Best Buy Takes $300 Off 15-Inch MacBook Air With Multiple All-Time Low Prices Starting at $999 [Updated]

M3 MBA incoming...

This is a really good deal. My 15” Air is the best laptop I’ve ever had. Better form factor than the MBP without any noticeable performance difference; at least with that I do with my laptop.

Win-win. They’re making space for the incoming M3s, and now you can get a fantastic laptop for a fairly reasonable price. Picked one up this morning at Best Buy.

This is the way. The M3 will surely benchmark faster, but it’s not going to feel subjectively faster when you’re using it (unless a couple seconds here and there on long renders means something to you.)

Heck. If blind tested I doubt M3Max feels subjectively faster than M1 for the kind of workload than an Air is designed for.

If Dell can do it, so can Apple. I believe in the supply chain prowess of Tim Cook.

Of course they can do it, but why would they? Upcharging RAM and SSD is a huge profit center for them. They get away with it because, well, the machines run beautifully in base spec.

It's an unpopular opinion in these parts, but several of my 'muggle' friends (i.e. normal computer users, not geeks or enthusiasts like us) have purchased base spec. MacBooks Air's M1 and M2 and LOVE them. They love the performance, the speed, they don't need lots of space for media because they stream everything. 8GB/256GB is fine for them - especially when bought in the sale or with EDU discount.

My wife LOVES her 8GB/256GB M1 Air. It does all her email and photos. She uses a million Safari tabs (because she forgets to close windows). She does light MS Office stuff with it and it's fantastic for that - and all her apps are open all the time because she doesn't care to quit them properly - she just leaves them. It's great for FaceTime with family. She never reboots - ever. I do that and find she's had 3-months of uptime, sometimes longer because she always says no to software updates.

Putting in 16GB/512 would literally be a waste for her. It could be argued that in a couple of years she might want more, but she keeps her laptops for 6-8 years and it's only because I am pushing her to change that she does.

These things are just appliances to most people. And and 8/256 works well enough for them. Those of us that want more, know it and pay (excessively) for it.

Realistically, what would anyone do with an M3 macbook Air compared to an M2 Air? There is literally no benefit other than maybe a slight battery life gain… but that would have to be tested.

The real value proposition would be an M2 with 16 GB RAM base model. If they went for a device upgrade on every other processor for Macbooks Airs and Macbook Pros… it would be cheaper to service those on Apple Care and the devices would last longer and feed into their supposedly green/environmental targets…

I would prefer more significant upgrades every two years over smaller iterative upgrades every year. Then they can focus on just bringing some really nice changes and have more time to refine and ensure reliability etc.

Id pay slightly more for that kind of focus.

My wife LOVES her 8GB/256GB M1 Air. It does all her email and photos. She uses a million Safari tabs (because she forgets to close windows). She does light MS Office stuff with it and it's fantastic for that - and all her apps are open all the time because she doesn't care to quit them properly - she just leaves them. It's great for FaceTime with family. She never reboots - ever. I do that and find she's had 3-months of uptime, sometimes longer because she always says no to software updates.

These things are just appliances to most people. And and 8/256 works well enough for them. Those of us that want more, know it and pay (excessively) for it.

You summed up quite nicely what has been going on in the thread titled "is 8GB of RAM enough in a Macbook Pro?" or 8GB is the bottleneck. For the casual user a laptop with 8GB is plenty. I have stated over and over that my M2 base spec Mini is twice as fast at everything vs my 2018 Intel i5 Mini with the faster SSD and I upgraded the RAM from 8 to 32GB because I got caught in the 8GB is not enough. The cold boot to desktop is at a ridiculous <9 secs on the M2 Mini.

You gave a really solid example of what can be done with a base spec M1 Macbook Air and why there's not a whole lot of reasons to spend the extra money when the user might not see a lot of difference in performance. If a person feels they need more headroom then they can pay for it. For most, the base spec will suffice.

M3 MBA incoming...

100% that's what I'm waiting on, not really for the processor itself but so they can fix the speed on the 256gb SSD which is what I'm looking to grab.