretty significant design change and new accessories that would allow you to customize the look of the phone. Apple has kept quiet on finer details about the handset, but it usually debuts toward the end of September at Apple’s annual event.
Other rumors suggest the iPhone 17 could arrive with high-end displays across the entire lineup (as opposed to just its Pro models), putting it on par with the iPhone 16 Pro Max in terms of display quality. Rumors have emerged in bits and pieces, but Apple hasn’t confirmed anything. For now, we’re just guessing at what the next handset might hold, but it sounds like the iPhone 17 is set to shake up Apple’s phones in a big way.
Over the course of the past few months, I’ve tried a handful of Windows on Arm machines. The biggest takeaway is that if you buy a slim and light Windows laptop in 2025, you don’t need to hunt for a seat near a wall outlet. The battery life figures I’ve got from Qualcomm Snapdragon X-powered laptops have been pretty amazing.
For the first time, I feel Windows laptops have reached a point where they can reach the high benchmark set by the MacBook Air. My most recent tryst was with the Asus Zenbook A14, and the Dell XPS 13 before that. I loved the thin and lightweight form factors, and the progress Windows on Arm has made with the app compatibility situation.
Yet, despite all the progress, if I were to recommend a slim and light laptop, the MacBook Air M4 would be at the top of my list. There are a healthy few factors that go in its favor, but battery life, in itself, is the biggest driver. I’ve used every iteration of the MacBook Air since the M1 variant, and I think Apple finally struck power efficiency gold with the M4-driven model this year.
Low uptake, high yield
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
It’s not a straightforward choice to buy a laptop with the “definitive” best battery life. There is no such universal benchmark, especially when you’re dealing with an entirely different OS, architecture, and hardware variables. A lot of other factors come into the mix, including the apps and workflow that a machine is supposed to handle.
This is where you make the safer bet, where a balance of performance and battery efficiency is the ideal choice. At that metric, the MacBook Air remains unbeatable. Before we dig into the benchmarks, I’ll show the collective side of why silicon efficiency matters. Take a look at the figures below.
Nadeem Sarwar / DigitalTrends
Two Chrome windows were eating up more energy reserves than a fairly powerful photo editing app, in addition to hogging up nearly four times more memory load and a bigger share of CPU resources, too. And yet, the heavy lifting is deputed to the M4 silicon’s efficiency cores. Only when things get taxing that the performance cores go full throttle.
Another aspect is that the cores try to enter a zero activity phase as soon as they detect the system entering an idle state. I noticed that the four performance cores enter this state far more frequently than the efficiency cores. The latter cluster usually remains active if there is ongoing background activity.
Nadeem Sarwar / DigitalTrends
The gains are not instantly noticeable, but compared to the M3 silicon (four performance and four efficiency cores), the M4 relies more often on its six efficiency cores. The net effect is lower power draw from the battery, and as a result, higher per-charge mileage.
This trend is more discernible if you have enabled low-power mode, either manually or have triggered it automatically for on-battery usage. In this mode, the performance cores on the M4 drop to the zero activity state more frequently than the M3. I observed a similar behaviour across the efficiency core cluster, as well.
The pattern of higher efficiency is also visible across demanding tasks. I encoded a film on Handbrake at the 1080p30 Fast preset. The M4 performed roughly 16% better than the M3 MacBook Air, while using approximately 13% less power. These are approximate figures calculated with assistance from third-party tools, but the M4’s frugal power uptake is evident, nonetheless.
Realistic workflows fare even better
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
My typical workflow includes the famous resource hog that is Google Chrome, divided across three to four windows, and totalling 30-40 tabs on average. Then there are apps (and browser instances) that handle the rest of my workflow, such as Obsidian, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Apple Music, Gemini, Sheets, Grammarly, and iPhone Mirroring.
On the more demanding side of my workflow, there are Photoshop, LumaFusion, and PyTorch. These are the tasks at which the four performance cores on the M4 silicon kick into full throttle, while the rest are distributed across the cluster of six efficiency cores.
