Compared my M3 Air with M4 Pro and…

TL;DR 16GB M3 Air and entry level 16GB M4 Pro are almost indistinguishable in general performance. Get the Air for portability and to save $$$. Get the entry level M4 only if you can find it very close to the price of the M3 Air. Otherwise, step up to the 24GB M4 “Pro” Pro for tangible differentiation from the M3 Air and a “single system to do it all”.

Got some interesting results comparing the 13” M3 Air 16/256 with 14” M4 16/512. I did a bunch of boot up, opening apps, spreadsheet work, etc. and also used https://browserbench.org/ to see how each performs in browsing tests. Had them side by side, identical configuration.

On cold start, or on reboot, the M3 Air was on average just slightly quicker than the M4 to get to the login screen each time. When doing work, the two were identical. Identical time to launch apps, identical time to load things within apps, identical time navigating UI elements, identical time to perform data manipulation and calculations, literally identical in every way.

In browser benchmarks tests, the M3 Air consistently performed better by a slight margin than the M4 in speedometer and JetStream2. Repeating the tests many times and even rebooting and repeating the tests each time resulted in the M3 slightly outpacing the M4.

The M4 pulled ahead in motion mark tests however. This is a rendering test and is the only test where the M4 genuinely pulled quite ahead of the M3 Air. Over 3 runs, the M4 was pretty consistently about 24% faster than the M3 Air.

So there you have it…when you put synthetics aside, the two don’t really show any difference except in graphics tasks.

FWIW, I think the base M4 model is also being crippled by Apple by being shipped with 16GB of memory. This is barely enough on the Air. No Pro machine should come below 24GB.

I also qualitatively compared the screens, and though the Pro is better, the difference is barely noticeable under general operating conditions. HDR plays no factor for office or data work so the benefit of the fancier display on the Pro is kind of lost. Ditto on the 120Hz. Nice, but funny enough nothing to write home about.

Oh and as the final word, ironically I think the Air is actually a better built machine than the Pro. The Pro has air gaps in the chassis and this creates an annoying hollow “thonk” when you’re clicking the trackpad, typing, or you tap on the shell of the notebook. The Air does not have any of this since it is tightly packed. It just has a nice clean “thud” when you’re tapping away, trackpad or typing or anything. (Before anyone says maybe it’s your Pro, I’ve tried a few. They’re all the same, as are all the Air variants.)