For years, Apple kept its M1 MacBook Air around as the ultimate budget pick in its laptop lineup. Now, the M3 MacBook Air from 2024 has just hit the same heady discount heights, plunging to $799 at Amazon in the early Prime Day sale in a deal that makes the MacBook Neo look pretty tame by comparison.

• Check out this deal on Amazon

The M3 MacBook Air came out in 2024, so it's a couple of years old now. However, if you want a fantastic portable machine that will give you great battery life, this is not to be sniffed at. For just $200 more, this blows the MacBook Neo out of the water. Its M3 chip has an 8-core GPU and 10-core CPU, and you also get 16GB of RAM and 512GB SSD. That means you get a better CPU and GPU core count, twice the RAM, twice the storage, and higher memory bandwidth versus the Neo. The M3 also offers drastically better battery life and a host of other extra features.

Both the M4 and M5 MacBook Air are on sale for around $950 at Amazon right now. That makes this deal $150 less than those more expensive options. While the M4 and M5 chips are faster than this M3 model, this older version is no slouch.

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Our Geekbench testing does reveal a fairly substantial uplift on the M4 model, which scored around 3,800 in similar Geekbench 6 single-core tests and nearly 15,000 in multi-core.

What you're getting here is really the ultimate budget MacBook right now. Of course, the MacBook Neo is cheaper at $589, but for that price, you get a meager 8GB of RAM and just 256GB of storage, half what you get with the M3. The M3 has more CPU cores (10 vs 6) than the MacBook Neo, and more GPU cores (8 vs 5). Battery life is also rated for longer (18 hours versus the Neo's 16 hours), and the M3 comes with significantly better 102 GB/s maximum memory bandwidth compared to the Neo's 60 GB/s.

Versus the Neo, the M3 MacBook Air also has a higher resolution display that is slightly larger, and has better color with Wide color (P3) and True Tone Technology. The M3 also has more speakers, support for spatial audio, better microphones for calls, and support for high-impedance headphones, which you won't find on the MacBook Neo.

If you can stretch from the Neo to this $799 Macbook Air, this one is a no-brainer as a great laptop for a college student, a gift for a relative, or a high school student.

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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.