Apple MacBook Air Geek Squad Certified Refurbished 13.3" Space Gray Review

A sleek but slow entry-level Mac. The Intel i3 and 8GB RAM are major bottlenecks for 2024. Only consider if you need an ultra-portable for the most basic tasks and are on a very tight budget. The Retina display is the best part.

This refurbished MacBook Air is a classic design that's still a great ultraportable. It's incredibly thin and light, and that Retina display is still gorgeous for everyday stuff. But under the hood, it's running on old tech. The Intel Core i3 from 2020 is slow by today's standards, and 8GB of RAM is just not enough for most people anymore. It's a polished shell with dated internals.

Performance is this laptop's biggest weakness. The dual-core Intel i3 lands in the 3rd percentile for CPU power in our database, so it's going to feel sluggish for anything beyond basic web browsing and document editing. The integrated Intel Iris Plus Graphics is fine for streaming video, but that's about it. On the bright side, the 256GB SSD is fast, and the 13.3-inch Retina display is sharp and color-accurate, scoring in the 71st percentile for screens. Just don't expect to do any real work on it.

At around $310, it's a tough call. You're getting Apple's premium build quality and that excellent screen for a very low price. If your needs are literally just email, web, and streaming, and portability is everything, it's a cheap ticket into the Mac ecosystem. But for anyone who needs to do more, that money is better spent on a used M1 MacBook Air, which will run circles around this for not much more cash.

This Intel Air is completely outclassed by its own successor, the Apple Silicon M1 MacBook Air. The M1 is faster, cooler, and has much better battery life. Compared to modern Windows ultraportables in this price range, you're trading raw performance for macOS and that Apple design. The listed competitors, like the ASUS ProArt or Lenovo Legion, are in a different league performance-wise but are also much more expensive and not as portable. This is for a very specific, lightweight use case.

Skip this if you need to do real work. If you regularly have more than 10 browser tabs open, use Zoom while having other apps running, edit photos, or even think you might want to try a new hobby that involves software, this laptop will hold you back. Its performance scores are just too low.

Buy this only if you have the simplest possible computing needs and your top priority is a super-light, super-portable Mac for a rock-bottom price. Think a student who only needs a note-taking machine, or a retiree who just wants to check email and look at photos. For literally anyone else, the performance limitations will become a daily frustration.