I’m a lifetime PC user, and I bought this Apple M4 MacBook Air with my own money to find out whether it’s actually good enough for video editing. Here’s my story.
Way back in 1996 my dad bought the family a 300MHz Compaq Presario desktop, and ever since then I’ve been a Windows guy. Windows 95, ME, XP, Vista, 7, heck, even 8, and now 10 and 11. I’ve always either built my own desktops or used heavily customized PC laptops, because up until 2020, from a hardware perspective, PCs were superior. That changed whenever Apple released their M series chips, and after about five years of development it’s become incredibly hard to ignore what they’ve built up, especially in laptops.
Why I Took The Leap
I’ve found myself traveling more and more lately, and while I have a powerful Dell PC laptop that’s only a couple of years old, as a video editor I could only ever expect 3 to 4 hours on battery. Whenever you add in the fact that Windows laptops perform significantly better plugged in than they do on battery, my ability to edit on the go was really being stifled.
So I decided to dip my toes in the water. I wanted something ultra lightweight that I could use for some light editing, and at the very least could copy footage off my memory cards until I got home to my much more powerful Windows desktop. That pointed me at the most affordable current laptop Apple makes, the M4 MacBook Air, with a small bump to the 10 core GPU and 512GB of storage instead of the base 256.
Buying Experience
I bought this the day before traveling internationally, so I went to Best Buy, told them I wanted silver or sky blue, and got home to discover they’d accidentally sold me a black one. That wasn’t entirely their fault, because the box doesn’t say the color anywhere on it, and in the store it genuinely looked blue on the packaging. Whenever I went back the next day, a few hours before leaving for the airport, even the guy working returns thought it was sky blue until we opened it and both went, yep, that’s definitely black.
Thankfully there was an Apple Store 15 minutes from the airport, so I drove over, bought one, threw it in my suitcase, and didn’t even turn it on until I was waiting at the gate.
The reason I’m telling you that story is that one of the major strengths of Apple laptops is the near ubiquitous presence of an Apple Store in almost every major city, and it’s hard to overstate how helpful that is. Back in early 2020 I was four hours from a 19 hour flight to Australia whenever I discovered I’d left the charging cord for my Dell XPS at home, eight hours round trip away. That laptop wouldn’t charge over USB-C, it needed an older barrel plug, so I frantically searched until I found a Micro Center 45 minutes away with a universal adapter.
That story has a happy ending in that I found a charger, but two big cons. First, I had to make a long drive for a third party adapter when I guarantee there were multiple Apple Stores dramatically closer that would have had exactly what I needed. Second, that third party charger came back to bite me, because it made my laptop battery swell over the two weeks I was in Australia, and I had to get the entire battery and chassis replaced. Thankfully it was still under warranty from Dell so it didn’t cost me anything.
Build Quality
Build quality is unsurprisingly exceptional. Apple has really perfected the aluminum unibody, it’s incredibly sturdy, and at 2.7 pounds this is the second lightest laptop I’ve ever owned. Second lightest? Yes, because I owned a $200 netbook back in 2007 that weighed 2.2 pounds, had a seven inch sub 720p screen, and a keyboard designed for a small child. Apple wins in literally every other category against it.
Open this thing up and you’re looking at easily the most color accurate screen I’ve seen out of the box on a laptop. Whenever I color calibrated it I found myself going, wait, did the colors even change? It’s incredibly impressive if you’re planning on color grading. I still always recommend calibrating, because just because mine looked accurate doesn’t guarantee yours will, there are always manufacturing variations.
Compare that to my last three PC laptops, two Dell XPS and a Precision, where I always ran into color accuracy issues with the OLED panels Dell was using, usually oversaturated and forcing me to recolor anything I’d edited on the laptop once I got back to my calibrated desktop monitor. Dell has improved, but even now I always send anything I edit on the PC laptop to my desktop to double check colors before it goes to YouTube. It’s a pain. With the MacBook Air, having now color graded multiple videos on it, the grades look accurate and correct.
Sleep Mode Just Works
With a Windows laptop I’ve trained myself to completely power it off when I’m not using it, and that’s been true since I bought my first one in 2005. I know Windows has supported sleep for decades, but I’ve never had a good experience with it. I’ve had the battery drain in sleep so many times, and there’s no worse feeling than getting to your destination, cracking open the laptop, and finding it dead because it either drained inexplicably or decided to wake itself up in your backpack with the fans running and nowhere for the air to go.
