Apple MacBook Air 13 with M4 gets a $250 discount

One of the year’s best ultraportables has just become a better deal. The 2025 MacBook Air 13 with Apple’s M4 chip is marked down $250, bringing workstation-grade efficiency and everyday portability into a more wallet-friendly price range. This is the rare deal that fundamentally changes the value equation for students, heavy travelers, and creators who prize silence while working and battery life while moving from office to home and back.

Why this MacBook Air M4 price drop is significant now

Discounts this steep on the most recent Air are rare. See some prices drop even more because of the starting configs; your interest might be 18%–20% off — again, sweet savings if you juggle storage or memory without breaking the bank. Given that component prices are still high across the industry, there haven’t been many significant price cuts on premium ultrabooks. “Thin-and-light laptops continue to be a growth bright spot, and many of these customers are looking for evidence of innovation,” market trackers at IDC wrote, but added that prices remained high, which is why this cut is interesting if you were on the fence.

What the Apple M4 chip adds to the new MacBook Air

M4 is based on Apple’s 2nd-gen 3nm architecture, which focuses on performance per watt.

You’re getting faster high-efficiency cores for day-to-day tasks and snappier performance cores when you push into heavier workloads, like jumbo RAW photo edits or timeline scrubs in Final Cut Pro. The media engine in the chip has been updated to handle modern codecs with ease, while the GPU continues to support hardware-accelerated ray tracing that was added last generation.

The latest Neural Engine represents one of the most significant jumps. (Apple has publicly said it can deliver up to 38 trillion operations a second on M4-class silicon, paving the way for on-device AI capabilities — say, background separation in photos, smarter transcriptions, or local language models — without handlers being forced to take those data packages back.) For users who place a premium on privacy, that’s not only faster; it’s better.

Design: Power and portability, nailed in this model

The formula for the Air is unchanged: a sturdy, fanless case that fits inside any bag and remains whisper quiet under load. It is light — about 2.7 pounds, which means it’s easy to toss in a bag and carry all day. The 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display features crisp text and vivid P3 color, offering an excellent experience for both reading and watching videos. And True Tone ensures a comfortable viewing experience in any light. Battery life is still a headline feature — Apple says the Air can get up to 18 hours of video playback and all-day web use, and mixed workloads in the real world are able to last through all but the longest workday before needing a charger.

Connectivity is practical and modern: MagSafe 3 for safe charging, two Thunderbolt/USB4 ports for fast peripherals and external displays, and a 3.5mm jack with support for high-impedance headphones. The 1080p camera, beamforming mics, and better speakers come together to make video calls and casual content consumption feel less like a compromise than it does with most ultraportables in this class.

Real-world speed and responsiveness you can feel daily

Outside of synthetic benchmarks, the improvements manifest in the work. Lightroom Classic exports with heavy noise reduction faster, complex Xcode builds are ready sooner, and 4K H.265 footage scrubs slicker thanks to the new media block. M4-class devices in independent testing have already been shown to boast double-digit CPU gains over the M2 plus an attention-grabbing Neural Engine uplift — which collectively means less waiting and more doing.

If you’re upgrading from an Intel MacBook or an M1 Air, the leap will appear significant. Even M2 owners are going to feel multitasking with many browser tabs open, streaming, and productivity apps all running at the same time is a little smoother. For M3 owners, the upgrade calculus becomes more a matter of future-proofing — particularly if you are someone who will be taking advantage of AI-heavy workflows over the next several years.

How to get the most out of this MacBook Air deal

• Memory: 8GB of unified memory is fine for basic productivity, but 16GB is the sweet spot if you plan to do photo/video work, run virtual machines, or keep a lot of pro apps open at once. With $250 in your pocket, that upgrade very well pays for itself over the long haul.
• Storage: Opt for 512GB if your workflow includes local media and large libraries. On top of capacity, higher-tier SSDs usually deliver faster sustained speeds than many 256GB base drives, which can help with large file imports/exports or big app installs.
• External displays: If you’ll be driving high-resolution monitors, budget for a quality USB4 dock or a display featuring one-cable USB-C connectivity. The Air doesn’t mind productivity stations, but the right hub tidies your desk.

How it compares with alternatives from Windows and Apple

With Apple’s expanding lineup, Air 13 is the travel-friendly one; the Air 15 has more screen real estate with a slight weight penalty, and the MacBook Pro 14 shoots for sustained pro workloads with active cooling and added ports. On the Windows side, high-end models such as the Dell XPS 13 and HP Spectre x360 14 offer similar design and OLED options, but the Air’s blend of battery life, macOS optimization, and silent operation is a winning one. Research agencies such as Canalys and IDC have cited battery life and portability as the biggest drivers of ultraportable demand, two areas where the Air is perpetually ahead.

Buy it now, if the fit is right for your workload

If you need a machine that is light, quiet, and assured both in everyday tasks and creative workloads, the MacBook Air 13 M4 is an easy recommendation with this $250 discount. It’s a good, balanced laptop that punches above its weight — and today it finally punches above its price.