Table of ContentsTable of ContentsPrice and release dateDesignPerformance and featuresApples MacBook Air is one of the best MacBooks you can buy, and its also one of the most affordable ways into the Mac ecosystem. If youve been thinking about taking the plunge and buying one, youre in luck, as a new model equipped with Apples M4 chip is right around the corner.Here, weve put together all the info we have about the M4 MacBook Air. Whatever it is you want to know about Apples next laptop, youre in the right place.Recommended VideosAppleRight now, the most probable release date for the next MacBook Air seems to be spring 2025, with Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman stating in April 2024 that he expected the laptop to launch by the spring. Apple has form here the M3 MacBook Air was announced in March 2024, after all.RelatedOfficially, spring would mean anything from March 20 to June 20. Still, we wouldnt expect a June launch if the laptop is pegged for spring that month coincides with Apples Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), which is considered to be a summer event.Its worth noting that Gurman has slightly clarified his position in recent months. In a post on X in September 2024, the journalist said that the MacBook Air was now scheduled for calendar Q1, which covers January to March. If correct, that means the new laptop could appear any time now.AppleWhatever the exact date, we can be almost certain that a new MacBook Air will land at some point in 2025 and we have Apple itself to thank for that. When the company released macOS 15.2, it accidentally included references to MacBook Air (13-inch, M4, 2025) and MacBook Air (15-inch, M4, 2025), seemingly confirming that new MacBook Air models will launch this year.Regarding the price, wed expect Apple to keep the same $1,099 starting price for the M4 model as it used for the M3 MacBook Air. As well see later, this is mostly due to the fact that the M4 version will, by all accounts, be a minor upgrade.The main question surrounding the cost is what Apple will do with its lower-priced model. At the moment, Apple sells the M3 MacBook Air and has kept the M2 model as a more affordable alternative, which it sells for $999. Gurman has said its possible that Apple might keep the M2 in place rather than replace it with the M3, blaming manufacturing challenges faced by the M3 chip.AppleDont expect major design changes when the M4 MacBook Air takes to the stage. This version is expected to feature a new chip and not much else, with design upgrades saved for a later date.Indeed, Apple last redesigned the MacBook Air in 2022, giving it a flat-edged look that brought it closer in appearance to the MacBook Pro. But considering Apple usually waits at least four years between redesigns, its probably too early to see a change for the MacBook Air this time around.The absence of a design overhaul also means well have the same two sizes of MacBook Air. Specifically, thats the 13.6-inch model and the 15.3-inch version.AppleWe can be sure that the next MacBook Air will only come with the M4 chip. Thats because its a consumer-focused device, so anything more powerful is unnecessary for its target audience. Chips like Apples M4 Pro, M4 Max, and M4 Ultra are just way beyond whats needed in the MacBook Air and given the MacBook Airs passive cooling system, theyd run too hot anyway.So, if were just getting the M4 chip, what can we expect from it? Looking at the M4 MacBook Pro will give us some hints. In that device, the M4 has a 10-core CPU and a 10-core GPU. We can probably expect something similar in the MacBook Air, perhaps with a lower-binned version as a cheaper option. Thats been the case in previous years and could happen again this time around.Elsewhere, the 16-core Neural Engine will come with more efficient cores versus the M3, as was the case with the MacBook Pros M4. The memory bandwidth could step up from 100GB/s to 120GB/s, and were anticipating maximum memory and storage capacities of 24GB and 2TB, respectively.AppleNote that because both the M3 and M4 are made using a 3nm process, the shift to the M4 will be less significant than the move from M2 to M3 was (the M2 was made with a less efficient 5nm process). As a result, you should look forward to modest performance increases rather than anything groundbreaking.Theres also been some good news if you use multiple screens with your laptop. The M3 MacBook Air can only connect to two external displays when the lid is closed, but that limitation might be lifted with the M4 version, claims 9to5Mac. Thats because the M4 MacBook Pro can support two displays at higher resolutions and frame rates than the M3 model, suggesting that the M4 chip has improved bandwidth. And with better bandwidth, theres a good chance that the M4 MacBook Air will be able to handle running its own display and two external ones at the same time, with no need to close the lid.Finally, there have been rumors that Apple is planning to outfit all of its laptops with OLED displaysand that reportedly includes the MacBook Air. Unfortunately, that doesnt appear to be happening any time soon, with the latest rumors pointing to a 2029 launch. Thats a delay from the previously reported 2027 release date.Editors Recommendations

