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Apple is in the middle of announcing the 13-inch and 15-inch versions of the M4 MacBook Air, with the company said to be unveiling both machines in March at the earliest. Prior to the official launch, it was only a matter of time before we spotted one of their benchmark results uploaded online, and as luck would have it, we stumbled upon those numbers. Compared to the base M4 MacBook Pro, we only witnessed a minor difference, as both portable Macs are powered by the same Apple Silicon.
New benchmark leak also shows the M4 MacBook Air tested with 24GB unified RAM, with no changes to the CPU clock speeds
Going over the specifications that were mentioned in the Geekbench 6 Metal results, the M4 MacBook Air sports the unique designation Mac16,12, with the SoC configuration featuring four performance and six power-efficiency cores. Currently, there is no confirmation that Apple will launch a 9-core CPU version of the MacBook Air, so for the time being, we get these details. This model is also equipped with 24GB of unified RAM, with the performance cores running at 4.41GHz, making it the highest recorded frequency of the M4.
Interestingly enough, the M4 MacBook Air was spotted on Geekbench 6’s database with the Metal 6 results instead of the compute ones, and while there is still some difference between the base M4 MacBook Pro, it is next to negligible. The latest score obtained was 54,806, making it a measly 5 percent slower than the more premium Mac. There are two possibilities for this performance delta despite both machines featuring the same chipset. Since the M4 MacBook Air is said to be equipped with a ‘fan-less’ design again, the M4 MacBook Pro’s cooling fan might have given it the edge in Geekbench 6 Metal.
Then again, this particular benchmark was not tailor-made to measure sustained workloads or stress the M4’s GPU far enough to see this difference, so it is likely that when the first commercial units are available to purchase, we will see similar performance. However, if you are still inclined towards the MacBook Pro and do not want to wait for the M4 MacBook Air, you can grab the base model that comes with a 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 16GB unified RAM, and 512GB for just $1,399 on Amazon thanks to a $200 discount.
News Source: Geekbench 6
