Get a MacBook Air for under $800 with this Amazon deal

This MacBook Air deal gets the M1 version down to just shy of $800 - a great deal for students.

When looking at the best laptops for students, the Mac lineup is always a great choice thanks to its capable hardware, clean looks, and impressive battery life. That only got more impressive with the debut of Apple Silicon, which took the company's iPhone and iPad learnings and applied it to laptops and desktops.

Thankfully, Amazon is offering the M1 MacBook Air's basic variant at $799.99 - a saving of $200 from the MSRP.

While the MacBook Air M1 is still sporting what we'll politely refer to as a more "classic" design, it certainly maintains all of the incredible portability that Steve Jobs showcased years ago when he pulled the first MacBook Air from a manilla envelope.

Sure, the 720p camera isn't great, even at this price, and we'd definitely have preferred more than the base 256GB of storage, fast as it is, but this powerful laptop weighs just 2.8 lbs.

There's a 13.3-inch Retina display, a great keyboard (Apple has banished memories of the butterfly keyboard for good, thankfully), and the M1 chip is just as great at handling multiple tasks as it is for keeping your battery going.

In fact, you can get up to 15 hours of web browsing on a single charge -- that's huge for such a svelte machine.

If it's your first Mac, and you're an iPhone user, you'll find of touchstones, too, like Apple's Messages app, email client, and Safari. All of this means that the MacBook Air M1 is still one of the best MacBooks for students, even with its successor arriving last year.

In our 4-star MacBook Air M1 review, we noted that the MacBook Air M1 is a great entry-level macOS machine for students.

We said "the MacBook Air M1 is the cheapest way to get an Apple laptop, and offers a huge power jump over its predecessor," referencing the prior Intel-based model.

Lloyd Coombes freelance tech and fitness writer for Live Science. He's an expert in all things Apple as well as in computer and gaming tech, with previous works published on TechRadar, Tom's Guide, Live Science and more. You'll find him regularly testing the latest MacBook or iPhone, but he spends most of his time writing about video games as Gaming Editor for the Daily Star. He also covers board games and virtual reality, just to round out the nerdy pursuits.