Following the announcement of the M5 MacBook Air, the previous-generation 15-inch M4 MacBook Air with 24GB of RAM and 512GB of storage is available at a record-low price of $1,299. This represents a significant discount, making it $200 cheaper than a comparably spec'd new M5 model.
While the M5 chip offers performance improvements, particularly in AI tasks, the real-world performance gap for general computing is described as not "seismic." The two models share many core features like the display, design, ports, and battery life.
The article presents this deal as a strong value for those who do not require the latest chip, as the M4 model remains highly capable for day-to-day tasks and offers substantial savings over the new generation.
Main Topics: M4 MacBook Air price drop, comparison with M5 MacBook Air, specifications and value analysis.
M4 MacBook Air with 24GB of RAM plunges to lowest-ever price following M5 announcement — $300 off is a steal on Apple's highest-spec RAM configuration
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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.
This portable number gets you the larger 15-inch display, along with the aforementioned 24GB of RAM, an upgrade worth $200 alone on the M4 lineup, made all the more sweet by catastrophic price increases on memory and computers in general. You'll also get 512GB of storage, up from the 256GB base storage on this model, and a choice of three of the four colors available.
The 2025 MacBook Air comes with Apple's M4 processors, 24GB of unified memory, and 512GB of storage. It also features a 15-inch Liquid Retina display.
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.
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.
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Stephen is Tom's Hardware's News Editor with almost a decade of industry experience covering technology, having worked at TechRadar, iMore, and even Apple over the years. He has covered the world of consumer tech from nearly every angle, including supply chain rumors, patents, and litigation, and more. When he's not at work, he loves reading about history and playing video games.
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