It’s nice when a piece of technology makes your life easier, especially when it’s not obscenely-priced. That is an extremely relative judgment, of course, but I was in the market for a new laptop, and the M4 MacBook Air, which just launched for £999, is a seriously-powerful piece of kit that seems to fit all of my needs. For those who have arrived here from Google, I’m a freelance writer and consultant in the games industry, so I have a separate Windows desktop rig and a PlayStation 5 for covering the more power-hungry video games on my docket. I also have profound hearing loss, so I need a laptop that is going to connect with my hearing aids for meetings and easy listening to music, YouTube and so forth.
You might assume, then, that all I need is a lightweight Google Docs and Gmail machine that I can throw in my bag and take to coffee shops and events. But I am, unfortunately, a chronic creative dabbler, with quite high standards for what I want my backpack buddy to be capable of. It needs to be able to handle the Adobe suite, Ableton, Blender, and Godot — among other programs in my rotation — for when inspiration strikes on the road. I also want a laptop that I can play some games on in my downtime, natively or through remote play, when I’m tragically divorced from my Steam Deck. So yeah, no pressure, consumer technology industry!
Initially, this led me to consider the 16″ Razor Blade, widely regarded as the most uncompromising gaming laptop. When I can help it, I don’t like buying cheap and paying twice, and the gaming laptop field, in my previous experience, is a minefield for that sort of stuff (with a healthy sprinkle of forced obsolescence, driver mayhem and bloatware). But it also costs £3,899.99 for a Razer Blade configuration that I’m happy will stand the test of time, and I simply cannot stomach putting down that sort of money when I could instead plan an action-packed long-haul trip, or build two gaming PCs for roughly the same price, and be safer in the knowledge that they’re not going to suffer from some proprietary illness later down the line that I’m unable to fix myself.
So, the M4 MacBook Air. By comparison to the Razer Blade, the M4 doesn’t even have a fan, which means that if it starts to run hot, it will just begin to throttle itself and lower performance over time. It also only has 16 GB of Unified Memory, and 8 or 10 GPU cores, depending on your configuration. Immediately, I’m sure you’re wondering how the hell the M4 is going to complete any of the tasks I’ve alluded towards above, or satisfy my lofty power user needs.
Gaming on a MacBook Air? It’s more likely than you think.
But it just… does. I played several hours of Sid Meier’s Civilization VII last night on high settings, and besides getting a bit warm, the laptop maintained a silky framerate thanks to our mutual friend FidelityFX. You can knock it down to medium, too, and it honestly doesn’t look all that different. I’ve also been working on a new Disco Elysium playthrough on this machine, and the M4 Air is yet to break a sweat. Resident Evil 4, Frostpunk 2, Hades 2, Two Point Museum, Valheim, World of Warcraft… all native and very enjoyable experiences on this humble device. Native 2D games are an even lighter lunch.
And that’s without testing any titles using CrossOver, a tool that allows you to install and play non-native Windows games through compatibility layers, without the need for a virtual machine. Unfortunately, it costs $494.00 for a lifetime CrossOver license, or $74.00 for a year of use, which is a bit much for me when I have a powerful desktop in my periphery vision. Regardless, YouTubers like Andrew Tsai have done the hard work for us here, and the results are pretty flabbergasting. It seems like even Baldur’s Gate 3 will be playable at a pleasant frame rate in a few patches time.
The big elephant in the room is that very few games receive native Mac ports these days, but if this won’t be your main gaming machine, that’s not too much of a problem. Apple is pushing in the right direction on this front with impressive App Store ports for Death Stranding and Control et al, but unfortunately, the company is still way behind the curve.
Put simply, macOS has nowhere near the Steam library available to the average PC player. For example, I have nearly 600 macOS compatible games in a Steam library of nearly 3000. That’s not to say there aren’t some hidden gems, though. Here’s a few to get you started, if you’re in the same boat as me:
- Betrayal at Club Low
- Dandy Dungeon – Legend of Brave Yamada
- Project Zomboid
- Crusader Kings III
- Riven
- House Flipper
- Case/Rise of the Golden Idol
- Barotrauma
- Snowrunner
- Inscryption
- Mad Max
- VIDEOVERSE
- Nearly every LucasArts point-and-click
(Not) Waiting for Godot
On the creative software side, I hopped into a 3D FPS Godot project (that I was previously developing on a M1 MacBook Air), and it was easy-breezy to rapidly prototype and test out some maps. Photo editing and DAW tomfoolery were similarly quick. I also recorded some 4K ProRes footage on my iPhone, airdropped it to my M4, and then scrubbed through it in Premiere Pro at full resolution. No issues there, and the export was quicker than I expected.
I also booted up Blender to render out an old PC project, and was surprised at how solid even the preview looked after a few seconds of loading with the GPU Compute. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a patch on the speed of my 3080-powered PC, but the performance here is pretty astounding for a laptop that weighs just over a kilo.
