You might have noticed that Apple unveiled a new M5 MacBook Air this week. While the performance of the new chip promises big things, new product launches are a great time to score a discount on older Apple gadgets that are famously pretty expensive. Case in point, Amazon is now selling the 15-inch M4 MacBook Air with 24GB of RAM for just $1,299, its lowest-ever price according to price tracking.
Despite being supplanted by the newly unveiled M5 chip, the M4 is no slouch, and Apple silicon continues to offer some of the best bang for your buck in processing when it comes to battery life, efficiency, and performance. For college or work, this laptop will chew through pretty much any day-to-day task. In our battery test, the 15-inch M4 was good for over 15 hours of use browsing the web, streaming video, and running OpenGL tests while connected to Wi-Fi. In the same test, it beat the Lunar Lake Yoga Slim 7i from Lenovo by over an hour.
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The crucial question is: why would you choose this over the new M5 MacBook Air? Firstly, there’s cost. This MacBook is $200 cheaper than the new M5 with the same specs. Apple has increased the base prices of the MacBook Air and the storage, so the value is harder to compare like-for-like, but the M4 is considerably cheaper even when you factor in that the M5’s base storage is now 512GB.
The M4 chip and M5 chip both feature a 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU. However, the newer M5 features Apple’s new super cores, as well as six efficiency cores. Apple says that the M5 MacBook Air is 4x faster at performing AI tasks than this model on sale. Away from AI, however, the touted performance margins are much slimmer, just 1.9x for AI video enhancement, 1.5x for 3D rendering in Blender, and 1.5x image processing in Affinity. All of which is to say that the gap between M4 and M5 isn’t seismic, and of course, these are Apple’s claimed performance figures; the real-world gap is likely to be smaller still.
The M4 model does have a slower hard drive, too. However, there’s also a lot of parity. Both have exactly the same Liquid Retina display, are the same size and weight, have the same camera for FaceTime and video calls, very similar audio capabilities, the same ports (two Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C)), TouchID, and the same battery life rating from Apple. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 are upgrades on the M5, but the gap generally is pretty slim.
Whether you think the gap is worth $200 is up to you, but if not, this deal is a corker and unlikely to stick around for long.
If you’re looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.
