The M1 MacBook Air in Gold is down to £779 for Prime Day
The cheapest it's ever been.
Well, the second day of Prime Day 2023 is underway, and we're already seeing some fabulous deals on a wide range of products. This below deal that brings the base model M1 MacBook Air has been the one that's got us talking the most, and if you're someone who wants to grab a powerful MacBook in gold for its lowest price ever from Amazon, then you'll want to take notice.
Apple's move to their own silicon, starting with the M1 chip back in 2020, has made for one of the biggest upgrades compared to the older Intel MacBooks of years gone by, helping to make this MacBook Air a truly class-leading machine. Our very own Will Judd uses an M1 MacBook Air day in day out, and has testified to its power, while I'm using an M1 Pro-powered 16-inch Pro from 2021, moving up from the last gen of Intel-based Pros, and the gains made in efficiency, thermal performance, and general power are excellent, making them a worthwhile upgrade.
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. What's more, the more modern M2-powered MacBooks only offer modest upgrades in performance, making this M1 Air an even better value proposition for most people. This MacBook Air is also fanless, so won't be making any noise under load, unlike my old Intel-based 13-inch Pro whose fans would spin up at the drop of a hat.
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.
The M1 Air also 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 easily cost double the money of this M1 Air. 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.
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, there arguably isn't a better time to pull the trigger with the M1 MacBook Air at its lowest ever price.