Of course, I’d still recommend rendering complex projects on a more powerful machine to save time in the grand scheme, but if you’re a hobbyist video editor or 3D modeller like me, this is more than fine. My pixel-textured models were even less of an issue for the M4 MacBook Air, and extruding my beloved cube into a low-poly character model felt nice and slick.
On that point, one of the few downsides to the M4 is that the screen is only 60 hz, which may be a dealbreaker for those of you used to 144 (I get it, it’s difficult to regress). But you can always use an external monitor if this really bothers you — in fact, the M4 allows you to use two external monitors with the lid open (so technically three screens at once), which is great if you love your resolution real estate. Though, as per usual for Apple, the colours on the M4’s screen are rich and the brightness palpable, which helps to assuage some of that lost fluidity.
Alongside the software that I’ve focused on, I’ve also downloaded Illustrator, Aseprite, Game Maker Studio 2, Renpy, Visionaire Studio, Twine, OBS, Final Cut, Logic Pro and Final Draft, which all appear to be working smoothly on the M4. I’m excited to really get stuck into some creative projects on this thing. As for accessories and peripherals, I’ve been using my Logitech MX Master 3S mouse, and have slipped the M4 Air into a tomtoc 13″ sleeve — I’d highly recommend both.
Hearing device accessibility and MFi
You can tap out now if you don’t care about hearing aids or hearing accessibility. But if that’s all you’re here for… welcome! I recently purchased a pair of Philips Hearlink 9050s from Costco, which I’ve been adjusting to. The 9050s are Made For iPhone certified, so they work really well with my iPhone 13 Pro, and I can tap the Hearing Devices widget in the swipe-down Control Centre to quickly control the volume and swap presets on-the-go. My previous hearing aids connected via Bluetooth only, and lacked some of this nifty functionality.
But, in even better news, Apple has expanded MFi functionality to MacBooks too, which is a big reason why I bought this device. Certain M1 chip laptops are capable, but everything after M2 boasts this functionality, including, obviously, the M4 MacBook Air. Plus, pairing 9050s to the M4 MacBook Air is really easy. You just need to head to System Settings > Accessibility > Hearing Devices, and then power down and power up your hearing aids, either by switching them off or dropping them into the charging case briefly, then taking them back out.
Your device should appear under the Available Devices tab, and you just click Connect to finish the job. I’d also recommend heading to the Control Centre settings menu and switching on Show in Menu Bar so you can quickly tinker with presets and levels like you can on the iPhone.
But here’s where it gets really handy. Under Hearing Devices in the Accessibility menu, switch on Control Nearby Devices on both your MacBook and your iPhone (and Audio Handoff on your iPhone). Now, if you’re working on your MacBook, but then pick up your phone and play some audio on it, your hearing aids will detect that you’ve switched devices, and swap back to your iPhone automatically. Pretty cool!
The only issue is that this doesn’t work the other way around. So, if you get back from, let’s say, ahem, the toilet, and you want your hearing aids to handoff from the iOS Instagram app to your MacBook again, you can’t just hit play on a YouTube video. You need to click the Sound widget in your MacBook’s menu bar and manually select your hearing aids. It’s a shame that the handoff isn’t as seamless as using AirPods between an iPhone, iPad and MacBook, but I’ll take what I can get here. Maybe it’s because my iPhone is pretty old by today’s standards, but I’m not so sure.
Further still, I feel like I’m noticing a slight bit of latency when my hearing aids are connected to the MacBook versus the iPhone. I’ve tried using online latency tests, but still haven’t quite figured this out. I can’t tell if this is just my eyes swapping between a 120 hz screen and a 60 hz screen and therefore noticing the difference in fluidity. The benefit of being able to connect my hearing aids to my MacBook overrules the pain here, but it’s still something I’d love to see ironed out. So if you’re reading this, Apple, you know what to do!
Google tells me that some Windows 11 computers have similar hearing aid functionality to the M4, but it is not standard practice. In fact, this forum thread seems to indicate that it’s pretty tricky to pair the 9050s with any Windows PC, at least without an expensive add-on peripheral. If you’re a PC or Android phone user, perhaps there’s an alternative pairing solution for Windows devices coming in a future update — I truly hope so. When I’m at my desk, I currently use external speakers or slip a pair of headphones over my ears — with my hearing aids in. The latter solution is not ideal, obviously, and leads to persistent feedback, which is why I’m now taking all my meetings on my MacBook, so I can hear everyone better.
Should you buy an M4 MacBook Air?
Beyond the M4’s technical prowess enabling my creative and gaming endeavours, it’s a massive boost to my day-to-day life that I can work on my laptop and use my phone while integrated with my hearing aids. That alone has made this purchase worth it for my hyper specific use case, even with the associated quibbles.
Apple’s cheapest MacBook may not be the first option you think of when looking for a powerful portable, but as I hope to have demonstrated, the price-to-power ratio here is undeniably brilliant. Hats off to the boffins at Cupertino — you’ve got me hook, line and sinker, for now.
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1 comment
Cheesoid