If you find yourself in need of a new laptop, we have good news—there are a whole bunch of models on sale right now (as is usually the case as of late), including an all-time low price for Apple's M2 MacBook Air. Yes, it's officially a last-gen product with the M3 roll out, but it's still a powerful and efficient system. Not to fret, though, we also found some deals on M3 hardware too.
We'll start with the
Apple M2 MacBook Air (13.6-inch) first, however, because this matches its lowest price ever—it's on sale at
Amazon for $849 right now, which is $150 below its MSRP. The timing of the deal is interesting too, because coincidentally we just had a discussion internally about the MacBook Air and its baseline 8GB of RAM, which is unified memory on this system. Is that enough?
The answer is absolutely, depending on your needs. On one hand, this is 2024 and 8GB a paltry allotment, especially when factoring in the usable lifespan of a system. That's something to consider if you plan on doing heavy lifting with your laptop, now or down the road. But on the other hand, if you're looking for a general purpose system—web browsing, word processing, and basic productivity chores mostly—you'll be just fine and can apply the money saved to apps, or put it towards a fund for a future upgrade. In fact, our resident Alan Velasco owns the 15-inch model with 8GB of RAM, and here's what he had to say on the matter when we were discussing if 8GB is still enough on a Mac for basic computing.
"I currently daily drive a 15-inch M2 Macbook Air with 8GB of RAM. I have Firefox and the Brave browser open with 10-12 tabs each, Microsoft Word with whatever I'm writing, and Apple Music all open and running [simultaneously] fine. I've had it on for 3 weeks straight without restart and it's running smooth. Screen is beautiful, keyboard and trackpad are great, Wi-Fi is plenty fast, and the camera and mics are great for videoconferencing stuff," Velasco stated.
If you want to save even more and are willing to try your luck with a refurbished model, you can score a
refurbished Apple M2 MacBook Air (13.6-inch) for
$764.99 at Best Buy (save $334.01).
Not interested in a Mac (or 8GB of RAM)? A really nice alternative in the Windows camp is the
ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED that's marked down to
$799.99 at Best Buy (save $250). As the model name gives away, it sports a 14-inch OLED touchscreen display, with a 1920x1200 resolution (16:10 aspect ratio), 500 nits of peak brightness for HDR chores, a 60Hz refresh rate, and 100% coverage of the DCI-P3 color space. It also boasts an 87% screen-to-body ratio.
Internally, this Intel Evo Edition laptop hitches its wagon to Meteor Lake with a Core Ultra 7 155H processor (16C/22T, up to 4.8GHz, 24MB L3 cache). It also comes correct with 16GB of LPDDR5X-7467 RAM, a roomy 1TB PCIe 4.0 solid state drive (SSD), and a 75Whr battery that's rated to deliver up to 15 hours of battery life.
This is a rather svelte system, too—it features an all-metal design with a thin 0.59-inch waistline, and is ultra-light at just 2.82 pounds.
Here are several other laptop models that are on sale...
- 15.3-Inch Apple MacBook Air (M3, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD): $1,069.99 after coupon (save $229.01)
- 14.2-Inch MacBook Pro (M3, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD): $1,449 (save $150)
- 14.2-Inch MacBook Pro (M3, 8GB RAM, 1TB SSD): $1,599 (save $200)
- 14-Inch Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen 5 (Ryzen 7 7730U, 16GB/512GB): $779 (save $800)
- 10.9-Inch Apple iPad 10th Gen 5 (A14 Bionic, 64GB storage): $349 (save $100)
- 10.2-Inch Apple iPad 9th Gen (A13 Bionic, 64GB storage): $249 (save $80)