MacBook Air M4 and Pro M4 Pro a month later…

I finally upgraded my MacBook Air M1 at work last month, going to the M4 version with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD. I also have an M4 Pro MacBook Pro at home, which replaced a Mac mini M1 about a month before the Air M4 came out, I had been holding out for the Air, but it was just taking too long to come to market.

Moving from the M1 to the M4 was a huge performance boost. The M1 only had 8GB RAM and since the recent Microsoft Office updates and macOS Sequoia, it had become very slow with the “typical” load, opening an appointment in Outlook left Outlook with a spinning beach ball for around 30 seconds!

Typical Load

My typical daily apps that are always loaded at work are:

• Outlook
• Teams
• Swyx (VOIP telephone system)
• 1Password
• Brave (normal web browsing and M365 user account, around 30 tabs open)
• Safari (M365 administration account)
• OneNote
• Microsoft Windows App (Remote Desktop etc.)
• TeamViewer
• Excel
• Word
• Adobe Reader

I also have Parallels with a Windows 11 Enterprise VM, but I rarely use it these days – the only app I need it for is the Swyx management console, everything else runs natively.

That all ran on the 8GB M1, until macOS Sequoia came along, then it started to struggle a bit and MS Office has been bloating out in recent months as well. On the M4 everything runs smoothly.

Configuration

Air M4 – 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD

Pro M4 Pro – 24GB RAM, 1TB SSD

The MacBooks are connected to a Ugreen Revodock Max 208 (4 TB4 ports and 3 USB-A 3.0 ports, plus Ethernet. There is a 44″ LG 4K display attached via USB-C to the dock, Perrix Periboard 835 keyboard (ergonomic with linear red switches), Logitech MS Master 2 mouse, Logitech Webcam and, at home, a Rode NT USB microphone. I have the same setup at home and at work, so switching between the two “just works”.

Performance

Switching from the M1 to the M4 (Pro) made a huge difference, the whole experience feels smooth again. Word and Excel load within 2-3 seconds, which is a lot faster than it used to be – MS Office on the Mac has always loaded slowly, compared to Windows, where, depending on the version and processor, it would load almost before you had finished double clicking. But, given that you rarely have to start the applications, that isn’t a real problem.

The performance is really good and easily outstrips the new Dell Latitudes with Core i5 13th/14th generation processors or the Core Ultras we have. The apps also use a lot less memory, whereas Teams will bring an 8GB Windows laptop to its knees, on its own (having a 5 way conference on my Lenovo ThinkPad T480, I would have to close all open applications to stop Teams from stuttering as Windows was busily swapping memory in and out from the SSD, the M1 Mac never had that problem and, with double the memory, the M4 doesn’t either.

Use

What I really love about macOS (and some Linux desktop managers) is that your account logs on and you are where you left it, all of the applications that were open before the shutdown restart automatically.

Everything seems to flow and there are no hiccups or glitches, no waiting for Outlook to catch up with you etc. I have been using a Mac at home since 2022 and at work since late 2023, so I have all the apps I need, I don’t have any Windows only apps, apart from the aforementioned Swyx management console.

Privately, I also use the MBP for photo editing and it doesn’t even break a sweat and I have still never heard the fans spin up. (At work, I had been using a Lenovo TB3 dock, but it stopped working and I grabbed a Dell TB4 dock, the fan noise from it, after 2 years of no fans was driving me crazy! The Revodock Max is passively cooled and doesn’t even get warm to the touch.

I have used the sidecar feature of having the iPad as a second screen, that works really well and is very useful when I have to sign documents, I push the window from the Mac or the LG monitor to the iPad and sign it there with the Pencil.

Apple AI

This only started rolling out in April and I haven’t had much time to experiment with it. I did try and generate a couple of images, but it has severe limitations. I wanted to create an image of the Whitestar flying past Babylon 5, but it didn’t understand the prompt in English – it seems that it will only accept prompts in German, it doesn’t understand English – and in German it said it couldn’t comply. I ended up with a generic spaceship and space station that were pretty bad. I tried a couple of other prompts, but nothing good came of it. There again, I didn’t get many good results out of Midjourney either… So that might be me.

The Email features I turned off straight away. I work with Inbox 0 and only pertinent emails are in my inbox, the AI hid 5 from 7 active emails, including some priority emails, so it didn’t last long (same on the iPhone).

Battery Life

What really got me to write this is my trip yesterday, we were setting up a new glass fibre connection at one of our other sites. To test the line I had the Mac streaming 4K videos from YouTube all day long, plus the usual workload, plus continuous pings to half a dozen different networks over a USB-C ethernet adapter. 6 hours of 4K streaming and other work, with the brightness turned up, the battery was still at 62%. It ran the pings over night and the battery was at 28% this morning (I forgot to shut down the Mac before leaving the site and driving home, so it was running the pings with the screen off from 4:30pm to 8am this morning.

Overall I love both of them, although the black and midnight colours are fingerprint magnets, despite Apple’s best efforts.