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Credit: Product image courtesy of Amazon and Best Buy.
It’s a good time to upgrade your laptop: Apple’s newest and most portable machine, the M2 MacBook Air, is currently on sale for its lowest price ever. Right now. you can get a 15-inch model for $999 (down from $1,299) from Best Buy, a $300 discount. After looking at price compression tools, I can say this is the lowest price it has reached since its release last summer, even better than October Prime Day and Black Friday prices.
While arguably the best ultraportable Apple laptop, the M2 MacBook Air isn’t necessarily the right choice for everyone, as Lifehacker Senior Technology Editor Jake Peterson noted in his review of the machine. It’s essentially a bigger version of the 13-inch MacBook Air, and a great buy provided you truly need that extra screen real estate. 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.
The limitations of the M2 MacBook Air are clear: the RAM and storage aren’t as good as they could be. The good news is that the upgraded version with 16GB RAM and 512GB of storage is also $300 off, and currently $1,399 (originally $1,699), making the upgrade to a beefier version of this laptop less painful.
Rumors suggest the reason the MacBook Air and the iPad Air are seeing their best discounts right now is because Apple plans to launch a new batch of iPad Airs and MacBook Airs in March. The latter are expected to include Apple’s new M3 chip in both the 13- and 15-inch models. If you’re always looking for the latest Apple products, it might be worth waiting. Otherwise, right now is a great time to take advantage of a good-for-Apple discount. If you’re looking for a great Apple deal, you’re unlikely to find a better one any time soon.