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Apple Intelligence In Apples first-quarter earnings, the Mac leads the way in sales growth CEO Tim Cook says iPhones sell better in countries with Apple Intelligence. Samuel Axon Jan 30, 2025 6:07 pm | 20 From left to right: iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro, and iPhone 16 Pro Max. Credit: Samuel Axon From left to right: iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro, and iPhone 16 Pro Max. Credit: Samuel Axon Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreApple fell slightly short of investor expectations when it reported its first-quarter earnings today. While sales were up 4 percent overall, the iPhone showed signs of weakness, and sales in the Chinese market slipped by just over 11 percent.CEO Tim Cook told CNBC that the iPhone performed better in countries where Apple Intelligence was available, like the USseemingly suggesting that the slip was partially because Chinese consumers do not see enough reason to buy new phones without Apple Intelligence. (He also said, "Half of the decline is due to a change in channel inventory.") iPhone sales also slipped in China during this same quarter last year; this was the first full quarter during which the iPhone 16 was available.In any case, Cook said the company plans to roll out Apple Intelligence in additional languages, including Mandarin, this spring.Apple's wearables category also declined slightly, but only by 2 percent.Despite the trends that worried investors, Apple reported $36.33 billion in net revenue for the first quarter. That's 7.1 percent more than last year's Q1. This was driven by the Mac, the iPad, and Services (which includes everything from Apple Music to iCloud)all of which saw slight upticks in sales. Services was up 14 percent, continuing a strong streak for that business, while the Mac and the iPad both jumped up 15 percent.The uptick in Mac and iPad sales was likely helped by several new Mac models and a new iPad mini starting shipments last October.Cook shared some other interesting numbers in the earnings call with investors and the press: The company has an active base of 2.35 billion devices, and it has more than 1 billion active subscriptions.Samuel AxonSenior EditorSamuel AxonSenior Editor Samuel Axon is a senior editor at Ars Technica. He covers Apple, software development, gaming, AI, entertainment, and mixed reality. He has been writing about gaming and technology for nearly two decades at Engadget, PC World, Mashable, Vice, Polygon, Wired, and others. He previously ran a marketing and PR agency in the gaming industry, led editorial for the TV network CBS, and worked on social media marketing strategy for Samsung Mobile at the creative agency SPCSHP. He also is an independent software and game developer for iOS, Windows, and other platforms, and heis a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied interactive media and software development. 20 Comments

You fell right into my trap How one YouTuber is trying to poison the AI bots stealing her content Specialized garbage-filled captions are invisible to humans, confounding to AI. Kyle Orland Jan 30, 2025 5:52 pm | 6 Never go up against a YouTuber when transcripts are on the line! Credit: Getty Images Never go up against a YouTuber when transcripts are on the line! Credit: Getty Images Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreIf you've been paying careful attention to YouTube recently, you may have noticed the rising trend of so-called "faceless YouTube channels" that never feature a visible human talking in the video frame. While some of these channels are simply authored by camera-shy humans, many more are fully automated through AI-powered tools to craft everything from the scripts and voiceovers to the imagery and music. Unsurprisingly, this is often sold as a way to make a quick buck off the YouTube algorithm with minimal human effort.It's not hard to find YouTubers complaining about a flood of these faceless channels stealing their embedded transcript files and running them through AI summarizers to generate their own instant knock-offs. But one YouTuber is trying to fight back, seeding her transcripts with junk data that is invisible to humans but poisonous to any AI that dares to try to work from a poached transcript file.The power of the .assYouTuber F4mi, who creates some excellent deep dives on obscure technology, recently detailed her efforts "to poison any AI summarizers that were trying to steal my content to make slop." The key to F4mi's method is the .ass subtitle format, created decades ago as part of fansubbing software Advanced SubStation Alpha. Unlike simpler and more popular subtitle formats, .ass supports fancy features like fonts, colors, positioning, bold, italic, underline, and more.It's these fancy features that let F4mi hide AI-confounding garbage in her YouTube transcripts without impacting the subtitle