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Apple Now Selling Refurbished M2 MacBook Air Models
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Costco, amazon and micro center are selling brand new ones for $1,049. Best Buy also had the same deal but expired yesterday.
The usual thing you hear from the "8 GB is pathetic" crowd in response to this is, "Yeah, but you're destroying your SSD with memory swapping!" Well, I've yet to "destroy" the SSD in any Mac I've owned with the default RAM amount, even running a 4GB 2013 MacBook Air with a similar workload to you for many years (and it's now being enjoyed by another owner).
EDIT: just realized I didn't read your quote carefully. Thought you were saying you had no issues with 8GB, but now I see that you say you do. All I can say is that I've had that many tabs open in Chrome (which is supposedly infamous for being a resource hog) and other apps open on an 8GB M1 MBA with no issue. So what I say above applies to people's responses to me when I tell them that 😉
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Also they’ll price-match with Amazon (and Microcenter, I believe, along with other “major” electronics retailers).
It’s how I recently picked up a base M1 Air for less than $700, with trade-in of my iPad 9th gen.
I just wish they would give up on the square edge design on computers. I was in the Apple Store yesterday to look at the newer stuff that I hadn’t seen up close yet and I was surprised how blocky, heavy, and thick the new mba and even more so the 14/16” mbp are. What works well on iPads and phones doesn’t translate to laptops. While the older models aren’t really thinner overall, they feel a lot thinner. Even the current iMacs and the studio display suffer from this. The old iMac was elegant, the new one looks cheap.
I'd rather pay the $120 and get it brand new!
If you haven't ever purchased Apple refurbished from Apple your missing out. It's just like new with the same warranty and return policy. I'd pass on the over priced M2 MBA too.
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That and 10% off for a refurb product in general doesn’t exactly scream deal of the century.
Enough today and for the next year or two. But will an 8gb RAM machine run MacOS in 2026 while you have ten Google Chrome tabs loaded? I'm going to guess that it won't run smoothly at all.
I have the midnight and its worth it. This is the fastest longest battery life computer I have ever owned. Its amazing.
I agree re base model. Re fingerprints and the midnight blue color, the first day or two after reading reviewers highlighting fingerprints I obsessed over fingerprints and wiped them off whenever I saw them, for the next couple of weeks I'd wipe them off occasionally but mostly didnt notice them, and since then I wipe my MBA off maybe once every week or two, about the same as happens with my other systems. I do find the MBA to be my system of choice a lot of the time (obviously not for those cases where I have a sustained heavy processing load) and definitely my favorite for travel...
Apple’s refurbs rarely, if ever, are great deals. Like you pointed out, a reseller usually has a new one for a similar price… and no tax if they’re out of state… making them even better deals.
A M1 MBA with the "same specs" at $849 is also available...and a much better deal. As for the 16-20 tab Safari users: Open Safari/preferences/advanced/show Develop menu in menu bar. Then go to Safari/develop/empty caches. Works like a charm on my 2020 M1 MBA 8/256
That’s exactly why I bought an M2 13” MacBook Pro…
I bought a couple of refurb units from Apple.com tbh I can't tell if it's used or not. For the same amount of $ spent I get a better spec with the same Apple warranty, why not?
A refurbished product from Apple is treated the same as brand new in terms of them standing behind its quality and support. I think people simply have a psychological hangup over the term "refurbished". I'd suggest getting over that hangup and applying that $120 savings towards Apple Care.
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But of course you're supposed to be reporting out of state purchases and paying taxes on them each year if the retailer didn't collect your state's sales tax at the time of sale, so if you're following the law then that's a moot point. Also, lots of people prefer to buy directly from Apple for various reasons (ease of returns, if needed, being a major one), so there's that.