The best MacBook deals we found for Black Friday
You're not alone if you've waited until Black Friday to scope out deals on the latest MacBooks. Considering these are some of the best (and most expensive) laptops out there right now, plenty of people will be looking for the best MacBook deals over the holiday shopping period. We me be still one week out from Black Friday proper, but we're already seeing some solid deals on machines like the new MacBook Air M2, and even the high-powered 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros.
While you'll likely get the best deal by shopping at a retailer like Amazon, B&H Photo, Adorama and others, Apple does have it's own holiday sales as well. However, you'll have to wait until Black Friday for those, plus they give you up to a $250 Apple gift card with purchase rather than a discounted price. If you know you'll use that gift card, that may be the best option for you. But if you'd rather the instant gratification of a couple hundred dollars off, we've collected the best MacBook deals here so you don't have to go searching for them.
MacBook Air M1
The 2020 MacBook Air with Apple's M1 chipset is at an all-time low right now — only $800 for the base model with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. While, yes, the M2 chip in the latest model will give you a slight performance boost, the M1 processor is still quite powerful. It'll certainly be an upgrade for anyone coming from an older, Intel-powered MacBook. We gave the M1 Air a score of 94 when it first came out for its incredibly fast performance, excellent keyboard and trackpad, lovely Retina display and its lack of fan noise.
MacBook Air M2
The latest and greatest MacBook Air, the 2022 model with the M2 chipset, is $150 off and down to a record low of $1,050. This laptop looks and feels quite different from the 2020 version thanks to Apple redesigning the machine to have a uniformly thing frame all around (no more wedge) and its screen is slightly larger at 13.6-inches. We also appreciated its quad-speaker setup and its excellent performance overall, so much so that we called it Apple's "near-perfect" Mac.
13-inch MacBook Pro
Apple's most compact Pro laptop, the 13-inch MacBook Pro, is on sale for $1,149 right now, or 12 percent off its normal rate. It sits, somewhat confusingly, in the middle of the company's notebook lineup. While it has solid performance thanks to the M2 chipset, a long battery life and stellar build quality, it's hard for us to recommend outright. Most people would be better served by the M2 MacBook Air, or jumping up to the 14-inch MacBook Pro for even more power. But if you're set on the 13-inch size and want the efficiency provided by an internal fan (which the Air doesn't have), this MacBook Pro is your best bet.
14-inch MacBook Pro
The 2021 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro processor, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD storage is a whopping $400 off and down to a record low of $1,600. This machine has the most advanced features of any Apple laptop (aside from its larger, 16-inch sibling), including a Liquid Retina XDR display, remarkable performance using that Pro chipset, excellent battery life and a bevy of ports that make connecting all of your peripherals and accessories much easier. Apple is overdue for a MacBook Pro refresh, though, but it's likely that those machines won't launch until early 2023.
16-inch MacBook Pro
The biggest of Apple's laptops, the 16-inch MacBook Pro, is cheaper than ever at $2,000 thanks to a $500 discount. That still-hefty price gets you an M1 Pro chipset, a 10‑core CPU and 16‑core GPU, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. This model is essentially an enlarged version of the 14-inch Pro, sharing most of the same features with it. You're getting a Liquid Retina XDR display, a bunch of ports including an SD card slot, a fantastic keyboard and great battery life.
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