MacBook Air M4 for development: 1 year review
MacBook Air M4 for development: 1 year review
Published on 21 June 2026
TL;DR: After nearly a year on the MacBook Air M4, coming from a Linux<br>Ryzen ThinkPad: fanless, great battery, no performance difference vs.<br>the Pro for typical dev workloads, 24 GB is enough. No regrets.
Almost a year ago I switched from my good Linux Ryzen 7 PRO-based<br>ThinkPad to a MacBook Air M4. I wasn't really looking to switch,<br>but my ThinkPad had broken down (because of bad luck).
I was interested in M-series MacBook laptops back then. My company had<br>given me a MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro chip and I was amazed. So I<br>kinda planned to buy one as my next laptop, and the time had come sooner<br>than expected.
At $WORK I've noticed I've never pushed the MacBook Pro's M4 Pro chip to<br>its limits, so I decided to save a few bucks and consider an Air (M4)<br>instead of a Pro (M4 Pro).
Background
For context, I'm coming from a Linux background, and I spend most of my<br>time in a terminal with typical workloads that fall into two categories.
Frequent workloads:
Writing code in Neovim with continuous type-checking and LSP running
Compiling non-trivial Go projects
Building Docker images (sometimes pretty heavy ones)
Occasional workloads:
Transcoding media with ffmpeg (video and sound)
Running small models such as qwen3-8b and gemma-4-26b-a4b
Compiling toy projects in Zig and Rust
The Ryzen 7 PRO I previously had was excellent performance-wise,<br>and bonus: it had AVX-512, which is pretty sweet since ffmpeg<br>and some codecs can leverage it. It worked very well. (well, needless to<br>say those workloads drained the battery very fast.)
But overall I could hear it blow even on modest workloads and the battery<br>drained pretty fast. Not as fast as older AMD or Intel generations, but<br>still. For a laptop I was ready to trade some performance for comfort. I<br>mean, it's in the name: laptop. That thing is supposed to be on my<br>lap without burning my skin. I also wanted to have that peace of mind,<br>knowing I wouldn't need a high power USB-C charger everywhere I go, even<br>for a couple of hours.
The recent Ryzen CPUs ("U" series, designed for power efficiency and<br>mobile applications) are not that terrible, they're much better than a few<br>years ago. But compared to an Apple M chip, it's a totally different<br>story.
Pro vs Air
Overall performance
I noticed no difference in performance between $WORK's Pro and my<br>Air. My typical workloads are pretty similar: I compile Go projects on<br>both, I use the same Neovim + LSP setup on both, same browser, etc.
Heat management
The Pro has fans, while the Air relies on its aluminum chassis to conduct<br>heat outside the machine. I worried about thermal throttling, but it turns<br>out I worried for nothing, because the thermal dissipation is very<br>manageable and pretty fast. When I run MLX models the chip and the bottom of the chassis get pretty hot, but<br>fortunately the machine cools down pretty fast. Having a stand certainly<br>helps here. It's pretty much the same story with big ffmpeg<br>batches, and it never triggers throttling when I compile moderately-sized<br>Go projects, or type-check a big TypeScript codebase. For Rust (well,<br>LLVM), it's kind of okay too, but I've never tried compiling a big<br>project.
During "regular" operations (Web browsing, coding, watching videos), the<br>laptop stays perfectly cool.
But, beware: aluminum conducts heat both ways, so having it on my lap can<br>make it warm: body-heat-warm. It's okay though, I don't think that causes<br>noticeable performance degradation on regular workloads.
Memory: is 24GB enough?
My previous Linux laptop had 32GB of RAM, so I was a bit worried about<br>stepping down to 24GB. I hesitated between the 24GB and 32GB<br>configurations, but after months of use 24GB seems perfectly fine for my<br>purposes. 16GB would have been tight, though.
For instance, I need to run a full Linux VM to get podman working, and I've never encountered any memory-related<br>error even during big image builds.
As for inferences, since I usually use the 4-bit quantized models, they<br>fit in RAM without much problem, with peaks at 5GB-8GB of memory.
Conclusion
Those M4 laptops, whether Air or Pro, are genuinely impressive hardware.<br>The performance is there and the battery life is there too. I think I<br>wouldn't pick a Mac for a desktop workstation (I'd rather get a<br>Ryzen 7 and Linux for that), but for a laptop: absolutely no<br>regrets .