Apple is preparing to launch its latest M4-powered MacBook Air as soon as next month.
The powerful M4 chip is expected to be brought to the company’s 13-inch and 15-inch versions of the Macbook Air.
Apple is already reported to be preparing its marketing, sales and retail teams for the debut, while also drawing down the inventory of its current generation of Macbook Air models in stores, reported Bloomberg.
The company introduced the M3 MacBook Air last March, and unveiled its new M4 chip a few months later.
The M4 chip subsequently debuted on the iPad Pro, and iMac, Mac mini and MacBook Pros.
The M4 chip promises significant performance upgrades over its predecessor. In the MacBook Pro, the M4 chip reportedly runs 1.8 times faster than the 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro in gigapixel photo editing and 3.4 times faster in rendering complex scenes in Blender.
It also includes a 16-core Neural Engine, which operates three times faster than the M1.
The more powerful M4 Pro chip meanwhile reportedly delivers a big boost in both single-core and multi-core performance.
The Mac mini with the M4 Pro is now the fastest desktop Mac Apple has, surpassing even the M2 Ultra in CPU power.
Last year, a total of 262.7 million PCs were shipped, an increase of 1% over 2023, according to data by research firm International Data Corporation (IDC).
Apple saw its market share rise from 8.8% to 10.1% in the last quarter of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023, with its shipments increasing 17.3% from 5.9 million units to 7 million.
For the full year of 2024, Lenovo shipped 61.8 million units (an increase of 4.1% year-on-year), HP shipped 53 million PCs (up 0.1% year-on-year), Dell shipped 39.1 million units (a decrease of 2.2% year-on-year), Apple shipped 22.9 million PCs (up 4.5% year-on-year) and Asus rounded up the top five with 17.9 million units shipped in 2024 (a 6.4% year-on-year increase).
