The M1 MacBook Air simply won't die - it's that simple. This is a near six year old laptop at this point that still has plenty of power for everything from productivity to creative workloads with its M1 processor, plus a dazzling Retina screen and excellent battery life, which can still hang with the big boys.

Being an older laptop means it's now able to had for virtual peanuts.This refurb unit is just $320 from Woot! for a base 128GB variant, or $350 for a 256GB model, which feels like they're giving it away. Its previous best price from the retailer was $500, so this is a big price cut. You do get a 90 day Woot! warranty with the purchase, too. It is listed as 'Scratch and Dent' condition, so is more on the 'acceptable' end of the spectrum, but if you don't mind, you can pick up a $13 protective case to put over the top, which still gives you a potent MacBook Pro for well under $350-$400.

This is a steal of a price for such a potent laptop, considering that the sub-$350 price tag elsewhere limits you to basic Windows laptops and mid-tier Chromebooks. We've got eight cores and a seven-core GPU with the M1 chip, making it an especially powerful APU, and one that helps this MacBook Air to power through everything from day-to-day computing to more intense workloads such as editing 4K video while on battery power.

It features one of Apple's Retina displays, and provides a 2560x1600 resolution with solid coverage of the more specialist DCI-P3 colour gamut, which is arguably vital for content creation work such as video editing on Final Cut Pro for instance. Okay, you don't get the 120Hz refresh rate panels of higher-tier MacBook Pros, but they are several times more expensive than this humble M1 Air. Being fanless also means it should be whisper quiet under load, where previous Intel options had the tendency to sound like a jet engine.

I should note that this is the old base level spec, with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. On paper, it seems heinous to recommend a device with 8GB of RAM, but thankfully, the efficiency of the M1 chip makes this configuration surprisingly workable. However, you will definitely need to rely on external storage or cloud storage for more intensive tasks such as video editing, as you won't have the space for large video project files on-board. The M1 MacBook Air also falls over with just having a pair of USB-C ports. As a result, for wider expansion, you will need to live the dongle life with a handy USB-C adapter, but luckily, these can be had for quite prices reasonable these days - for instance, this Ugreen one is just $13.

A quoted battery life of up to 18 hours also means you'll be able to go for a couple of working days without needing to plug the MacBook in, which is testament to its solid endurance for a laptop at this price. These Apple Silicon laptops are markedly more efficient than their Intel-powered predecessors, offering a large increase in total runtime away from a charger.

Apple's base spec M1 MacBook Air remains a top-class laptop for most people, and this refurb Woot reduction is quite the steal.