Even as an avid Windows user, I was surprised at how quickly I was able to find a great deal on a 13-inch MacBook Air M2 this early Black Friday. Apple's M-series MacBooks are among the best laptops you can buy, with their thin bodies, impressive power, and insane battery life.

In fact, the Air, especially the M2 version, lasted over 14 hours in our tests. I've long coveted this product for editing videos and navigating dozens of tabs at once, and at $300 off, I can justify putting my everyday MSI gaming laptop on the chopping block.

Right now, Amazon has the M2 MacBook Air for only $699. This is 30% off the regular price and is the fastest Black Friday laptop deal I have seen.

As you can see from my review of the MacBook Air M2, this is a generational chip leap from the M1 Air. The larger, brighter screen and upgraded 1080p webcam bring it up to about the same value as the MacBook Air M3. Basically, you get a powerful, sexy Mac at an entry-level price. I don't know about you, but this is too good to pass up.

I spent most of the end of last year debating whether to buy the M1 MacBook Air, which was on sale for $699, a great price for a MacBook with an M-series chip. After all, the previous model's design didn't impress me much, with its chunky screen bezel and 720p webcam. The redesigned M2 fixes these shortcomings, resulting in a more modern looking machine.

I was issued a MacBook Air M2 at work, and its crisp 2,560 x 1,664 pixel resolution screen is gorgeous and bright enough to beat the natural light flooding my apartment. The M2 chip is always fast, even though I have over 50 Chrome tabs open at any given time while using apps like Photoshop. In fact, it can handle everyday multitasking on par with my MSI gaming laptop with 16GB of RAM. But the efficient chip and power make for a comparable experience.

That said, this machine can't edit 4K video as fast as a MacBook Pro, and the GPU can't run the latest games at medium or higher settings. Still, the M2 Air is far more capable of rendering 27 frames per second in the latest Tomb Raider game.

The main complaint I stumbled across in my research is that the 256GB MacBook Air M2 has a slightly slower SSD speed than the M1 and M3 versions. This is because Apple changed from two NAND chips to one in this model. This change was reversed in the subsequent M3. Otherwise, the MacBook Air M2 is in the sweet spot, being almost 90% identical to the latest MacBook Air M3 ($1,099) while being a significant upgrade from the M1. There has never been a better time to buy or upgrade your Mac.