If your old laptop is hanging on by a thread, this might be the perfect upgrade moment. You can currently get a Grade A refurbished MacBook Air with an M1 chip for $384.99. If you’ve been wanting a fast, reliable, travel-friendly laptop without playing financial Jenga, this might be your easiest tech win of the year.

With the M4 model that has a better design and faster specs costing just $150 more, most shoppers should go that route.

Find the best early Black Friday MacBook deal. The 2025 Apple MacBook Air M4 is on sale for $749.99 at Amazon.

Nevertheless, I will also keep my MacBook around for activities that remain macOS exclusives, such as HomePod mini OS recovery. My world has flipped: My iPad Pro is now a functional laptop replacement… and I only need to keep my Mac around for specific, uncommon use cases.

During testing, reviewers found the Air M4 to comfortably handle multitasking, 4K video scrubbing, large documents, and dozens of browser tabs without breaking a sweat. With the new M4 chip, Apple has made the Air significantly faster and cooler than the previous generation.

The 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 chip, 16GB of unified memory, and 512GB of storage just dropped to $1,444 on Amazon, down from its $1,599 retail price. The 1TB models are also on sale but his configuration hits the sweet spot between capability and cost: enough power for serious work without the premium attached to maxed-out specs.

The M5 MacBook Pro has incredible performance gains, especially for AI. But is that good enough to overlook the same design, screen, and ports selection?