The MacBook Air is probably the most well-known thin and light laptop on the market, and it’s hard to think of any other laptop that comes close besides Dell’s XPS lineup. Still, if you want something within Apple’s ecosystem, then the MacBook Air M2 is the best MacBook to buy if you’re doing so on a budget, and that’s saying something. Luckily, you can also take advantage of a great deal from Best Buy that pushes the price even lower, from the original $1,299 to $1,099. You can also get up to $825 worth of trade-in credits, so you can bring the price down quite significantly, and if that wasn’t enough, you even get a few months of various Apple services thrown in as well, sweetening the deal even further.

Why you should buy the M2 MacBook Air 13

As the name suggests, the M2 MacBook Air comes with the still powerful M2 chip under the hood, which is no slouch, even when compared to the latest M3 chip. The M2 MacBook Air excels at video editing due to the higher bandwidth video decoder and a ProRes engine, while overall performance is 18% better than the M1 version. Unfortunately, there is one downside: since this is a fanless laptop, there is quite a bit of heat generation, especially when running it at full capacity. It’s not a dealbreaker, but something to keep in mind, and if you’re thinking of going to the M3 directly, you should take a look at our M2 vs M3 breakdown.

The rest of the specs are very respectable, too, such as the 13.6-inch screen that has a gorgeous 2560 x 1664 resolution. You also get a reasonably sized 256GB of storage to work with, and if you feel that’s not enough, then you can always add to it with one of these external hard drive deals. Unfortunately, you still only get 8GB of RAM, which isn’t a dealbreaker either, but at this price point, we really should be seeing 16GB, although we’re fairly familiar with Apple’s philosophy of skimping on the RAM.

Overall, the M2 MacBook Air 13 is an excellent option if you want a budget Apple MacBook, especially since the new M3 MacBooks are out, which pushes down the prices a bit. You could also potentially go for the

, and our M2 MacBook Air vs. M1 MacBook Air comparison goes into more detail. Otherwise, the discount from Best Buy that brings the M2 MacBook Air down to $1,099 is the perfect option, or you could check out some of these other Apple deals as well.

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