4 Budget-Friendly Laptops More Powerful Than The MacBook Air

A MacBook Air in an Apple store plugged into a MagSafe charger – Jonathan Weiss/Shutterstock

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MacBooks have always offered a balanced package, but they’ve always had trouble keeping up with similarly priced Windows laptops in terms of specifications alone. This makes sense, as Apple’s productivity notebooks — especially the MacBook Airs — were never supposed to do intense tasks like running AAA games. However, with the advent of Apple’s M-series chips, this gap has been steadily getting smaller. Now, an Apple computer with the latest M5 chips is actually a good deal for its price, as it can compete with the hardware that’s in competitors in the same price range.

If you want a general productivity laptop that can also do some light gaming, you won’t find a better deal than a MacBook Air, especially one using the M5 chip. However, there are still cheaper, budget-friendly Windows laptops under a thousand dollars that are more powerful than the MacBook Air. These won’t be better than the Air under all circumstances, but if there’s a specific area you’re aiming for — be it gaming performance or visuals — there are always cheaper alternatives to the MacBook Air.

As far as performance goes, the M5 MacBook Air performs between M3 Pro- and M4 Pro-based machines on average for light tasks. This performance is worse when we talk about intense rendering or gaming, which means the M5 MacBook Air is roughly only as good as an M3 Pro for gaming. This is because of the M5 Air being fanless, which means it’ll eventually throttle its performance to keep functioning so it doesn’t heat up.

Read more: 4 Of The Best Cheap Laptops You Can Buy According To Consumer Reports