Next to Black Friday, Chief Day It’s a great time to buy gear from Amazon and apple. At the latter brand, we see some of the best prices on the latest models of iPads, AirPods and AirTags. If you’re in the market for a new laptop, now’s a great time to get a MacBook, with prices starting at $849 for the latest MacBook Air. It’s our Engadget top pick right now best laptop list.
But I’m here to argue that you should spend $1,249 for that MacBook Air instead of.
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Save on the latest MacBook Air (but double the RAM and storage).
Here’s why: They get you in the door for under $1,000, which is $250 less than what you’d spend at an Apple Store. But Apple is notoriously stingy with memory and storage for its devices: The base model only has 8GB of RAM and a 256GB drive. It’s fine if you only use your laptop for the basics—say, social media, streaming video, and light document creation. But even with cloud storage, if you’re doing something creative, that SSD will fill up with photos, audio and videos very quickly. (Yes, you can external USB drives(but they’re slower and break the lines of Apple’s sleek laptop.) And while Apple does a great job of managing software resources on the Mac, that 8GB of memory feels like a low ceiling.
So that’s what I did when Amazon ran a version of the same deal a few months ago: I paid to double both features. For $1,249 (after clipping the same $50 display coupon), you get 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. Yes, a terabyte or more would be better, but you pick your battles. And this configuration still saves $250 over the Apple Store price for the same configuration, while also being more future-proof. For example, if you’re shopping for a laptop for a high school or college student, this ruggedized model will survive 4 years of academic work more comfortably than the $849 version.
If it is still too steep, you can separate it with a difference 512 GB MacBook Air M2. It doesn’t have the extra RAM, but an otherwise identical slightly older model gets you a very capable, modern Apple laptop with decent storage for just $999. But don’t wait: these laptop discounts ends today and we don’t know if we’ll see them again before Black Friday.
Prime Day Shopping Guide: Look at all of us Chief Day coverage. Get the best Prime Day deals at Yahoo Life. Follow Engadget for Prime Day tech deals. Hear the best from Autoblog’s experts Amazon Prime Day deals find for your car, garage and home Prime Day sales shopping at AOL curated just for you.
