Apple Silicon has breathed new life into MacBooks with much better overall performance, not to mention large gains in battery life, too. The M1 MacBook Air was the laptop to kickstart this MacBook renaissance, and even though it’s now a few years old, remains a top-class ultraportable laptop for students, creatives, or anyone else who needs one. Being a slightly older machine means it can now be had for quite reasonable money – a case in point is this reduction at Walmart, which takes it down to the bargain price of $650. That deal is also on a range of colours too – either Space Gray, Gold or Silver – which is rare for MacBook discounts.
This is a steal of a price in terms of paying the Apple tax, considering the power on offer from similarly priced Windows machines.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, making it a great choice for a wide range of people and use cases. Even if you may not use it for more than day to day work with the occasional bit of a more intensive workload, it’s nice to know that this MacBook Air is well up to the task.
It features one of Apple’s Retina displays, and provides a 2560×1600 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 slightly newer refreshed MacBook Pros, but then again those machines start at a lot more than this humble base model. Being fanless also means it should be whisper quiet under load, where previous Intel options had the tendency to sound like a jet engine – I know my old 13-inch MacBook Pro did.
I should note that this is the base level spec, with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. On paper, it seems heinous to recommend a device with 8GB of RAM, 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. It’s at this point where this M1 MacBook Air falls over, also given that its selection of ports totals a pair of USB-C offerings. As a result, for wider expansion, you will need to live the dongle life with a handy USB-C adapter, but luckily, these can be had for quite prices reasonable these days.
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. These Apple Silicon laptops are markedly more efficient than their Intel-powered predecessors, offering a large increase in total runtime away from a charger.
Apple’s base spec M1 MacBook Air remains a top-class laptop for most people, and this Walmart reduction is quite the steal.