When the laptop is running in balanced mode, I have barely ever run into performance bottlenecks. But what surprised me is that even when running the laptop in low-power mode, my workflow didn’t feel any more sluggish. That’s not something I can say for a healthy bunch of ultra-portable Windows laptops I’ve tested in the past few months.
Apple
The Dell XPS 13, powered by Qualcomm’s top-of-the-line Snapdragon X Elite chip, is a fairly performant machine. It even outpaced the Apple M3 at multi-core tasks. But it stuttered more often, froze, and brought Chrome to a standstill far more frequently than I’ve ever encountered with the MacBook Air.
It was able to handle my short-burst, high-demand scenarios like short video editing, but for a full day of work, it was not nearly as smooth as the MacBook Air. That laggardness seeps into the battery life figures, as well.
Another weakness is that Windows laptops are dramatically more aggressive with performance throttling as soon as they enter low-power mode. Apple’s performance cores, even the older ones on the M3, are more powerful compared to Qualcomm’s and Intel’s flagship laptop chips.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
In our battery life tests, the 13-inch MacBook Air delivered a 20% higher score than a Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptop, and it also lasted 40% better than a slim HP laptop with an Intel chip at simulated web browsing. On Cinebench R24, the Apple laptop fared nearly twice as well compared to Windows laptops in its segment.
Peerless, in a lot of ways
In a nutshell, what you get aboard the MacBook Air M4 is not just the promise of a faster laptop, but also one that performs consistently better even in low-power mode. It’s just surprising that despite packing a smaller-sized battery and no active fan to cool things inside, the MacBook Air still manages to run faster and last longer.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
Another crucial consideration is that the entry-level Apple laptop offers a more pixel-dense, but less efficient IPS LCD screen. And yet, it manages to fare better than the rivals that serve a less power-hungry and lower-res full-HD panel.
Of course, the M4 silicon is fundamentally more efficient and powerful than its predecessor. But it’s really the system optimization that compounds and adds up to all those benefits, especially when pitted against a Windows laptop.
Simply put, all that performance upper-hand comes with lower energy intake in tow, and that means the M4 MacBook Air lasts longer in day-to-day workflows than other Windows-based machines in its league. At the end of the day, all you need is a reliable mobile workstation that won’t give you charging socket anxiety.
In that role, I can’t recommend a better machine than the M4-fueled MacBook Air, so far.
I am a huge fan of slim and light laptops. That preference is borne more out of my professional lifestyle than a necessity for absolute silicon firebreathers. I believe a laptop should be, well, light on your lap, or hands, unless you need all that firepower in a mobile form factor.
That’s the reason gaming laptops exist, or those thick workstations such as the HP ZBook with an Nvidia RTX A500 series graphics card. For the rest, a thin laptop can do the job just fine, with its quirky set of compromises. Finding the right slim laptop, however, is the tricky part.
I recently spent a few months with a rather “experimental” kind of slim laptop from Dell. The XPS 13 configuration I picked runs Windows on Arm, and serves an equally unconventional processor – the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite. It was fast, sleek, and filled the 12-inch MacBook’s ache for me.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
Unfortunately, it isn’t the most practical laptop out there. I realized that even more so, after adopting the M4 MacBook Air as my daily workhorse. At the end of the day, I came to the conclusion that Apple’s machine is the more practical, slim and light laptop, without any serious compromises.
Beauty runs deeper than the looks
One of the most arresting aspects of the Dell XPS 13 is its standout looks. The metallic chassis is sharp, sturdy, and has an understated coat of paint on top of it. Lift up the lid, and you will be greeted by a beautiful screen with one of the slimmest bezels you will come across on a laptop, a gapless keyboard, and a seamless glass touchpad with force touch feedback.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
Think of it as borrowing Apple’s tech stack, but executing it more tastefully. That also happens to be the biggest undoing of the Dell laptop. Ever since Dell adopted the futuristic design, users have cultivated a love-hate relationship with the keyboard-trackpad combo.
