It’s not too early to start shopping for a laptop for the coming school year. September will be here before you know it. And it’s never been a better time to buy a new MacBook — whether you need it for school, work or home. A new MacBook just started shipping earlier this month. The 15-inch MacBook Air means you no longer need a pricey MacBook Pro to get a large screen size. It starts at $1,299 and is already available for less than that.
*Note that “all-time” means the best price that we’ve seen at an Apple-authorized retailer in the product’s lifetime. Prices change frequently and may differ between color variants.
Best MacBook deals
The MacBook Air from 2020 features Apple’s M1 processor, which has an eight-core CPU, a seven-core GPU and a 16-core Neural Engine. The M1 MacBook Air starts at $999 from Apple and features 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. It lacks the Touch Bar (which could be viewed as a positive), and does have a 13.3-inch Retina display, Touch ID and the Magic keyboard. The step-up model costs $1,199 from Apple and doubles the solid-state storage to 512GB.
You can save $249 on this entry-level MacBook right now at Amazon and Best Buy. We’ve not seen it sell for less than its current $750 price. For students on a budget, the M1 MacBook Air is a great value, costing hundreds less than the discounted M2 MacBook Air.
Read our Apple MacBook Air M1 (Late 2020) review.
In addition to receiving the second-gen Apple silicon chip, the M2 MacBook Air boasts a larger 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display and is available in two new colors: starlight and midnight. It also ditches the Air’s tapered wedge shape and now looks more like the squared-off, slablike Pro models. The webcam has also been upgraded to a 1080p resolution for better video calls. At Apple, the M2 Air starts at $1,099, which is $100 more than the previous model. It features an M2 processor with an eight-core CPU and eight-core GPU, 8GB of memory and a 256GB SSD. The step-up $1,299 model has an M2 chip with an eight-core CPU and 10-core GPU, 8GB of memory and a 512GB SSD.
Discounts are slight at Amazon right now for the latest MacBook Air, but you can save $150 on the baseline 256GB model at B&H — that’s the biggest discount we’ve seen yet. We can’t find any current discounts, however, on the 512GB model. Read our M2 Apple MacBook Air review.
The baseline model of the new 14-inch MacBook Pro costs $1,999 and features Apple’s latest M2 Pro processor (10-core CPU and 16-core GPU), 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. The step-up model costs $2,499 and doubles the storage to 1TB while featuring an M2 Pro with a 12-core CPU and 19-core GPU. There’s also an M2 Max model that costs $3,099 with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. The M2 Max is a 12-core CPU, 30-core GPU processor.
Apple says the performance from the M2 Pro chip is up to 40% faster than the previous M1 Pro in Photoshop image processing, and that the M2 Max can do effects rendering in Cinema 4D and color grading in DaVinci Resolve up to 30% faster than the M1 Max. Apple promises the battery will last up to 22 hours, which the company says is “the longest battery life ever in a Mac.” The MacBook Pro also adds Wi-Fi 6E, up from Wi-Fi 6, and an HDMI connection that now supports 8K displays up to 60Hz and 4K displays up to 240Hz.
Big discounts are available right now on the new 14-inch M2 Pro MacBook Pro. You can save $200 on both the 512GB and 1TB models at Amazon.
