Thoughts on MacBook Air M4?

SketchUp Computer Advice
1

I’m an interior designer looking to upgrade my laptop, and I’m currently considering the new M4 MacBook Air with the following specs:
• Apple M4 chip (10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine)
• 32GB unified memory
• 512GB SSD storage

At the moment, I’m using SketchUp Pro 2025 and V-Ray 7 on an older HP ZBook with a Quadro P2000 GPU and 32GB of RAM. It’s bulky, the battery life is poor, and rendering performance isn’t great.

I’m wondering if anyone has experience using the new M4 MacBook Air for SketchUp and V-Ray? Do you think I’d notice a meaningful improvement in performance? I know the Air is fanless and can throttle under load, which makes the MacBook Pro tempting—but it’s a bit out of my budget, and I’d really prefer something lightweight and portable

2

I have an M2 Macbook air, and its great. Carry around all day. Sorry - I dont use Vray - but im sure it would be more than fine on the M4. I also have the mac mini M4 and its a definite step up. The new Sketchup graphics engine (since 2024) has really made a big difference to big models. The big difference is Sketchup in macos.. takes a bit of getting used to.

3

I still have my M1 Max Mavbook pro, I don’t feel I need to upgrade it because it still has an unbelievable performance. It’s great for rendering big projects with gpu cause it has unified memory so it can use almost 64gb of video memory, not even the RTX 5090 has that amount of memory, I’m not saying it’s faster than a 5090 but it can handle bigger scenes than my RTX 4080 with 16gb of memory.

The M4 single core performance is currently the best on the market, I can’t imagine how good it is cause my M1 is already incredibly fast.

You won’t regret if you buy it, it’s imo the best laptop in its category.

4

:smirking_face:

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5

use your words sean. what’s your point ?

if your macbook air gets warm, you can maybe look on the side of external cooling ?

6

Oh my gosh, nothing but a friendly jab a Francisco’s post about the M4 being the fastest single thread. Nothing to get your “culotte” in a wad over :slight_smile:

:roll_eyes:

7

That site is bs, I don’t know how do they get those results, they even have the M3 above the M4. On geekbench and Cinebench, the M4 have the best single core performance, even AMD has better performance than intel latest gen of CPUs. And not only on Benchmarks, real life tests made by several YouTubers show that the M4 has the fastest single core performance on the market.

8

It’s a trusted site. You can either believe it or not. Others here have cited it before.

9

It’s not about believing or not, it’s not Ripleys show. There are many other sites that and YouTube videos that show that the new intel processors are a disappointment, they compare them with AMD and Apple, using the benchmarks I mentioned, also making real life test like using web browser speeds, photoshop, blender etc, the intel CPUs lose on almost everything.

It’s just evidence, if someone says that the earth is flat you don’t have to believe it or not, you investigate from different fonts and you’ll find out that it’s not flat.