If you’ve been waiting for an excuse to grab Apple’s latest MacBook Air, this might be it.
The 13-inch Apple M4 MacBook Air has dropped to $849 at Amazon, down from its usual $999 starting price, as part of the US Presidents’ Day sales. That’s a healthy $150 saving on a laptop we rated a full five stars in our 2025 review.
While we reviewed the larger 15-inch M4 MacBook Air rather than this 13-inch version, the experience is fundamentally the same, bar some obvious differences like overall size, weight, and battery capacity. And that’s very good news.
The big story here is the M4 chip. In our testing, it delivered a clear performance bump over previous generations, especially if you’re upgrading from an older M1 or Intel MacBook Air. Single-core performance remains particularly strong too, and even compared with the M3 there’s still a modest uplift.
Apple has also finally standardised 16GB of RAM as the base configuration, meaning no more scraping by with 8GB on an otherwise capable machine. That alone makes this generation feel more future-proof.
Battery life also remains one of the Air’s strongest cards. Apple quotes up to 18 hours, and while real-world heavy use won’t quite stretch that far, it’s still comfortably an all-day machine. We tested the 15-inch model, which has a larger battery than the 13-inch version on sale here, but the underlying efficiency of the M4 chip is the same.
Design-wise, nothing dramatic has changed – and that’s not a complaint. The squared-off chassis introduced a few years ago remains one of the sleekest in the ultraportable world. It’s thin at just over a centimetre, impressively light, and still feels properly premium.
You also get support for two external displays without having to close the lid – something earlier Air models couldn’t manage properly. For students or home workers juggling multiple screens, that’s a meaningful upgrade.
At $999, the M4 MacBook Air was already a strong recommendation. At $849, it starts to look like a bit of a no-brainer if you’re in the US and shopping for a lightweight laptop that can comfortably handle productivity, creative work, and everyday use. Happy deal hunting.
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