Yesterday, Apple updated both the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air to feature the latest and greatest M4 chip, and what you may not noticed is that the base 13-inch MacBook Air actually has a better chip than on the base 24-inch iMac (M4).
Apple introduced the iMac as one of its first M4-base Macs back in October. If you head to the iMac’s tech specs page, the iMac offers two variants of the M4 chip: a binned variant with a 8-core CPU/8-core GPU and a full-fat variant with a 10-core CPU/10-core GPU. If you take a look at the tech specs of the MacBook Air, you’ll see that Apple has another binned variant with more CPU cores for a total of 10. The GPU core count remains the same as the one found on the base iMac at 8 cores.
Therefore, Apple has four variants of the base M4 chip with three of them binned:
- 8-core CPU and 8-core GPU (found in the 24-inch iMac with two ports)
- 9-core CPU and 10-core GPU (found in the iPad Pro models with 256GB or 5126GB storage)
- 10-core CPU and 8-core GPU (found in the base 13-inch MacBook Air)
- 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU (found in the iPad Pro models with 1TB or 2TB storage, 13-inch/15-inch MacBook Air, 14-inch MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and 24-inch iMac with four ports)
So that may explain why even the base 13-inch MacBook Air can support up to two external displays when the lid is open, and that’s one of the biggest features for the MacBook Air’s refresh. The base 13-inch MacBook Air also has two Thunderbolt 4 ports. The base iMac, on the other hand, can support only one external display, and it has two Thunderbolt / USB 4 ports.
The base 13-inch MacBook Air is a far better value than ever before since it now starts at just $999, and when you configure that machine to either at least 24GB unified memory or at least 512GB SSD storage, you’ll get the full-fat M4 chip with all the cores included.
With all the greatest features beyond the M4 chip, MacBook Air continues to be the best-valued Mac for the rest of us, and it’s now a great time to upgrade when you’re coming from an M1 or even an Intel-based MacBook Air.