With the MacBook Air I don’t worry about it at all. I close the lid with absolute confidence that it’ll sleep with minimal drain, and when I open it, it’s instantly awake and ready. This laptop feels way more like my phone, and I only restart it once a week or so if I feel like it. That’s a massive shift after literal decades of PC use, and I still catch myself going to the shut down menu and thinking, wait, I don’t need to do that. Just close it. It’s fine.
Battery Life
Once my Dell was running, even though it was rated for 8 to 10 hours, pushing it hard editing meant 3 to 4 hours before it died. And due to some limitation of Windows that’s existed basically forever, even with the battery set to high performance mode it would still run about 25% slower than it did plugged into AC power. I don’t know why, but it’s been true of every Windows laptop I’ve ever owned from every manufacturer.
With the MacBook Air I’ve noticed zero difference in editing speed plugged in versus on battery. And then you combine that with a frankly mind blowing amount of battery life. Apple has been touting 15 to 18 hours since the M1, but that’s for web browsing or video playback, not 4K editing, so in my mind I figured maybe I’d get 6 or 7 hours out of it. Still double the Dell, but nowhere near the claim.
Cue my complete shock whenever I was editing for hours on a plane over the Atlantic at 36,000 feet, thought to check the battery, and saw 89%. I’d been working nonstop and it had dropped all of 11 percent. Those of you already on an M series Mac are going, Matt, welcome, we’ve had this for years. Well, it’s mind blowing to me.
If you need to edit on the go and you don’t want to stress about battery, just get a MacBook. So much of my travel used to be waiting for a power plug, or using the PC laptop purely to copy footage and waiting until I got home to edit. Now I don’t need to find an outlet and I trust the colors, so I have more time to edit than ever before. This laptop is literally making me more productive.
Mac Quirks
It’s not all sunshine and rainbows. The touchpad is the best I’ve used on a laptop, the palm rejection and smoothness are basically unbeaten, and Dell has been catching up but still isn’t there. But right clicking took me a whole day to figure out. On my Dell you click the right side or corner of the trackpad. That doesn’t work here. You have to rest one finger on the trackpad and click with another. I struggled for literal hours, and once I figured it out it felt natural and I now like it more than right clicking on a PC. I almost wish Apple popped up a little tips app on first boot going, hey, are you switching from Windows? A little Clippy. They’ll never do it, but I’d appreciate it.
The keyboard feels clicky and comfortable and I’m very glad they’re not using butterfly keys anymore. But cutting and pasting drives me up the wall. On Windows I select files, Ctrl+X, go to the destination, Ctrl+V. I move video files between drives and cards constantly. On macOS, Command+X doesn’t cut. You press Command+C to copy, then Command+Option+V to move. That’s an extra button press and I don’t think it’s needed at all.
Also, wow is the backspace key slow. If you’ve got a big block of text to delete, Windows chews through it, but on Mac it’s almost like it pauses at every single letter. If you’ve used a Mac your whole life you probably have no clue what I’m complaining about, but coming from Windows it’s really noticeable.
I do like the combo power button and fingerprint reader for logging in and confirming settings changes. But it’s extremely weird to me that Apple has a literally identical looking notch on their laptops as on their phones and still hasn’t put Face ID in them. Windows has had face unlock for years, and on my Dell I just turn it on, look at it, and I’m in. I know Apple can do it. They do it on phones and iPads. What’s up with that?
My other real gripe is how hidden the file system is by default. I remember when there was a hard drive icon right on the desktop. Now I open a Finder window and still don’t see a drive, so to get to the underlying folders like Applications I have to go through the Go menu. As a power user I want to get at those faster. Let me risk breaking things! I’ve made some of it quicker with shortcuts, but I’ve still got work to do to get it how I like it.
On the pro side, the iPhone integration is genuinely great. iMessage for sending text and files, AirDrop for pulling reels I’ve cut over to my phone for social, and I was really impressed when I put my AirPods in and the laptop connected automatically despite never having paired them. Stellar work.
Video Editing Timeline Performance
Remember, I bought this expecting a tiny laptop I could dump footage onto, and best case maybe do some light editing if I was patient with it. I opted for the 512GB model over the 256, which also came with that slight GPU bump from 8 to 10 cores. And with the M4, Apple raised the base RAM from 8GB to 16GB, which is really the minimum for 4K editing in my opinion, so I didn’t have to pay extra for memory. Out the door from Apple it came to $1,297.92. That exact configuration is at Amazon and B&H if you want to price it up.
