The M4 also gives the MacBook Air its AI boost with Apple Intelligence. The 38 TOPS of local AI processing through the faster 16-core Neural Engine makes the M4 MacBook Air closer to the 48 TOPS on Intel’s Lunar Lake chips and 45 TOPS of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips.
This is difficult to judge, because Apple Intelligence is very much still unfinished, but there are some new third-party apps that Apple is showcasing that use Apple Intelligence right out of the box in third-party applications, such as the note-taking app, Bear. You can now do things like automatically format text into tables or summarize a report. It also comes with Image Playground, the updated version of Siri with ChatGPT integration, and lots more. On the other hand, you’ve never needed fast local AI processing to get Apple Intelligence, as AI tasks on older devices just get run on Apple’s Private Cloud…
