Best Buy Has the Best Preorder Deals on the New MacBook Lineup

Apple announced new products this week, all of which are all already available for preorder and will be released on March 11. But before you place your order, it’s best to compare the preorder deals from various retailers. Walmart has the best iPad Air preorder deal, for example, offering $40 off the listing price. If you’re interested in a new MacBook, however, Best Buy is the place to look: it’s the only major retailer offering any preorder deals for all three new MacBooks.

Previously, anyone looking for an affordable MacBook looked toward older models, like the M1 and M2. The MacBook Neo is changing that, along with the personal computing market in general. The Neo isn’t breathtaking in specs—it has the A18 Pro processor, the same chip as the iPhone 16 Pro—but the price is what makes it enticing. At $599, I can see a lot of people opting for this MacBook over other budget laptops, especially with the $25 pre-order gift card. (You should still consider the M1 and M2 as good options if you find good deals, though.) The Neo is also missing some premium features you’d expect from other MacBooks, like a backlight for the keyboard, Touch ID, and MagSafe charging. It’s also limited to 8GB of RAM, which in today’s standards, is subpar.

The M5 MacBook Air is tempting, starting at $1,099, but you shouldn’t be swayed if you already own an M4. The rest of the laptop is virtually the same. Of course, the basic starting model doubles the storage to 512GB, which is nice and only $100 more than the listing price when the M4 was released. Add a $50 gift card, and this is a great option for someone upgrading from the M2, M1, or getting their first MacBook.

The new MacBook Pro is a beast. It starts with 1TB of storage, the M5 Pro chip with a 15-core CPU and a 16-core GPU. The RAM is 24GB, which offers people all the multitasking and smoothness they need to run multiple programs at once. Starting at $2,199, the $100 gift card doesn’t soften much of the blow, but it’s $100 more than anyone else is offering.