I bought a new Mac for the first time in years this Black Friday. I purchased the 15-inch MacBook Air M2 and I love it. If you're looking for a new Mac, the MacBook Air I bought is back on sale at the same sale price I purchased it. Even better, the rarely discounted 16GB of RAM is also on sale.
For a limited time, you can get the 15-inch MacBook Air M2 on sale for $1,049 at Best Buy. That's $250 off and one of the best MacBook deals I've seen. Yes, it briefly hit $999 last month, but that deal was limited to paying My Best Buy members only. By comparison, today's deal is available to anyone. Even better, you can get the rarely discounted 16GB RAM model for $1,449 at Best Buy. This 16GB model wasn't on sale when I purchased my MacBook Air, but I heartily recommend it because it'll help future-proof your laptop (and you can never go wrong with more RAM).
The Mac I've been using for day-to-day work is my late 2015 iMac 27-inch 5K running on a Core i5 CPU with 16GB of RAM. As expected, the MacBook Air with M2 blows it out of the water. This is the first machine I own with Apple silicon and the first thing I noticed was how fast it boots up. I never complained about my iMac being slow, but the M2 takes things to another level.
I can have over 20 Firefox tabs open, stream a 4K YouTube video, and edit a picture with not so much as a hiccup on my Mac. It's no surprise it ranks as one of the best laptops on the market right now.
In our MacBook Air M2 review, we called the Editor's Choice laptop the best 15-inch laptop you can buy. It even earned a spot on our best MacBooks lists for offering a near-perfect mix of performance, display quality, portability, and battery life. On Geekbench 5, which measures overall CPU performance, the MacBook Air 15-inch notched a single-core score of 1,908 and 8,932 on the multi-core test. Outpacing the bulk of Windows laptops, the MacBook Air M2 effortlessly handles everyday tasks like browsing the web and streaming video. While it may not match the raw speed and power of the MacBook Pro M2, we're confident that, for most people, the MacBook Air M2 is more than capable of serving your needs.
Its stellar battery life is also not to be overlooked. We got nearly 15 hours of battery life out of our unit on a single charge. It suffers from the same shortcomings as the 13-inch MacBook Air — namely a minimal number of ports and support for just one external monitor.
But even with those few drawbacks, the MacBook Air M2 is still a top-tier laptop, and it's a steal at this price. My one regret, I do wish I would've gotten the model with 16GB of RAM. That would have helped future-proof my laptop a little more. While it wasn't on sale when I bought my MacBook Air, it is on sale now and I totally recommend it if you can afford to spend the extra money.