The infinity trackpad takes a bit of time getting used to, but if you look at the Dell community forum, there are a healthy bunch of users complaining about technical issues. From malfunctioning haptic feedback to one of the edges losing its touch sensitivity, the reports are diverse.
Then there’s the gapless keycap situation. Once again, the user community is undecided on whether it’s the software that often breaks the keyboard, or if it’s the engineering to blame. Ideally, users should not be burdened with flashing the BIOS of their laptop to try and fix keyboard woes.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
The typing experience is also divisive. I grew used to it within a day, but a healthy few of my industry peers have reported that the XPS 13’s beautiful keyboard deck is easy on the eyes, but not so much from a functional lens.
For me, the XPS 13’s zero lattice keyboard and the capacitive function row keys at the top did the job just fine, but it’s hard to look past the valid concerns. The MacBooks I’ve used so far, haven’t given me any such headache in years.
The new MacBook Air arguably has the best combination of a touchpad and keyboard on any laptop out there. On the M4-powered refresh, you get a fantastic build, beautiful design, solid keyboard, sharp display, and no lingering weak spots.
I’d rather side with reliability, especially when I’m spending north of a thousand dollars on a laptop.
You deserve performance, not potential
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
I dived into my XPS 13 experience hoping for a smooth experience, especially after seeing all those comparison charts depicting the Snapdragon X Elite racing ahead of Intel and AMD silicon. It scored above the M3 MacBook Air at multi-core performance, but can’t quite level up at single-core and GPU-heavy workloads.
Running the 3DMark Wildlife Extreme test, for example, shows the Snapdragon silicon lagging behind by a healthy 36% after repeated runs. For me, benchmarks don’t really do justice to a laptop’s true potential, unless it has been tested on a realistic workflow. That’s where the Dell XPS 13 lost the race.
The configuration I tested offered 16GB of RAM and plenty of storage. It was able to handle my workflow spread across Slack, Chrome, Trello, Microsoft Teams, Asana, and Gmail, while Spotify handled streaming duties. Initially, I didn’t run into lags or UI freezing woes.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
But things changed after a few updates. While trying to reboot after the first OS update, I ran into a Windows installation error, which spiraled into a bootloop problem. I tried a few troubleshooting steps shared on the Windows community, but none of them could solve the “unexpected system error” problem I was facing with Windows on Arm.
Dell support tried to fix it on a phone call, but ultimately decided to recall the laptop to avoid any further damage. Another accompanying issue was the constant whirring of the fan and a weird noise at each restart, as if something was stuck within the fins.
After the windows installation issues were resolved, merely a month into setting up the laptop as my daily driver, I started noticing some unexpected hiccups. When connected to an external display and spreading my workflow across Chrome, I began running into unexpected lags and jitters.
Mark Coppock / Digital Trends
App windows often became non-responsive, or the system simply couldn’t register keyboard and trackpad inputs. A machine with this kind of firepower shouldn’t run into such stutters, and certainly not when you are paying a minimum of $1,300 for a laptop.
The latest-gen MacBook Air, on the other hand, has only lifted the game even further. Apple is now offering 16GB of RAM for the same $999 asking price, and coupled with the advanced M4 silicon inside, this machine sets a new standard for laptop performance.
The M4 also enables mesh shading, Dynamic Caching, and hardware-accelerated ray-tracing. Moreover, Apple’s own OS-level optimizations ensure that the MacBook Air is better than ever at demanding tasks such as video editing and coding.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
The performance hiccups I faced with the entry-level M3 MacBook Air (with 8GB RAM) are gone on its M4 successor. I’d gladly take that upgrade, because it blends a higher performance with improved functional reliability. I can’t say the same for Dell’s sleek XPS 13, and I’m not sure who is to blame here.
The OS situation
I had high hopes with the second incarnation of Windows on Arm, led by Qualcomm and its promising Oryon cores atop the Snapdragon X Elite laptop. The silicon has done its job just fine, bringing Qualcomm roughly in the same performance league as the venerable M-series processors by Apple.
