Amazon Clears MacBook Air M3 at Nearly 40% Off, No Regard for Apple's Pricing Rules

This article features deals sourced directly by Gizmodo and produced independently of the editorial team. We may earn a commission when you buy through links on the site. Apple’s official price on the MacBook Air M3 with 16GB and 512GB is $1,299. Since this Monday morning, Amazon has been running a Prime Early Deal on the same machine at $799, nearly 40% off and $50 below the previous record low (of around $850) this configuration had ever reached on Amazon. Prime membership is required to access the price, and with Prime Day officially running June 23 to 26, this is the window. The M3 chip runs an 8-core CPU with four performance cores and four efficiency cores, alongside a 10-core GPU with hardware-accelerated ray tracing and a 16-core Neural Engine. The 16GB of unified memory configuration is the one that matters: the 8GB base model increasingly shows its limits as macOS and app requirements grow, and 16GB provides the headroom for sustained multitasking, creative workflows, and Apple Intelligence features without the memory compression that slows the 8GB variant under load. The 512GB SSD covers the operating system, app library, and a working file set without requiring constant