I did consider 1TB of storage, but that would have pushed it much closer to $1,500, and at the time I could have bought a base 14 inch MacBook Pro with a fan for around the same price. That would have been faster with less storage, and bigger, and I wanted small for travel.
So I opened it up, installed DaVinci Resolve, launched it, and almost blew my beard clean off.
I imported 4K footage I’d shot in 10 bit H.264 and H.265, highly compressed, at 24, 60, and 120fps, and it had no lag. Zero. Timelines scrubbed around like butter. It cut literally as fast as my $5,000 custom built Windows desktop, without being plugged in, on battery power, at 36,000 feet. A flawless editing experience. I was gobsmacked, bamboozled, brains scrambled like your eggs for breakfast.
Is it perfect? No. After Effects froze up on me a few times, but maybe that’s just Adobe, and I was also processing a RAW timelapse of 300 photos at the same time, so a crash or two is understandable.
And this is the base model. I’m actually tempted to say that if you’re just editing 4K in H.264 or H.265, you don’t need to waste money on a MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro or Max chip. The Air is great. It’ll do the job incredibly well. Save your money and use it to buy tacos.
Render Speed
I edited an entire vlog of my trip to Scotland on this laptop, 45 plus minutes long, hundreds of clips, timelapses, drone footage, heavy coverage, all in DaVinci Resolve. It cut through the timeline like butter, but rendering took a little while: 40 minutes on battery power.
Is that surprising though? There’s no fan in it. There’s no real vent anywhere, and rendering is a very CPU and GPU intensive task that generates a ton of heat, so I’m sure it was throttling itself back so as not to melt.
For context, my custom built desktop, which has twice the cores and literally five fans, rendered the same project in 13 minutes and 54 seconds, a little over a third of the time. Which is exactly what I’d expect from a dramatically more powerful machine that cost roughly five times as much and is always plugged in sucking down power.
So expect a stellar experience on the timeline, which is where you spend 95 to 98% of your time anyway, and give it some extra room at render. It doesn’t get uncomfortably warm, it just takes a while. The higher end Pros are faster thanks to a fan and more media encoders, but the Air is no slouch and I’d still trust it with larger jobs. You’ll just have to take a break and get a taco while you wait.
All this talk of heat made me want to try a thermal pad modification to see whether it improves render speeds, and I did eventually get around to testing exactly that in this $10 mod.
Noise vs PC
Edit a video on any PC laptop, or a premium MacBook running an Intel chip, and you know fan noise intimately. Clicking the Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve icon is enough to make basically any PC laptop sound like it’s taking off for orbit, and my Dells have been no exception. Dell has done a lot of work to make their fans less high pitched, but it doesn’t matter, once you start editing you hear them from across the room. In my experience their fans run loud for about a year until enough BIOS updates optimize them. Yes, a year.
The MacBook Air? What fan noise? You have to have a fan to have fan noise. It’s so smooth editing video and it doesn’t make a sound doing it. The bottom does get a bit warm, but nowhere near uncomfortable.
Am I Switching To Mac Forever?!
Considering the performance, the size, the quality, and the price, I don’t see myself buying another PC laptop for video editing ever again. Sure, things could change. Qualcomm could catch up and Windows could fully support ARM properly. But Windows has already had five years to respond and Intel has had five years to catch up, and it hasn’t happened. This is the best cheap laptop you can buy for video editing today, and I think Apple is going to be in the lead for a while.
Am I switching completely? Nah, not yet. I still like Windows, I still like PC gaming, I still like building my own computers, and I have a very powerful Windows desktop. Why would I spend money upgrading to a Mac Studio if I don’t need to? But whenever I’m traveling, which is more and more lately, I won’t be bringing a PC laptop along any more.
My only regret is not going for 1TB of storage. It would have cost $200 more, but because I’m genuinely editing full videos on this thing I’d have liked the space. Oh well. I’m still really happy with 512, and I think it’s the sweet spot.
If you’re weighing this against the newer machines, I’ve since compared them directly in M5 vs M4 MacBook Air for Video Editing and in MacBook Neo vs M4 MacBook Air. And if you want to get faster at the editing itself, my Edit Videos Like A Pro guide covers the biggest tips it took me years to learn, completely free.
One last thing worth knowing about. There is a company called Get Upgraded that lets you buy a MacBook the way you buy an iPhone, paying monthly and trading up to a new one every two years, and it does not cost more than buying outright with AppleCare included. They are not sponsoring this, I am an affiliate, and I genuinely would have used them if I had not bought this laptop 24 hours before leaving the country.
\nLet me know what other videos you want to see me make about this laptop!