experience for her human viewers. For each chunk of actual text in her subtitle file, she also inserted "two chunks of text out of bounds using the positioning feature of the .ass format, with their size and transparency set to zero so they are completely invisible."In those "invisible" subtitle boxes, F4mi added text from public domain works (with certain words replaced with synonyms to avoid detection) or her own LLM-generated scripts full of completely made-up facts. When those transcript files were fed into popular AI summarizer sites, that junk text ended up overwhelming the actual content, creating a totally unrelated script that would be useless to any faceless channel trying to exploit it.F4mi says that advanced models like ChatGPT o1 were sometimes able to filter out the junk and generate an accurate summary of her videos despite this. With a little scripting work, though, an .ass file can be subdivided into individual timestamped letters, whose order can be scrambled in the file itself while still showing up correctly in the final video. That should create a difficult (though not impossible) puzzle for even advanced AIs to make sense of. How F4mi's YouTube subtitles look with the extra formatting allowed by the .ass format (invisible AI-confusing junk not shown) F4miHow F4mi's YouTube subtitles look with the extra formatting allowed by the .ass format (invisible AI-confusing junk not shown)F4mi How normal subtitles appear on the same YouTube video. F4miHow normal subtitles appear on the same YouTube video.F4miHow F4mi's YouTube subtitles look with the extra formatting allowed by the .ass format (invisible AI-confusing junk not shown)F4miHow normal subtitles appear on the same YouTube video.F4miThe fight continuesWhile YouTube doesn't support .ass natively, there are tools that let creators convert their .ass subtitles to YouTube's preferred .ytt format. Unfortunately, these subtitles don't display correctly on the mobile version of YouTube, where the repositioned .ass subtitles simply show up as black boxes covering the video itself.F4mi said she was able to get around this wrinkle by writing a Python script to hide her junk captions as black-on-black text, which can fill the screen whenever the scene fades to black. But in the video description, F4mi notes that "some people were having their phone crash due to the subtitles being too heavy," showing there is a bit of overhead cost to this kind of mischief.F4mi also notes in her video that this method is far from foolproof. For one, tools like OpenAI's Whisper that actually listen to the audio track can still generate usable transcripts without access to a caption file. And an AI-powered screen reader could still likely extract the human-readable subtitles from any video quite easily.Still, F4mi's small effort here is part of a larger movement that's fighting back against the AI scrapers looking to soak up and repurpose everything on the public Internet. We doubt this is the last effort we'll see from YouTube creators trying to protect their content from this kind of AI "summarizing."Kyle OrlandSenior Gaming EditorKyle OrlandSenior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper. 6 Comments

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My daughter is entering high school, and I got her a "dumb phone" with no access to social media.I can't ignore the studies that say social media is harmful to teens.She can try to change my mind, but I doubt I'll budge.I spent over a decade working in education. After the pandemic, I saw a distinct change in the screentime habits of my middle school students, and that's when I knew I needed to make a different decision for my daughter.My daughter is finishing up middle school and about to enter high school this year.I decided my teenager would have a "dumb phone" that's limited to calling, texting, and photo-taking capabilities. The phone will never have social media, internet browsing, email, news, or ads. The goal is to have my teenager go through most of high school with a dumb phone.Of course, my daughter isn't happy about it, but I am certain I'm making the right decision.I can't ignore the studies that show social media is harmful to teensTo say my teenager is less than thrilled to be getting a dumb phone for high school would be the understatement of the century. It's not just my teenager; other parents are typically taken aback as well.However, I don't think there is a one-size-fits-all plan for technology that works for teens and social media.I can't simply ignore the facts. According to a 2024 Pew Research study, 95% of teenagers at least have access to a smartphone, putting our decision to give our teenager a dumb phone into a much smaller subset and making us wildly unpopular parents. The study also found that these teens are on social media apps "almost constantly."Smartphones bombard teenagers with constant notifications, curated images, and overwhelming amounts of information all of which can contribute to increased anxiety, depression, and isolation.The social and physical comparisons on social media are unrelenting and