Apple's M1-based MacBook is one of the best laptops ever. Thanks to the latest Amazon sale, it's a bargain.

For a limited time, Amazon is offering the new MacBook Pro M1 (512GB) for $1,399. That's $100 off and the best price ever on this powerful Mac. This isn't the only Mac laptop on sale; Amazon is also offering the MacBook Air M1 (512GB) for $1,189.99. That's $59 off and one of the best Apple products we've seen.

The current generation MacBook Air and MacBook Pro both use the same 8-core Apple M1 chip. However, the MacBook Air has a 7-core M1 GPU, while the MacBook Pro has an 8-core M1 GPU built in. Similarly, the MacBook Pro has a slightly brighter screen (500 nits brighter on the MacBook Pro compared to 400 nits on the MacBook Air). Otherwise, both laptops perform very similarly.

However, both machines use Apple's new M1 CPU, so not all applications are optimized for the new MacBook. This means that non-native apps will need to run Rosetta 2 emulation technology. (The first time you try to use a non-native app, this software is automatically downloaded.) Even with that caveat, the MacBook performs amazingly well.

In Geekbench 5.1, which measures overall performance, the MacBook Pro M1 scored 5,945 points in the multi-core portion. This is higher than the Dell XPS 13's 5,319 points and the Asus ZenBook 13's 5,084 points, both of which are powered by 11th generation Intel Core i7 CPUs; the MacBook Pro will get faster as more M1-optimized apps are released.

Meanwhile, battery tests on the MacBook Pro M1 showed 16 hours and 32 minutes of runtime, well above the 10 hours and 21 minutes of the Intel-powered MacBook Pro released last year.