Grab this M1-powered MacBook Air from Amazon for its lowest ever price
A steal on such a powerful laptop.
Since switching from Intel chips to its own Apple Silicon, MacBooks have improved massively, with better performance and way better battery life. The first model to ship with one of these chips was the M1 MacBook Air, and despite debuting two years ago it remains one of the best ultraportable laptops on the market, as the recent M2 successors provide only modest advantages at a significantly higher price. That makes it worth considering the original M1 MacBook Air, especially as it's now marked down to just £818 at Amazon - nearly £200 off its original price.
Well, I say 'just' £818. In the grand scheme of things, that's quite dear for a laptop, but considering the power on offer from it compared with Windows ultrabooks of similar specs, it reveals that the Apple tax here is a price worth paying. The M1 chip, with its eight cores and a seven-core GPU, is an especially powerful APU, and one that helps this MacBook Air to power through everything from day-to-day computing to more intense workloads such as editing 4K video while on battery power.
In addition, this MacBook Air is also fanless, so won't be making any noise under load, and provides an excellent quality display, too. It features one of Apple's Retina displays, and provides a 2560x1600 resolution with solid coverage of the more specialist DCI-P3 colour gamut, which is arguably vital for content creation work such as video editing on Final Cut Pro, for instance. You don't get the higher 120Hz refresh rate of the MacBook Pros, but these machines start at £2,149.
A quoted battery life of up to 18 hours also means you'll be able to go for a couple of working days without needing to plug the MacBook in, which is testament to its solid endurance for a laptop at this price. I've been running with one of the last Intel-powered MacBook Pros and by comparison, it doesn't offer anywhere near as good battery life, so the Apple Silicon powered ones are markedly more efficient.
This is the base level spec, with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage - but thankfully, the efficiency of the M1 chip makes this configuration surprisingly workable. However, you will need to rely on external storage or cloud storage for more intensive tasks such as video editing, as you won't have the space for large video project files on-board. As for connectivity, this MacBook Air only features a couple of USB-C ports, so you'll likely need to pick up a USB-C dongle with HDMI, full-size USB or an SD card reader if you need these options - thankfully, adapters these days are quite inexpensive.
If you've been wanting to try out an Apple Silicon-powered MacBook, but you've been waiting for prices to drop to the right level, this M1 MacBook Air for £818 from Amazon is a bit of a steal, and a deal you should definitely take notice of.