Apple's M4 MacBook Air is shaping up to be an affordable powerhouse. In newly released benchmarks, it performs almost as well as the M4 MacBook Pro, all for $600 less.

The smaller Air is the perfect student laptop, but once you're out of school you should graduate to the larger but still highly portable 15-inch model.

I thought I had this figured out. I was making a hard-headed decision to buy a refurbed M1 MacBook Air with 16GB RAM for half the price of a new M4 one, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment. But, ironically,