Buy the cheapest MacBook Air: Best prices in stores, refurb deals, and free accessories

Get the best price on MacBook Airs, we've shopped around for the lowest price

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Where to get the cheapest MacBook Air is one of the questions our readers often ask. This article is our guide to where to get the best MacBook Air price, which MacBook Air models are available to buy, and where to buy your MacBook Air.
Getting a cheap MacBook Air and saving money is important, but getting a good MacBook Air deal and buying your cheap MacBook Air from a good store is also important.
The MacBook Air is now Apple's flagship consumer notebook, initially introduced as a high-end laptop but now the staple product in Apple's laptop line-up, the MacBook Air combines fantastic performance, with extreme lightness but the MacBook Air price is higher than many people want to pay, so any MacBook Air savings are welcome.

Which MacBook Air to get

First of all you should decide if the MacBook Air is the right Mac for you? If you're undecided, or unfamiliar with Apple's range of Mac computers, read this Which Mac Should I Get article  and this Which MacBook Should I Buy article first.

You should also read this MacBook Air 2012 review before comitting to buy a MacBook Air.
If you've decided that the MacBook Air is definitely the Mac for you, then the question of Which MacBook Air to get depends on your needs and cash.
Apple has four MacBook Airs for sale on the Apple Store. Two MacBook Airs with a 11-inch display, and two MacBook Airs with a 13-inch display. Which MacBook Air to buy is a tricky question, as all Macs are good, but offer slightly different features.
The MacBook Air is sold with an i5 processor running at 1.7GHz in the 11-inch models, and 1.8GHz in the 13-inch models.
All MacBook Airs have 4GB of RAM by default (an upgrade to 8GB is available as on optional upgrade).
All MacBook Airs have the same Intel HD Graphics 4000 graphics chip.
The key differential between MacBook Airs is the amount of Flash hard drive storage (between 64GB and 256GB by default, with a 512GB expansion available on two MacBook Airs ).
Which MacBook Air you get is up to you, but we'd recommend the 11inch: 128GB model as a good purchase, and as the RAM cannot be upgraded after purchase, we'd be more comfortable with the 8GB RAM upgrade.

MacBook Air Apple Store price

You can buy a MacBook Air directly from the Apple Store, as well as most major retail outlets for the following prices.
MacBook Air 11-inch : 64GB
Price: £849
MacBook Air 11-inch : 128GB
Price: £929
MacBook Air 13-inch : 128GB
Price: £999
MacBook Air 13-inch : 256GB
Price £1,249

MacBook Air Upgrades

A number of MacBook Air upgrades are available at the time of purchase. You should pay close attention to these, because it is hard to perform a MacBook Air upgrade after you have bought a MacBook Air.
The MacBook Air RAM can be upgraded from 4GB to 8GB when if you buy a MacBook Air from the Apple Store. If you buy a MacBook Air elsewhere you may find it comes with the stock 4GB RAM.
The MacBook Air hard drive comes in 64GB, 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB upgrades. You can upgrade the MacBook Air hard drive at the time of purchase, but not afterwards. The MacBook Air hard drive is Flash-RAM welded into the motherboard.
If you buy a MacBook Air in a sale you may be limited to which MacBook Air upgrades are available. The following MacBook Air upgrades are available at the time of purchase.
RAM Upgrade 4GB to 8GB + £80
USB SuperDrive + £65
AppleCare Protection £199
One to One Membership + £79
2.0GHz intel Dual Core i7 + £130 (11in model); + £120 (13in model)
256GB Flash Storage +£240 (11in model)
512GB Flash Storage +£640 (11in model); + £400 (13in model);
Again, we advise getting the RAM upgrade for £80 as it can't be upgraded at a later date. The Intel i5 and Intel i7 processors are not radically different, so paying £120-£130 for the upgrade seems an extravagance to us. Although we think 64GB of Flash RAM is incredibly tight, paying for the 256 or 512GB upgrades seem outrageously high to us, instead we'd go with the 128GB option and invest in a good external Lightning or USB 3 hard drive if we needed the extra storage space.

Cheapest MacBook Airs

So the entry level price of a MacBook Air from Apple is £849 but surely we can get a cheaper MacBook Air than that? If you want to buy a cheap MacBook Air then here are some great MacBook Air deals:
The cheapest MacBook Air deal we can see at the moment is from online store Zavvi with a MacBook Air deal at £777.99. 
The second cheapest MacBook Air deal we can find is eBuyer, which is offering a MacBook Air deal for £778.99.
Amazon also has several sellers offering MacBook Airs at approximately £790 which is also a good saving. The MacBook Airs still have a one-year guarantee with Apple (which tracks all serial numbers) but be warned that Amazon only guarantees the initial condition and timely delivery of the MacBook Air, the ongoing guarantee that it'll work is between you and whatever company sold the MacBook Air though the Amazon store.
Be careful not to accidentally purchase an older MacBook Air, these are identifiable by having slower 1.6GH CPUs and only 2GB RAM).

