I've been tracking deals for 18 years and I've never seen MacBooks this cheap — back to school deals from $599
If you're on a tight budget, Walmart has the MacBook Air (M1) on sale for $599. Yes, this model was released in 2020, but that M1 chipset can still provide enough horsepower for basic Web-based tasks and it's great for young students who aren't editing photos or 4K video.
If you can spend a bit more, the current-gen 13-inch MacBook Air (M4) is on sale for $799 at Amazon. This is the deal I'd personally buy because you get a powerful M4 processor coupled with 16GB of RAM. That's enough to get you through four years of college and then some.
The new MacBook Air is powered by Apple's latest M4 chipset. It upgrades the camera from 1080p to 12MP with Center Stage support. The M4 chipset also supports dual external monitors, even when you have the laptop's lid open. It packs a 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display (2560 x 1664), Apple's M4 CPU w/ 10-core GPU, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB SSD. In our MacBook Air M4 review, we said the Editor's Choice laptop is irresistible thanks to its speedy performance, sharper camera, and lower starting price.
Prefer a bigger screen? The 15-inch model is also on sale. It packs a 15.3-inch Liquid Retina display (2880 x 1864), Apple's M4 CPU w/ 10-core GPU, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB SSD.
The MacBook Air M1 offers fantastic performance and value. The M1 CPU never stuttered in our tests and also helped it reach over 14 hours of battery life. It features a 13.3-inch Retina display, Apple M1 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD. In our MacBook Air M1 review, we said it offers amazing endurance and shockingly good speed.
For $100 more, this deals gets you an M2 chipset and — more importantly — 16GB of RAM. That extra RAM is the reason I'd recommend this machine over the M1-based model as it'll give you a better experience when it comes to multitasking. The laptop is remarkably light and thin yet sports a 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display, a speedy Apple M2 CPU w/ 8-core GPU, 16GB of RAM, 256GB SSD, and a great 1080p FaceTime camera. In our MacBook Air M2 review we lauded this Editor's Choice laptop for its versatility and battery life, so don't miss your chance to get one at a great discount.
The 13.3-inch MacBook Air (M1) for $599 at Walmart is a good deal, but one I'd only recommend to students on a very tight budget. Otherwise, I recommend spending a little more for the M2 or M4 model which each come with 16GB of RAM. If you don't need a laptop — consider getting the Mac mini (M4) for $539 at Amazon. (Just note it's sold for $499 in the past, so this is a good price, but not the lowest).
Otherwise, I'd say the 13-inch MacBook Air (M4) is the best MacBook you can buy and one of the best laptops on the market. I don't foresee these laptops getting any cheaper come Labor Day, so now is the best time to purchase one.
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CNBC
an hour ago
- CNBC
Last week's big winners and losers reveal where the stock market is headed
You can learn an awful lot by looking at the list of stocks that made new highs last week — and the list of stocks that hit new lows. Foremost, they can tell you what is and isn't working in this market, especially during earnings season. We saw many groups roll over and only one, the data center, really advance. The combination of Friday's weak employment number , more discriminatory tariffs , and President Donald Trump's anger, brought out sellers after a very long run up. The selling is real and it will take an end to speculative excess and endless tariff news to get us to restart, and I don't see it happening. I hear the usual geniuses talk about how dip-buying is as stupid as ever, even as though it has been fabulous since 1982. I see a landscape that wants to go lower, but I also see earnings that don't justify big declines, just a drift until something great happens. And I don't mean Fed Chair Jerome Powell quitting. Let's start — and end — with some cracks in the Magnificent Seven. The growth in Microsoft's Azure cloud business and the breakout of Meta's multiple revenue streams explain the incredible gains of those two Club names — gains strong enough that they both made the list of new highs. The perceived weakness of Amazon's 17% gain in web services versus the whopping 39% gain in the smaller but all-powerful Azure certainly helped. Amazon put up $30.9 billion in revenues in its AWS cloud unit. That's obviously a ton of business, but it was flat with the previous quarter and only equal to the estimates. Microsoft's cloud acceleration in the quarter was jaw-dropping. The staggering distance between Azure's triumphant growth and Amazon's perceived slowing led to a rally in Microsoft's stock and a sell-off in Amazon shares — losses which triggered immense soul-searching. Was Microsoft real? Or was it inflated by its partnership with OpenAI and its ChatGPT function, which reigns supreme? The burgeoning ChatGPT roster was a big reason why OpenAI was able to raise $8.3 billion this week at a $300 