Moreover, beating Intel in its first attempt at native benchmarks is no small feat. That’s where the problems begin. You don’t buy a laptop based on its synthetic benchmark performance alone, or its sheer future potential.
You spend real money on a laptop based on what it can accomplish out of the box. Apple did a fantastic job of transitioning macOS from x86 to Arm. Windows, on the other hand, has struggled.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
A Microsoft community member told me that the biggest challenge right now is convincing developers to embrace Prism emulation and optimize their stack for Windows on Arm. Adobe, for example, has done a decent job at optimizing its suite of professional software for Windows on Arm.
But there are a few caveats. Take Premiere Pro, for example. In my most recent run on a Copilot+ PC powered by Snapdragon silicon, I couldn’t run ProRes RAW files or enable AC3 audio playback. Plus, it runs in emulation mode, so a performance hit is expected compared to native Windows on Arm support.
Adobe After Effects is not supported, while InDesign and Illustrator have just entered the beta phase. Adobe Express and Adobe Firefly still run in emulated format, and aren’t native to Windows on Arm, yet.
Mark Coppock / Digital Trends
Going deeper into the realm of specialty software, your experience will be a hit or miss with emulators and gaming clients. Likewise, corporate VPNs, CAD software, and virtual machines remain a weak spot.
Due to non-optimization, many platforms can’t fully tap into the NPU aboard Qualcomm’s silicon. You might even run into limitations at something as basic as printing documents, due to hassles with Arm64-specific printer drivers.
The M4 MacBook Air, on the other hand, serves you none of those hassles. macOS is a mature platform, with its own set of well-known limitations and perks. You aren’t making a leap of faith with this one. You aren’t uncertain about software-specific compatibility. It’s either there, or it simply isn’t.
And that’s what matters. At the end of the day, if a $999 laptop doesn’t raise any red flags, while a laptop that costs far higher asks for your trust (and patience with well-known software-hardware woes), the choice is pretty obvious.
I spend an unhealthy amount of time lurking in communities where people share aesthetic desktop setups. One of my friends recently set the group chat on fire with a triple monitor setup that had two vertical screens and an ultrawide curved panel at the center. An impulse swipe later, I achieved a similar makeover for my desk at home.
Here’s the problem, though. My $600 workstation overhaul did bring me visual joy, but not much utility. For reporting assignments, I spend the majority of the year away from home, working from deserted cafes or unnaturally uncomfortable bunk beds. I do miss the convenience of large secondary screens. Interestingly, that yearning is addressed by a rather unconventional device —the humble iPad.
Over the past couple of years, I have carried iPads in all shapes and sizes. From the tiny iPad mini and the entry-level iPad to the 13-inch iPad Pro. I have used them extensively for video editing, photo touch-ups, gaming, and reading comics. But the best utility that I’ve got from Apple’s tablet is pushing it as an external monitor.
The problems an iPad solves
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
There is no dearth of minimalist monitors out there. Some are even thinner than the MacBook Air, while a few snap right to the lid, like some protective case. However, there are a few fundamental issues with external monitors, even if you aren’t vexed by lugging one around in your bag.
First, they burden you with the hassle of a wired connection. That, in itself, is troublesome for a couple of reasons. It leads to unnecessary wire clutter. Plus, plugging in an external monitor means you lose one port, for as long as you are working.
In the age of ultra-sleek laptops, ports are a luxury. The MacBook Air, for example, only features a couple of ports. That means you will have to juggle between charging and peripheral connection with the other USB-C port, but can’t do any of it simultaneously.
Yes, that is a full-fledged macOS running on the iPad mini.Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
If your profession entails handling heavy media files, plugging in (or out) external storage is a part of the daily routine. And that means you really a free port always at your disposal. The solution? Of course, prepare to live the dongle life. Or fork out extra cash for a dongle.
The biggest problem of them all? Power draw. You may not always have a power outlet at your disposal, especially if you are someone who works on the move or away from home. I recently tried a sleek external monitor from Arzopa, and quite liked it. But booking up to my laptop drained its battery, and I quickly found myself hunting for a power port.
