The MacBook Air 2025 gets the M4, the Mac Studio 2025 gets the M3 Ultra

If nothing else, you have to give this to Apple: the company is terribly predictable in its choices most of the time… but it does like to throw online media a curveball every now and then – which is exactly what it just did with the MacBook Air 2025 and Mac Studio 2025 models. It’s a different curveball for each of the two product lines but, amazingly enough, both lead to noteworthy, even impressive options for different kinds of consumers: a price reduction on the new M4-based MacBook Air and an M3 Ultra processor promising breathtaking performance for productivity. Apple pleasantly surprising people: it can be a thing after all. Who would have thought?

So, first things first: as it was already widely expected, the MacBook Air 2025 is getting some inevitable, but still welcome, upgrades. Apple’s latest mainstream laptop line is now based on the M4 processor, which is fast and capable of carrying out almost any task imaginable (including light gaming). It is the same version of the chip the base MacBook Pro 14 is built around (minus two GPU cores in the most affordable config), but the new Air uses passive instead of active cooling so we’ll have to see whether this affects the latter’s performance significantly (it’s highly likely that it does when it comes to the use cases people buy a MacBook Air for).

The new base Air model still comes with 16GB of system memory (it can be configured to 32GB now) and that memory’s bandwidth is higher than the Air’s built around the M3. The M4 MacBook Air also sports a slightly larger battery (but Apple’s estimates on battery life remain exactly the same). The other notable upgrade offered by the new MacBook Air models is none other than the 12 Megapixel camera: this is the same one featured in the M4 MacBook Pro models, supporting Center Stage and intelligent image processing, which should result in a superior video conferencing experience compared to the Facetime HD camera found in the previous models.

All other hardware components of the M4 MacBook Air – from screen and speakers to connectivity and wireless access – are pretty much identical to the ones found in the M3 MacBook Air, so no surprises there. Apple being Apple, unfortunately, also means that storage starts at a measly 256GB which – let’s face it – just doesn’t cut it in 2025 terms. Upgrading that to a much more manageable 512GB costs a criminally high $200, which never ceases to amaze and frustrate in equal measure (at least doing that is also upgrading the GPU to 10 cores).

Futureproofing the new MacBook Air by upgrading it to 24GB of system memory too brings its cost to $1400, which is – you guessed it – practically MacBook Pro territory, in line with what Apple has been doing with its laptop lines for years. This time around, though, people interested in just getting the most affordable M4 MacBook Air can hardly complain, as Apple has actually given the new models a price cut of $100 from the start (compared to the M3 MacBook Air), bringing the 13-inch model down to $999 and the 15-inch model down to $1199.

So, in essence, what we get are faster laptops with better cameras for less money… which is highly unusual but obviously great. This new M4-based MacBook Air was already looking like an excellent choice for most consumers in need of a capable “general purpose” laptop… and now it is an even more attractive option. It’s not hard to see these MacBook Air models being a huge success for Apple for a long time, for all the right reasons.

New Mac Studio models based on M4 Max and… M3 Ultra, you say?

One could not reasonably expect two Apple price cuts on new computer models on the same day… so the other curveball is related to performance. Most did not expect the Mac Studio to get a processor upgrade until June – WWDC being of interest to creative professionals and all that – but the company went ahead and announced it now in the form of two different options: the M4 Max, naturally, but also the M3 Ultra (!), which does not make much sense at first. It only does when other factors are taken into account.

The Mac Studio M4 upgrade is pretty straightforward: Apple’s small and dense workstation gets the same two variants of the M4 Max chip the 2024 high-end MacBook Pro is built around – 14 or 15 CPU cores, 32 or 40 GPU cores – along with the same memory configurations (from 36GB all the way to 128GB). The Mac Studio will probably employ a different cooling system to the MacBook Pro one, so we may get a bit of extra – especially sustained – performance. Starting at $1999, the M4 Max Mac Studio looks like a great desktop computer for demanding workloads (here’s hope that consumers will be able to upgrade the rather small 512GB SSD themselves like people are already doing with the Mac Mini… but we’ll have to see about that too).

Things get really crazy when one takes a good look at the M3 Ultra, though. It may seem strange for Apple to only now introduce a processor belonging to the M3 line while gradually making the transition to the M4 – effectively leaving the M3 behind – but the M3 Ultra is no ordinary system-on-a-chip: it’s the company’s most powerful M Series processor so far. It features up to 32 cores for the CPU and up to 80 cores for the GPU, which should make short work of any creative task, no matter how complex. The M3 Ultra can be accompanied by no less than 512GB (!) of unified system memory, the most ever in an Apple computer of any kind (including the Mac Pro).

One can put together an absolute monster of a desktop computer based on this platform and it only makes sense to do so for extremely demanding use cases (such as editing Hollywood-level multimedia material or running some of the most powerful AI models in existence locally). The pricing of this particular Mac Studio certainly reflects that, as does the fact that Apple went the extra mile with the M3 Ultra by adding Thunderbolt 5 connectivity (the M3 Max chips do not offer this) as well as huge SSD storage capacity options up to 16TB.

So where’s the M4 Ultra, then?

The question, of course, is “why the M3 Ultra and not the M4 Ultra?” followed by “why now?”. There are a few theories making the rounds on the Web and chances are there’s some truth to at least a couple of those. Some are of the opinion that the M4 Ultra is reserved for the next Mac Pro, which would make sense as there was just not enough differentiation between the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro last time around. Others believe that the M3 Ultra was supposed to be released much earlier… but didn’t because of manufacturing issues Apple faced with the M Series of chips in 2023-2024 (particularly while transitioning between certain TSMC nodes).

Both theories hold merit, but there’s also the distinct possibility that – because of that M3 Ultra delay – an M4 Ultra may not be in the cards at all anymore. Apple may have simply decided that there is no point in releasing an M4 Ultra in Q1 2025 – for whatever reason, e.g. not enough performance improvements over the M3 Ultra – and that it would be better to go straight for the M5 Ultra in 2026.

That certainly sounds plausible according to Ars Technica, to which Apple, when asked, answered that “not every chip generation will get an Ultra tier” – heavily implying that the company’s current plan is to skip this one. Then again, who knows? There may be more curveballs where these two came from, no?