We’ve NEVER seen a better Black Friday on the MacBook Air

• We’ve looked back over our Black Friday and Prime Day coverage over the past few years and this is by far the best MacBook deal we’ve covered
• MacBooks just aren’t discounted this much very often so it’s worth grabbing this now before the offer expires
• This is a three-year-old laptop, but performance and battery life still holds up today

approved deal

I spend weeks every year trawling the Black Friday sales – and I write about laptops for a living – yet I am struggling to remember a better deal on a MacBook than the one John Lewis currently has on the M2 MacBook Air.

Yes, it’s now nearly three years old, but Apple hasn’t really change all that much about its flagship lightweight laptop in that time. It’s still as desirable as it ever was: its sturdy aluminium shell looks and feels great, the display quality is excellent, the speakers kick out better quality audio than they have any right to and the keyboard is far better than the flat, unreliable butterfly switch effort of old.

M2 Apple MacBook Air: Key specs

• 13.6in IPS display, 500 nits brightness
• 8-core Apple M2 CPU, 8-core Apple M2 GPU
• 16GB of unified memory
• 256GB SSD
• 1080p webcam
• 2x Thunderbolt 3 / USB 4 ports, 1 3.5mm audio jack, 1 MagSafe charging port
• Black Friday price: £699

Battery life remains among the best in the business. Apple quotes up to 18 hours of local video playback and 15 hours of “wireless web” use, and when we tested it it lasted an impressive 17 hours – that’s longer than any of the MacBook Air models preceding it and any of its successors as well.

Moreover, the 10-core M2 processor still holds up, performance-wise, today. Indeed, I’ve been using one of these for work every day and for trips over the past two years and I have yet to desire anything faster or more responsive. The M2 MacBook Air remains as responsive and nippy as the first day I pulled it from the box.

This deal even secures you the model with 16GB of RAM, which is much more generous than the base 8GB model and should be more than enough for most applications, even quite strenuous ones.

However, you may want to purchase extra storage, as the 256GB drive here probably won’t be enough for your needs in the long term. Fortunately, that shouldn’t be too pricey to add.

Of course, you might wonder if it’s worth saving up and buying the £849 M4 MacBook Air instead and, yes, that’s the more powerful machine. However, the M2 is almost as good, and a whopping £250 less expensive. If you’ve always wanted a MacBook, now is the time to buy.

And don’t forget, if you have any money to spare after buying a new MacBook for yourself, there’s a whole world of other Black Friday deals available on products we’ve tested over on the main Expert Reviews Black Friday Deals page.

Written By

Jonathan Bray

Head of reviews at Expert Reviews, Jon has been testing and writing about products since before most of you were born (well, only if you were born after 1996). In that time he’s tested and reviewed hundreds of laptops, PCs, smartphones, vacuum cleaners, coffee machines, doorbells, cameras and more. He’s worked on websites since the early days of tech, writing game reviews for AOL and hardware reviews for PC Pro, Computer Buyer and other print publications. He’s also had work published in Trusted Reviews, Computing Which? and The Observer. And yet, even after so many years in the industry, there’s still nothing more he loves than getting to grips with a new product and putting it through its paces.

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