So there I was, juggling with power bricks, wires, and port anxiety, once again. The iPad solves all those problems in one go. You don’t need any cables. You aren’t burdened by a power-sipping peripheral. You aren’t tasked with handling a clunky third-party app. The iPad is just ready.
The world’s most convenient monitor
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
The Apple ecosystem is just seamless.
No situation exemplifies the above argument better than pairing an iPad to your Mac. Actually, no pairing process is involved. As long as your Mac and iPad are signed in with the same Apple account, you’re good to go. No pain-in-the-back Bluetooth pairing or manual Wi-Fi tethering is needed.
Just bring the two devices close, and it’s a smooth-sailing journey from there. All you need to do is expand the control center, click on the screen mirroring icon, and select your iPad from the drop-down menu. Heck, you can skip that, too.
Just hover the cursor over the green window shortcut in any Mac app, and you will see a dedicated option that says “move to iPad.” A click is all it takes to move that app to your iPad’s screen. That’s it. Your external display is now in action mode.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
In fact, you don’t have to worry about unlocking your iPad. Even in a locked state, you just have to click on the aforementioned window control on your Mac, and it will open on your iPad’s screen directly. No unlock or preparatory setup is needed across either device.
There is nothing that comes even close to this kind of seamless interplay between two entirely different classes of devices — separated across operating systems — except the Apple ecosystem.
Pushing an iPad as a secondary screen
My workflow is divided across more apps than I’d like. Technically, I can access a healthy few of them across browser tabs, but juggling between them is a hassle. I’d much rather hit the Command+Tab shortcut to shift between apps than head back to the mouse, find the appropriate tab, and switch back and forth. Apps, or web instances running as apps, do the job for me.
Moreover, with browsers, it becomes a chore to track the notifications on platforms such as Slack and Discord, where multiple buzzy channels can quickly throw your zen into disarray. It becomes difficult to track such conversations spread across multiple browser tabs.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
Apps, therefore, are the most convenient option for me. Of course, that means dedicated windows for each of them. But there’s only so much screen real estate you have on a 13-inch laptop, even with Stage Manager, you only get a partial reprieve.
With an iPad coming into the picture, I can safely switch at least two non-important or chat apps, in split-screen mode on the iPad. That leaves wme ith a near obstructed view of the apps that make up the bulk of my workflow, right in front of my eyes on the laptop screen.
In my case, Teams and Slack usually go on the iPad. Off the work hours, it’s usually a no-distraction slate for writing articles. When I have the iPad Pro handy, photo and video editing is deployed on the tablet’s OLED screen due to the superior color output.
I love that the macOS clipboard works just fine with iPadOS, too.Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
In the lowest-stakes scenario, the iPad mini simply serves as a screen for music playback control, watching lecture videos, or keeping an eye on my social media feed for gathering breaking news events.
A surprising OS versatility
One of the nicest things about Sidecar — the inherent tech that allows an iPad to work well alongside a Mac — is the OS flexibility. You can choose to either wirelessly mirror or extend the screen of your Mac to an iPad. But here’s the nicest part.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
Apple’s Universal Control tech allows you to use the Mac’s monitor as the input source on a nearby iPad. And once again, there’s no complex setup required. All you need to do is drag the cursor towards the screen edge near the iPad, and voila, your Mac’s keyboard and touchpad now serve as input devices on the tablet, too.
That means I can control the tablet running iPadOS, and interact with mobile apps in their natural state. It may not sound like much from a functional perspective, but this convenience slowly grows on you. For example, social media platforms such as X or TikTok work better as an app.
Compared to desktop apps, especially task management platforms where the workflow is updated in the cloud, I’ve found mobile apps to be the snappier option. What they lack in features, they make up for with speed and fluidity.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
Plus, it’s easier to track notifications on a mobile device compared to a desktop environment. Despite the OS disparity, there is virtually no input, and I can easily copy-paste material across both devices.
