With the recent M3 update, you’d think choosing a MacBook today would be simple. It’s not.
There are so many sizes, chip options, and configurations to consider — and not all are ones you should get. There’s the M3 MacBook Pro 14-inch with 8GB of RAM, for example, which doesn’t make a lick of sense. And beyond that, you’ll see plenty of deals flooding the front pages of retailers advertising MacBooks for around $500. No one should buy these.
As for me, there’s really only one MacBook that I would buy on Black Friday myself. Best Buy is
. Now, that might sound expensive, but it’s actually $250 off. That’s about as good as MacBook deals get — regardless of what time of the year it is.
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Essentially, this deal gets you the upgrade from 8GB to 16GB for free, plus an extra $50. This is important, because I don’t know about you — but 8GB of RAM is just not enough for my daily workload. That’s not going to be an issue for everyone, mind you. Plenty of people who are interested in buying a MacBook Air will be fine with 8GB of RAM. Apple likes to claim that its unified memory subsystem means 8GB on a MacBook is equivalent to 16GB on a competitive system.
But let’s be real, it really only takes an instance of Google Chrome with around twenty tabs or so to use 8GB of memory. Add in some slightly heavier applications like Photoshop, and you’ll start to see a slowdown in performance.
This configuration also comes with 512GB of storage, which is as low as you can go with the 15-inch MacBook Air. While you’ll likely need more space than this eventually, Apple charges a shameless amount to jump to one or two terabytes. I’ll happily save my money and stick to external storage.
Of course, there’s more to this system than just its memory and storage. This is the 15-inch MacBook Air, which was launched just earlier this year, featuring the M2 chip inside. While the performance and specs are identical to the 13-inch model, the larger 15.3-inch screen size makes really makes a difference. The size disparity between these two laptops is extraordinary, especially if your work involves using Split View or just complicated applications with lots of menus and things going on. In many of these situations, that extra screen real estate makes a big difference.
Lest you think that extra screen size equates to a hefty laptop, the 15-inch MacBook Air is still just 0.45 inches thick and weighs just 3.3 pounds. You’ll never find a laptop with that much screen real estate in a laptop this portable.
Now, you might be wondering why I didn’t point you in the direction of one of the MacBook Pros. You can find some decent deals out there, especially on the M3 Pro MacBook Pro, which you can get for
. But if I’m being honest, I really don’t need the extra performance that comes with the M3 Pro MacBook Pro. As much as I love the XDR display, extra ports, and better speakers, if I were spending my own hard-earned cash, I’d probably be unwilling to spend an extra $800 on a MacBook I don’t really need.
So, yeah — if you sound anything like me — this 15-inch M2 MacBook Air is an ideal laptop. At $250 off, I’d consider this a great time to pick this one up.
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