MacBook Air 13-inch (M2)
$699 $999 Save
$300
Writers don’t need the most powerful computers, but portability is key, and the MacBook Air 13-inch (M2) has that in spades, alongside a comfortable, responsive backlit keyboard.
The MacBook Air with an M2 chip is a fantastic laptop for all-day productivity, basic photo and video editing, some software development, and most other laptop tasks. Now you can get the model with 16GB unified memory and 256GB SSD storage for $699, a discount of $300 from the original MSRP and (seemingly) a new all-time low price.
This model is powered by Apple’s own M2 chip, with an 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU, and 16-core Neural Engine, which is up to 12x faster than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Air and up to 1.4x faster than the M1 Air, according to Apple’s own numbers. I’ve been using the older M1-powered MacBook Air for a while, and it’s incredibly fast and power-efficient. The battery should easily last all day for most people.
This is also the M2 MacBook Air with 16GB unified memory, as Apple discontinued the 8GB version. The unified memory is the shared pool of RAM and VRAM available to the M2 chip, giving you more graphics power when needed (like with photo and video editing) and using the rest for typical application memory. The unified memory has also made Apple Silicon Macs a popular choice for running local LLMs, though the 16GB memory in this discounted model still won’t be enough headroom for complex models.
You also get a 13.6-inch IPS LCD screen, a backlit keyboard, a 1080p FaceTime HD camera, Touch ID, two Thunderbolt ports, and MagSafe for charging. You can use either the MagSafe port or USB-C power to charge the laptop.
There are some drawbacks to the M2 Air. For one, it doesn’t have a cooling fan and functions entirely on passive cooling, so high-performance tasks over a long period of time (such as compiling code or rendering a 4K movie) will slow down the computer. You’re also limited to one external screen, and your options for running Windows software and games are limited—Boot Camp was never ported to ARM Macs.
Apple just introduced the M4 MacBook Air with an even faster chipset, but it starts at $999. If you have another $200 to spend, that might be worth considering, but the M2 Air is still a fantastic computer.