I do a lot of standalone work on my iPad Pro, and even used the baseline iPad for the better part of a whole year, but the inherent limitations of iPadOS often repulse me. Overall, my iPads — of which I have an unhealthy number lying on my desk — have found more utility as a secondary screen for my Mac than standalone tablets.
I just wish could solve some of the scaling and screen rotation bugs. And while at it, maybe, enable Stage Manager for the iPad mini, now that it is technically ready from a hardware perspective.
Our review of the M4 MacBook Air has just dropped, and it’s fair to say it’s one of the best laptops money can buy. For the first time ever, we gave it full marks and a five-star score, with our reviewer dubbing it “as close to perfect” as any laptop they’d seen. There’s no question that it raises the bar for thin and light laptops.
You name it, the MacBook Air has it: impressive performance that belies its lightweight design, build quality that will stand the test of time, a quiet and fanless operation that ensures you can work in peace, a comfortable keyboard and expansive trackpad, and so much more.
Yet there’s one thing that is conspicuous by its absence from Apple’s latest laptop: an outstanding artificial intelligence (AI) system.
Mark Coppock / Digital Trends
Sure, the MacBook Air doesn’t lack AI entirely: there’s Apple Intelligence, after all. But this is widely viewed as a poor choice among AI platforms and a long way behind its rivals. It’s not exactly what anyone would describe as ‘first class.’
To me, that makes the M4 MacBook Air feel like an interesting antidote to the current AI frenzy. Right now, every laptop maker is trying to promote AI as a reason to buy their devices, Apple included. Read Apple’s MacBook Air press release and you’ll see the company tout Apple Intelligence’s “incredible capabilities … that make Mac even more helpful and powerful.”
Yet you just have to spend a few minutes with Apple Intelligence to know that alternatives like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot are far more capable and powerful. Apple was caught flat-footed by the AI explosion, and it still hasn’t caught up. But does that matter? The MacBook Air suggests it does not.
Defying the AI bubble
Apple
As our review shows, the MacBook Air has obliterated the competition despite its AI system, not because of it. If anything, it proves that the best laptops in the world don’t need AI to create incredible experiences for their users.
In my opinion, that comes down to Apple absolutely nailing the basics. The M4 MacBook Air offers performance, longevity and build quality, all for a fair price. Its M4 chip is not only a step up over the previous M3, but it extends Apple’s lead across the entire industry. You won’t find a better trackpad or speakers on a laptop in this class, while the design exudes the kind of quality that’s almost unknown in a device this slim.
That is what makes a great laptop, not artificial intelligence.
I don’t think a revelation like this is going to slow down the proliferation of AI-enabled laptops any time soon. AI is an industry that is currently experiencing a massive boom (some might say a bubble) and there is money to be made. Company leaders clearly don’t feel like they can afford to miss out.
But as the MacBook Air aptly demonstrates, AI is clearly not necessary to make a superb laptop. If anything, that’s the lesson we should take from Apple’s M4 MacBook Air.
Do you need AI?
Mark Coppock / Digital Trends
If you’re a user looking to get a new laptop, the example of the M4 MacBook Air emphasizes that you should continue prioritizing those machines that get the core principles right. Instead of flashy AI, you’ll get the best experience from a laptop that solves the kinds of problems you actually face in your everyday computing life.
When considering a laptop, you’ll need to ask a few questions. Does it meet your needs? Is it affordable? Will it last well into the future? For most people, those questions will be far more important than whether it can run Apple Intelligence or ChatGPT. Nine times out of ten, AI will only be a minor part of this equation, if it figures at all.
In other words, it’s my opinion that the M4 MacBook Air proves that you shouldn’t get swept up by the AI hype. Buy the laptop that meets your needs instead.
And perhaps it’s also a reminder to Apple: continue focusing on what users love and don’t let your vision be clouded by AI. The company is on the right track as it is. It shouldn’t sacrifice its ability to make great laptops on the altar of AI.
There’s no way that Apple will suddenly stop working on AI. But if it can ensure it doesn’t divert its efforts away from the features its users care about the most — those features that have made the M4 MacBook Air so superb — everyone will be better off.