Best MacBook Air deal

If you're happy to pay full price for a MacBook Air and want a MacBook Air deal from a retailer that you're comfortable with, then John Lewis offers a two-year warranty on all Apple products, which is twice as long as the standard one-year offered by Apple.
John Lewis also offers a three-year warranty MacBook Air deal for £150. This compares favourably with Apple's own AppleCare Protection, which is essentially a three year warranty for £199.
There are very few resellers offering MacBook Air deals with free accessories at the moment, we presume that this is because they are being discounted quite heavily elsewhere.

Refurbished MacBook Airs

One great trick that many Apple fans use is to buy a refurbished MacBook Air from the Apple Refurb Store.
A refurbished MacBook Air bought from the Apple Refurb Store is likely to be a brand-new but unsold model (if it is from a previous year), or a reconditioned MacBook Air if it a new model. A reconditioned MacBook Air is likely to be either an ex-demonstration model, used during Apple MacBook Air teaching programs, or a unit sold to a customer who decided to return it.
A reconditioned MacBook Air bought from the Apple Refurb Store is in no way inferior to a MacBook Air bought direct from the Apple Store. Most MacBook Airs bought from the Apple Refurb Store will be cleaned, checked, tested and visibly indistinguishable from brand new MacBook Airs
A reconditioned MacBook Air comes with the same 1 year warranty (extendable to three years with AppleCare protection.)
The only likely difference beween a reconditioned MacBook Air from the Apple Refurb Store and a brand new MacBook Air from the Apple Store, is that it will ship in a brown box rather than the white retal boxes that Apple sells.
The price for a reconditioned MacBook Air changes frequently, so keep an eye on the Refurb Store every day for a while to get a feel for what the cheapest price for the model you want is.
If you wait a while you'll typically get the model that you want. At the moment we can see a neat 11-inch MacBook Air with a 1.7GHz dual core i5 going for £719; and an even neater 11-inch MacBook Air with 128GB storage going for £789.
Perhaps the best deal at the moment is a 13-inch MacBook Air 2011 with 128 GB storage and 4GB RAM going for £789). Although it has a slightly slower graphics card than the MacBook Air 2012 it still sings, and this cheap MacBook Air gives you a 13-inch MacBook Air for £210 less than the cheapest 13-inch model currently on sale.

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MacBook Air vs Windows laptops: which is best?

We compare Apple's MacBook Air to the best Windows Ultrabooks

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Should you choose a MacBook Air or a Windows laptop? Read our MacBook Air vs Windows Ultrabooks advice to find out.
The MacBook Air is one of Apple's greatest creations. A portable product that doesn't compromise on performance, build or user experience. Steve Jobs introduced the first MacBook Air in 2008. A 13in, thin-and-light aluminium laptop with bespoke graphics and processor from Intel, it set a new standard in portable PCs. Only now are Windows laptops catching up. (See our 13in MacBook Air review and 11in MacBook Air review.)
Why this was the case requires some explaining, but in essence where Apple is maker of both hardware and software, all Windows laptop builders make hardware to fit Microsoft's software. More important: they do so using a set of processors designed for them by Intel. Apple's great move in 2008 was to know what consumers wanted, and to insist that Intel made a CPU and GPU that would deliver. Right from the start the MacBook Air was not only thin and light, but it offered unsurpassed battery life without compromising on performance.
That Intel needed a push to create the components to make this possible is an irony. Because today it is Intel, in partnership with Microsoft, that is pushing Windows laptops makers to make thin and light, performance laptops. And doing so they are, with varying degrees of success. Here we'll compare the best Windows Ultrabooks with the latest MacBook Air. See also: should I buy a MacBook Air or a MacBook Pro?

MacBook Air vs Windows Ultrabooks: what is an Ultrabook?

Intel owns the term 'Ultrabook'. It describes a thin and light, ultraportable laptop or laptop/tablet hybrid. You may see first-generation Ultrabooks that don't subscribe to all the standards that follow, but the latest definition of the spec requires these standards to be met before a laptop maker can call its wares an 'Ultrabook'.
2013, 4th-generation Core Ultrabooks must have 802.11ac Wi-Fi, as well as touchscreens and voice control. They must wake from sleep in under 3 seconds. Battery life must be independently tested at seven days on standby, nine hours running Windows and six hours playing back HD video. Intel Ultrabooks must have built-in security software, and be no thicker than 23mm at their widest point.

