Apple’s stunning M1 MacBook Air is on sale for $800

The best price of the year is back for Apple’s 13.3-inch M1 Macbook Air with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. Best Buy is selling this awesome macOS laptop for $800. That’s a whopping $200 off the list price.

We reviewed this MacBook, giving it 4.5 out of 5 stars and an Editors’ Choice Award. “Apple’s stunning new M1 chip breathes new life into its most affordable laptop, giving it dramatically better performance and battery life along with iPhone and iPad app compatibility,” we said.

The cornerstone of this laptop is the M1 processor. This Arm-based chip has eight CPU cores and seven GPU cores, all based on Apple’s homegrown design. Apple also integrated the laptop’s RAM into the M1 package to reduce latency, and Apple treats the memory as a single pool that can be accessed as needed by the various parts of the chip, again increasing performance.

In our tests, we found the M1 Mac performed excellently when running native software, but there is usually a noticeable performance hit for traditional x86 software running on the compatibility layer. As more and more Mac software moves over to the Arm architecture now that Apple is fully invested in the migration, this will become less of an issue.

Apple’s Macs are always popular laptops, but they’re known for their luxurious price tags. Today’s $200 discount makes the M1 MacBook Air much more affordable.

[Today’s deal: 256GB M1 MacBook Air for $800 at Best Buy.]