If you’re in the market for a laptop, you have no shortage of choices. But unless you need something with exceptionally powerful hardware or are on a very tight budget, I’m here to end your search right now: you should buy the MacBook Air M4, especially if it’s on sale for $749 before Black Friday.
Apple’s latest MacBook Air is, without a doubt, in my opinion, the best laptop for most people, at least for those who don’t need to run Windows. It’s an entry-level machine, but it doesn’t look like it: The laptop comes with Apple’s M4 chip, which was until recently the company’s newest hardware. (That being said, there’s no M5 MacBook Air yet, so it’s still the best Air on the market.) Apple’s M series is great: In fact, the M1 MacBook Air is still a great machine five years after its release. You can’t go wrong with an M-series MacBook at the moment, although the newer the hardware, the better the performance – a plus for this M4 Air.
But M4 is almost an afterthought for me compared to this machine’s 16GB of RAM. For years, Apple only included 8GB of RAM with its base machine models. This was sufficient for smaller, simpler tasks, but once you started trying to do too much at once, you ran into problems. 8GB of RAM doesn’t go as far as it used to, so the fact that this machine doubles that memory without impacting the price is a major win. That said, this configuration comes with 256GB of storage, which could be a problem for anyone storing large files on their computer.
But what do I like best about the M4? The price. When Apple released this machine in March, I was impressed with the value you could get for $999. In fact, it convinced me to stop recommending the MacBook Air M2, even when it was on sale. But despite its novelty, the MacBook Air M4 has Also seen reductions this year. Now, before Black Friday, the machine costs $250 less at Amazon and Best Buy than at Apple. This is simply a fantastic offer.
What do you think of it so far?
Should you buy an older MacBook for less?
Of course, there are other cheaper MacBooks. You can save an extra $50 and opt for the MacBook Air M2, which also has 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. And if you don’t need your machine to be new, you can find refurbished MacBook Air M1s for under $500. Any of these laptops will work just fine in 2025, but they have drawbacks: The M1 only has 8GB of RAM and retains the old design of Apple’s MacBook Air. The M2 MacBook Air looks identical to its M4 counterpart, but it’s three years old. By spending an extra $50 on the new Air, you can shave another two to three years of software updates from your machine, not to mention the immediate performance gains from the new chip.
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