MacBook Air vs Windows Ultrabooks: Haswell chips, Sony vs Apple

Key to all this is Intel's fourth-generation 'Haswell' Core processor family. One of the key strengths of Haswell processors is much-improved power efficiency, which Intel argues will give rise to a new generation of laptops that are even lighter and slimmer, as well as providing the key benefit of much longer battery life. That's certainly true of some of the Haswell laptops we've seen.
But one of the first big names to update its laptops with Haswell processors is Apple itself. This means the MacBook Air has remarkable battery life. Apple claims an increase from seven to 12 hours for the 13in version, but in our tests it lasted even longer. Our video-streaming test ran for 12.5 hours and we saw almost 14 hours for less-demanding work.
Sony took a more ambitious approach for its first Haswell laptop, the Vaio Pro. It can't match the battery life of the Air, but the size and weight of the carbon-fibre Pro represents a breakthrough in portability. At 1.06kg, the Vaio is almost a third lighter than the MacBook and, according to Sony, the lightest laptop of its type.
But if you compared only the best Sony and the best Apple you wouldn't get the full picture. So below we outline some general points. See how to buy a cheap MacBook Air.

MacBook Air vs Windows Ultrabooks: why the MacBook is better

You know Apple, and you know the MacBook Air. Apple makes quality products that last, and the MacBook Air is one of the best. The design and build quality are impeccable, thanks to the elegant-yet-sturdy ‘unibody' aluminium casing. And with a maximum thickness of 17 mm and a weight of just 1.08 kg the 11in MacBook Air remains one of the lightest and most portable laptops currently available. The 13in model is hardly a beast, either.
The basic design of the MacBook Air has remained unchanged – which is hardly surprising as it set the template that legions of Wintel Ultrabooks have followed in recent years. And the performance is as good as it gets.
This Mid-2013 13in MacBook Air with a 1.3 GHz Intel Core i5-4250U scored 4602 points in our PCMark 7 test. The 2013 MacBook Air recorded 6770 GeekBench 2 points, too. That is one fast PC. The dual-core chip still includes Hyper Threading too, to process four concurrent threads, and will also dynamically overclock to twice its rated speed, 2.6 GHz in Turbo mode.
Since PCMark 7 also measures the speed of storage as part of the test suite, this better-for-less result could also be attributed to the upgrade in flash memory. There’s now 128 GB as standard across both 11.6in and 13.3in models, and importantly this takes a new form-factor that bypasses any SATA bus. Instead it uses a direct PCIe connection, obviating the intermediary and unneeded SATA stage.
Memory for this generation and the last is 4GB as standard, configurable to order to 8 GB, and this is now low-power LPDDR3 SDRAM running at 1600MHz.
And battery life? We put the 2013 MacBook Air to the test in Windows 7 Home Premium, using the venerable MobileMark 2007 (Productivity) benchmark test. And here we recorded a runtime that comfortably exceeded the specified 12 hours, hitting a new record figure of 13 hours and 57 minutes. That is 14 hours of use for your laptop. FOURTEEN HOURS!
Allowing for times when you may be working the machine harder than the MS office and Adobe apps that comprise this test, even an eight-hour stretch between charges means you can yet charge your laptop for the morning, take to work and comfortably last the day without dependence on a mains charger. That's a staggering result.
But stats don't tell the whole story. The MacBook Air is a quality device that is a joy to use. And Apple's sales and aftersales support is famously good. It's not as though Apple won't be around to service your laptop in a couple of years. And you know they will have stock when you go down to the Apple Store. That's not the case for all Windows PC makers.
Oh, and statistics suggest that OS X products are a lot more secure than are Windows computers. So you may decide to save yourself the cost of security software.
Finally, for those of you saying: 'yes, but I need Windows', consider this. You can easily run Windows on a MacBook Air, but you can't run OS X on a Windows laptop. See also: which cables, adapters and accessories do you need for the MacBook Air?

MacBook Air vs Windows Ultrabooks: why Windows is better

Okay, so the MacBook Air is a known quantity. It comes in just a few SKUs and they are all great. That's good to know, but if you are looking for real choice you need to look to the Windows world. And that Ultrabook moniker should mean that you need have no worries about performance (even if build quality is still something of a pig in a poke).
As mentioned above new Windows Ultrabooks have to have touchscreens - and you won't find that on your MacBook Air. Now most people would consider a touchscreen unecessary on a laptop, but  I can tell you from personal experience that when web browsing or using your PC as a media player the touchscreen is a real benefit.
Other variety in the Windows world includes form factor. The MacBook Air is a clamshell laptop, and that is the extent of your choice of portable running OS X. If you want a Windows portable you could choose from a range of clamshell laptops, convertible laptops that turn into slates, laptops that have detachable screens that become discrete slates, and slates themselves with desktop docking stations.
Variety of form factor is matched by variet of price. Ultrabooks tend toward the expensive, but you can pick up a Dell Ultrabook for around £600. That's £250 cheaper than the cheapest MacBook Air. You get what you pay for, but if your pockets are deep and your arms short that could be a major feature.
And finally, there are advantages to having a Windows PC. Windows is the OS run by most computers in the world, so you get the widest choice of third-party apps and more opportunities for peer support.

MacBook Air vs Windows Ultrabooks: the verdict

If you are looking for a thin and light laptop offering great performance and battery life, get a MacBook Air. Even if you need to run Windows. If you need a touchscreen, a hybrid device or you are short of funds, take a dive into the Wintel world. For more see which MacBook Air is best?


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