billion valuation. That little-noticed fact should have turned more heads, and that alone could explain some of this week's craziness. After all, design software company Figma only raised $1.2 billion in its initial public offering Thursday, a puny deal, but it still managed to capture everyone's attention. (More on that later.) There was lots of grousing about Microsoft benefitting from the surge in OpenAI business. Some experts liken the partnership to that of Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and predict it too will soon flame out, meaning that huge stream of Open AI revenue could go away. But the amount of fear instilled by AWS critics was behind the huge sell-off in Amazon . As I made my calls to sources Friday, I kept hearing that AWS, built to sell product, isn't built to help create new businesses based on AI. There is some truth here. AWS has fallen behind Microsoft in the cloud. I also believe that it doesn't have enough Nvidia product and has too much of its own chips, which are considered inferior by the fresh-faced AI developers even as it regarded as darned good for DevOps. Amazon is underspending its competitors. That's highly unusual and not good, and it's all that people cared about last week. I wish it didn't matter, but after this quarter Amazon's status as one of the greatest companies on Earth is now going to be considered suspect. The conference call was dispiriting, with CEO Andy Jassy giving a long and unnecessary soul-searching answer to Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak's question about Amazon falling behind in generative. A do-over on that question would help, but there are none. All of the great data about retail meant nothing. Sure, we own Meta and Microsoft, but the stock of Amazon now worries me, even though I would never count these guys out in a gunfight. My work says it will all sort out itself and Amazon will reaccelerate, if not this quarter then this year and those who sell will regret it. Amazon will get the Nvidia's next generation "Rubin" chips, and swallow the damned pride of making its own chips. We just want Amazon to be the fastest and the best. How the company hasn't bought AI start-up Anthropic is downright perplexing, to use the word of the day. Oracle , of course, is a state of the art, Rent The Runway style data center that is now loved, and its build out has been nothing short of amazing. Yes, it rankles me because we owned it and lost it on account of two misses on its way to greatness. GE Vernova and Constellation Energy show up on the highs list because all of the hyperscalers admit to being power-constrained, with Amazon emphasizing the need more than the others. Constellation has nuclear, Vernova has the more practical natural gas turbines, along with nuclear. They can keep going higher, even as the bears consider them meme stocks. They are most decidedly not. Caterpillar reports next week and it will be considered part data center, part reshoring and part Biden infrastructure. All of those themes work until someone decides they don't work well enough. Eaton is a better analogue. DoorDash and Roblox make the list because there are always a couple of companies that amaze and can't be denied. Doordash caught some upgrades. Roblox has accelerating revenue. Both are awful shorts. (Reddit will have a similar trajectory when it eventually gets added to the S & P 500.) S & P Global is a pure play on offerings, something that we can all agree to are about to heat up based on Circle and Figma. And Altria ? Its basic business repels managers even as it enthralls users. I want to break down and buy Altria, which happens to be the greatest stock of all time. No kidding. Even better than Nvidia because: 1) it has been around for 100 years; and 2) the power of compounding. Then there's Figma, the spawn of CoreWeave and Circle. It looks like those who embrace meme stocks and those who love the tightly controlled bitcoin have fallen in love with the IPO process and the lack of float. Coreweave, an almost busted deal, cut the size of its initial public offering (IPO) to $1.5 billion: 37.5 million shares at $40 per share, down from its previous plan of 49 million shares at $47–55 per share. It worked and the stock exploded higher. Figma also had heavy demand and light supply, as only $1.2 billion went to the company and the rest went to selling shareholders. Strange ratio there: 12.4 million shares raised by the company and 24 million shares raised by selling shareholders. I can't blame the bankers for low-balling Circle after Coreweave. But there was no excuse for the underpricing of Figma; even the gents putting up the signs in front of the New York Stock Exchange knew it would be a smash. Anyway, it's too bad because it devolved into rank speculation as the buyers, sensing there could be no more new shares trading for six months, decided to play bitcoin and generate an increase on the second day of trading that was childish. Palantir reports results on Monday, and I am expecting another home run, which will ignite even more speculation. Friday's losers were far more varied and deep. First, can we dispense with the idea that the employment