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Credit: Illustration by Ian Moore and product image courtesy of Amazon.
Apple laptops stand the test of time, as Senior Tech Editor Jake Peterson explains in his piece about the M1 and M2 Apple chips still being of great value in 2024. The 13.6-inch 8GB RAM M2 MacBook Air, in particular, is currently down to its lowest price yet on Amazon according to price-checking tools: $829 (originally $999) after a $170 discount. This is my favorite Amazon deal for today.
The M2 MacBook Air dropped to $999 in April, shortly after the new M3 laptops were released. A deal was expected back then, and it was a great value for your money at that price. At $829, it’s impressive enough to consider upgrading. If you have an M1, you can see the difference between the M1 and M2 and see if the upgrade is worth it for you. If you’re considering the M2 or M3, you can see our full breakdown here.
If 256GB of SSD is not enough for you, the 512GB of SSD is also well discounted on Amazon at $1,029 (originally $1,199). And if you’re looking for the bigger 15-inch screen, Best Buy’s deal is your best bet at $1,199.99 (originally $1,499).
The M2 MacBook Air is arguably the best ultraportable Apple laptop, but it isn’t the right choice for everyone. As Jake noted:
It sports the same design language, an M2 chip with an eight-core CPU and 10-core GPU with up to 24GB of memory, two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports (which does seem a bit low on a 15-inch machine), a MagSafe charging port, a 1080p webcam, and a display supporting a P3 color gamut with up to 500 nits of brightness. It even has the same 18-hour battery life claim, thanks to a larger battery driving the larger display.
The Air only comes with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, about as low of a memory and storage spec as you’ll find in a 2023 computer. Again, that might be just fine for your use: M2 is powerful, after all, and its design means you can do a lot with a small amount of RAM. But someday, 8GB of RAM isn’t going to cut it, and you won’t be able to upgrade the memory yourself. The same goes for storage: If you live your entire life in the cloud, 256GB might be plenty. But if you save any photos, videos, or other large files on your Mac, you’re going to eventually need to spring for an external drive perpetually attached to your computer, or else deal with constant storage management until you sell the computer.