incredibly harmful, especially for teenage girls. Teenagers are especially susceptible to visual comparison and perfectionism, and social media platforms give much more life to these ideas than I could ever counter as a parent. I cannot compete with that, so I am not going to spend my energy trying to do so.I am worried my daughter will feel left outOur daughter has played competitive sports for several years, which involve travel and significant time at practice and games. I connect with her through an Apple Watch, which gives me a way to communicate while keeping track of her safely and allowing autonomy. However, it doesn't give her the ability to communicate with her friends or teammates.If you ask her what bothers her the most about having an internet-less phone, the top complaints are that she won't have the internet to look information up and that she won't be able to download games. Luckily, being on social media holds no value for her as a middle schooler heading into high school, but she's a teen, and that could change tomorrow.I'm sure she'll struggle to communicate with friends outside school, but she can still make phone calls. She will also have a laptop for high school.I'm open to changing my decision, but I doubt I'll budgeI told my daughter that if she can find three studies demonstrating the benefits of smartphones and social media, I will renegotiate my stance. The empirical evidence is not in her favor.When she's an adult and there is far more research and data I'm more than willing to admit I was wrong if studies show that social media and smartphones weren't the problem. I just don't think that will happen.

On Thursday, federal prosecutors unsealed an updated sex-trafficking indictment against Sean Combs.The indictment brings no new charges but does make reference to two additional anonymous victims.The feds are asking for Combs to be arraigned on the new indictment on March 17.Federal prosecutors in Manhattan filed a long-awaited updated sex-trafficking indictment on Thursday against Sean "Diddy" Combs and while it makes reference to two additional anonymous female victims, there are no new charges or defendants.The new indictment does not warrant delaying Combs' scheduled May 5 trial date, prosecutors said, asking that he be arraigned on the new charges at his next court date, March 17.Defense attorney Marc Agnifilo declined to comment on the new indictment. Combs pleaded not guilty to the first indictment and says that any sexual activity with his accusers was consensual.Prosecutors had been warning since October, just weeks after Combs' arrest, that they may seek to re-indict the entertainment and fashion entrepreneur, signaling that they were looking at potential weapons and drug charges and possible additional victims.The second indictment makes no new mention of weapons or drugs, and repeats almost verbatim the allegations of Combs' original indictment from September, charging him again with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, and transportation to engage in prostitution.It does allege that Combs trafficked an unnamed "Victim-2" and "Victim-3." The original indictment had listed only "Victim-1," Combs' ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura.The new indictment also adds a smattering of details.In describing the conspiracy, it now specifies an allegation that back in 2016, Combs or his associates paid a $100,000 bribe to a security employee at the InterContinental Hotel in LA. In return, the employee provided the hallway surveillance video that shows Combs kicking and dragging ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura, it says. The previous indictment had just alleged that there was a bribe.The new indictment names two additional drugs that prosecutors say the Combs conspiracy used in its trafficking scheme: a psychedelic and methamphetamine. The original charges allege he gave ecstasy. ketamine, GHB to his victims.It also alleges that Combs' sex trafficking conspiracy began in 2004, instead of in 2008 as alleged in the original indictment.Prosecutors had said they recovered baggies of a pink powder they believed to be narcotics from Combs' hotel room when he was arrested in September. The new indictment makes no mention of this seizure.The indictment also does not charge Combs with guns and ammo prosecutors say they seized when search warrants were executed in March at Combs' homes and a Florida airport.Federal agents had seized three AR-15 rifles with defaced serial numbers, plus two magazines containing 29 rounds, prosecutors said. Two of the weapons were found broken down into parts in the bedroom closet of Combs' $48.5 million Miami mansion,Agnifilo, Combs' attorney, had suggested during bail arguments in September that the weapons belonged to his client's security guards."I don't dispute that Mr. Combs has used armed security," Assistant US Attorney Emily A. Johnson had told the judge in response."But it is incredulous that armed security in a professional security company would use defaced AR-15s and store them in pieces in the defendant's personal closet."