number, as weak as it was, caused the sell-off? The classic recession stocks fared miserably: Procter & Gamble , Bristol Myers , Colgate , McCormick all landed on the new-low list. (Bristol was good, but without a hit in Cobenfy, its drug to treat schizophrenia , we will never make money in it.) These stocks would be on the list of new highs if a recession was the real story. Plus, with bonds soaring and yields plunging, you would think someone would want that P & G yield. You also would have thought that Baxter would be on the new highs list in a recession, but all I can say is have no idea what's happening there. But it isn't good. If you cut your dividend (as in the case of Dow ) or if the dividend is doubted (think UPS ), you end up on the list of new lows. Both of those stocks deserve that fate. Old Dominion is a legit recession story if you want to frame it that way. Carmax , too, except the incredible move in Carvana makes that reasoning suspect. The food group is just so bad: General Mills and Conagra pop up; the latter lives on this low list. Then there are a couple of oddballs. Accenture had been on a multiyear consulting tear. That's over. It didn't take long for Otis after myriad good quarters to land on this ignoble list. Two yesteryear faves, Chipotle and Lululemon , are a reminder that this market has little enthusiasm for high-multiple disappointments. Both need huge upside surprises to change their direction. I don't see any coming. And then there's UnitedHealth , the much beloved UnitedHealth. What a death rattle feel for that Dow stock. It's a wide and varied list for the new lows. But it's not the kind of list you get when people think there is a recession coming soon. Instead, it says there is considerable rot underneath that we might not have known otherwise when we look at all of the deals and IPOs and SPACs that are being priced. Although the latter spells trouble, too — way too speculative. So where do I come out? We just had a huge move that was decapitated by Trump's tariff sword once again. To me, it was a depressing week because the speculation emanating from Figma, the endless bitcoin derivatives, and the Palantirs and next Palantirs are signs that nothing good is about to happen. We need Figma and Ciricle to be crushed if we are going to go anywhere. We need the fascination with stocks as crypto champs to die down. We need a return to the financials as leaders and techs as consolidators. Yes, we need to see consolidation in tech (and many other industries) to get things back on track. There is no sign of a pulse at the Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission, so the time is right. Which leads me back to the Magnificent Seven and Apple . The quarter was good . Double-digit growth in revenue and earnings per share. Most encouraging: When I spoke to CEO Tim Cook, the need to put big deals on the radar screen was clear. The idea of something major in a finance vertical, now that the Goldman Sachs credit card deal is unraveling, is downright exciting. But the fact that this stock went down last week? Downright depressing. How bad? If it goes down big Monday, we're going to have to some major resetting of what works around here and it won't be good. (See here for a full list of the stocks in Jim Cramer's Charitable Trust.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust's portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Watch These Amazon Stock Price Levels After Post-Earnings Tumble
Key Takeaways Amazon shares are in focus to start the week after plunging Friday as quarterly results from the e-commerce and cloud provider failed to impress investors. The stock price fell below the lower trendline of a rising wedge pattern on Friday, potentially laying the groundwork for further earnings-related selling. Investors should watch key support levels on Amazon's chart around $199, $190 and $175, while also monitoring a major overhead area near $ (AMZN) shares are in focus to start the week after plunging Friday as quarterly results from the e-commerce and cloud provider failed to impress investors. While the company posted growth in its Amazon Web Services business, investors may have expected more after rivals Microsoft (MSFT) and Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL) recently reported strong results in their cloud units. The company's AWS revenue grew 17.5% in its latest quarter, well below Microsoft's Azure growth of 39% and trailing the 32% sales increase in Google Cloud Platform. Following the results, analysts at Jefferies said that AWS growth was 'disappointing given big momentum at Azure and GPC.' Amazon shares fell 8% to just close Friday's session at just below $215, pushing the stock into negative territory for the year. Some analysts raised their price targets on Amazon following the earnings report, with those at JPMorgan analysts saying they 'would buy the pullback.' Below, we take a closer look at Amazon's chart and apply technical analysis to point out key post-earnings price levels that investors will likely be watching. Rising Wedge Breakdown Since setting their early-April low, Amazon shares had trended higher within a rising