The 13-inch M2 iPad Air beats its Black Friday price as a Best Buy Drop

SAVE $140: The Dec. 20 Best Buy Drop of the day is the 13-inch M2 iPad Air (WiFi, 128GB). Usually $799, the newest Air is on sale for $659 (compared to $699 on Black Friday) as long as you go through the Best Buy mobile app.

The Best Buy Drop for Dec. 20 proves what the big deal about Best Buy Drops is. When else would you casually see an Apple product beat its own Black Friday price less than a month after Black Friday?

As long as inventory's still there when you see this on Dec. 20, you can snag the 13-inch iPad Air with M2 chip (WiFi, 128GB) for $659 through the Best Buy app. You'll be saving an extra $40 over anyone who bought this iPad on sale during Black Friday and Cyber Week, when it was only $100 off at $699. (That sale price lingered at Best Buy through Dec. 20, when the Drop shaved an extra $40 off.)

The 2024 iPad Air is much more of an iPad Pro competitor than it was years ago. In fact, unless you're a hardcore designer who needs the ultimate efficiency and graphics, it's hard to think of someone who wouldn't find the Air to be the best fit for them. With Apple's M2 chip fueling every move, the Air makes a better laptop replacement than nearly any other tablet — in Mashable's testing, it dished out the same processing power as a MacBook Air with the same chip. The 13-inch version also simply feels like more of a legit laptop screen than the 11-inch version.

Despite pumping out more juice than previous Airs, the 2024 model can still squeeze out 13 hours of battery life on one charge. It's not the 16 hours clocked by the M4 iPad Pro, but when the difference in price is several hundred dollars, you may not care.