wedge, a move that coincided with the 50-day moving average (MA) recently crossing above the 200-day MA to form a bullish golden cross. However, the stock's upward momentum ended abruptly Friday, with the price closing below the rising wedge pattern's lower trendline, potentially laying the groundwork for further selling. Let's identify key support levels on Amazon's chart to watch and also point out a major overhead area worth monitoring during potential recovery efforts. Key Support Levels to Watch The first support level to watch sits around $199. The shares may find support in this location near last July's peak, which also closely aligns with troughs that formed on the chart in November and May. A decisive close below this level could see the stock revisit support at $190. Investors may look to accumulate shares in this region around a multi-month horizontal line that connects a range of corresponding price action on the chart extending back to April last year. A deeper retracement opens the door for the shares revisiting lower support at the $175 level. This area could attract buying interest near a series of trading activity on the chart stretching from February last year to April this year. Major Overhead Area Worth Monitoring During potential recovery efforts in Amazon's stock, it's worth monitoring how the price responds to the $233 level. This area on the chart could provide selling pressure near the rising wedge pattern's peak and the December swing high. The comments, opinions, and analyses expressed on Investopedia are for informational purposes only. Read our warranty and liability disclaimer for more info. As of the date this article was written, the author does not own any of the above securities. Read the original article on Investopedia
Business Insider
3 hours ago
- Business Insider
Top Analysts Raise Amazon Stock (AMZN) Price Target Despite Pullback on Q2 Earnings
Amazon (AMZN) stock declined more than 8% on Friday despite the e-commerce and cloud computing giant's better-than-expected revenue and earnings for the second quarter. The selloff is being blamed on the subdued outlook and lofty expectations from Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud division, which failed to impress to the extent rival Microsoft's (MSFT) Azure did with its June quarter performance. Ignoring the pullback, top Wall Street analysts remain bullish on Amazon stock, with many raising their price targets to reflect confidence in the company's prospects. Elevate Your Investing Strategy: Take advantage of TipRanks Premium at 50% off! Unlock powerful investing tools, advanced data, and expert analyst insights to help you invest with confidence. Top Analysts Remain Bullish on AMZN Stock Following the Q2 print, Bank of America Securities analyst Justin Post increased the price target for Amazon stock to $272 from $265 and reiterated a Buy rating. The 5-star analyst noted the Q2 revenue and earnings beat. He added that while AWS growth accelerated 60 basis points quarter-over-quarter to 17.5% and was slightly above Street, it lacked a 'capacity-aided top-line beat' similar to Azure and Alphabet's (GOOGL) Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Additionally, Post noted that AWS margins missed expectations, with over half of the 6.5 percent quarter-over-quarter decline attributed to stock-based compensation (SBC) and forex headwinds. It was also impacted by growing depreciation. On the positive side, Post highlighted that Q3 revenue guidance of $174 billion to $179.5 billion beat the Street's expectation of $173 billion, boosted by a solid Prime Day, with a profit outlook of $15.5 billion to $20.5 billion bracketing the consensus estimate of $19.4 billion. Likewise, Barclays analyst Ross Sandler raised the price target for AMZN stock to $275 from $240 and reaffirmed a Buy rating. The 5-star analyst stated that he suspected 'knives would come out on AWS,' given that rivals' June quarter revenue and backlogs accelerated on AI, and also due to the margin miss. That said, Sandler has not lost any faith and expects AI to add a couple of points by the fourth quarter on Anthropic and other applications built on Claude-4's API. Meanwhile, the analyst highlighted that Amazon's retail posted a strong quarter again, with efficiency reaching all-time highs. Finally, DA Davidson analyst Gil Luria increased the price target for Amazon stock to $265 from $230 and reiterated a Buy rating. The top-rated analyst stated that despite the accelerating revenue in Amazon's retail business and stabilizing growth in AWS, Q2 results were largely overshadowed by capex guidance that is expected to see infrastructure investments accelerate through the second half of the year. Nonetheless, Luria noted that management continues to reiterate that they're seeing an acceleration of customers' transition to the cloud, along with demand for compute still exceeding supply at AWS. Is Amazon Stock a Buy, Sell, or Hold? Overall, Wall Street has a Strong Buy consensus rating on Amazon stock based on 44 Buys versus one Hold recommendation. The average AMZN stock price target of $265.05 indicates 23.4% upside potential from current levels.
