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Apple Won’t Admit It Needs Discounts, So It’s Quietly Offloading MacBook Airs Through Amazon

by admin October 6, 2025

Here’s something you likely know: Apple never goes on sale. The tech giant carefully guards its premium image by refusing to slash prices on its official website or in its retail stores. But here’s the thing—even Apple needs to boost sales, and that’s where authorized retailers like Amazon come in.

For this October’s Prime Big Deal Day (essentially the fall version of Prime Day), Amazon is offering record-low pricing on the 2025 MacBook Air lineup, and these deals are too good to ignore. The 13-inch model with the new M4 chip and 256GB storage has dropped to $897, down from $999, and the 15-inch 256GB version is available for $1,078, reduced from $1,199.

See MacBook Air 13″ at Amazon

See MacBook Air 15″ at Amazon

The M4 Chip Changes Everything

At the heart of this 2025 MacBook is Apple’s M4 chip which represents a significant leap forward in performance and efficiency. The M4 delivers big improvements when you’re juggling multiple applications or running graphics-intensive games. The chip’s architecture allows for seamless multitasking without the fans kicking in (because there aren’t any) and without draining your battery. Speaking of which, you’re getting up to 18 hours of battery life which means you can work through an entire day and well into the evening without hunting for an outlet.

The screen warrants particular admiration: Both the 13.6-inch and 15.3-inch Liquid Retina displays handle one billion colors, translating to extremely lifelike photos, videos bursting with deep contrast and text that’s crisp enough to minimize eye strain when working for long stretches. The larger 15-inch variant provides additional screen real estate for productivity applications such as working on spreadsheets or designing projects in which you desire multiple windows in sight at all times. When it comes to video conferencing and content creation, the 12MP Center Stage camera automatically positions you in the center of the picture when you’re in motion.

Connectivity is another aspect in which the 2025 MacBook Air excels: You have two Thunderbolt 4 ports that manage blazing-fast data transfer rates of up to 40Gbps which is ideal for external storage or high-end monitors. There’s the MagSafe power port that ensures you won’t pull your laptop off the desk if you kick your foot against the cable—the cable automatically disconnects magnetically without causing damage. Wi-Fi 6E support prepares you for the newest router tech with increased speeds and less traffic, and Bluetooth 5.3 ensures seamless connections for wireless peripherals. You’re connectable to up to two external displays as well.

Apple Intelligence is the company’s new personal intelligence system and it is baked right into the MacBook Air. This feature helps streamline your writing, creative expression and daily tasks with groundbreaking privacy protections that ensure your data stays yours (even Apple can’t access it). The system integrates with macOS to make common tasks faster and more intuitive. If you’re already in the Apple ecosystem with an iPhone, the integration becomes even more powerful: iPhone Mirroring lets you control your phone directly from your Mac screen, while Universal Clipboard means you can copy text on your iPhone and paste it on your Mac.

The audio system is backed with six speakers for Spatial Audio and three microphones, and it produces an immersive listening experience for music, movies, and games. Speakers deliver exceptionally deep bass and crisp highs for such thin case depths. Both models come with 16GB unified memory and 256GB SSD storage in this configuration, and unified memory architecture allows the system to distribute resources back and forth between processor and render tasks dynamically.

At these all-time-low Prime Big Deal Day prices, you’re getting the best laptop technology from Apple at a discount that doesn’t originate from an authorized dealer. They won’t stay on sale like this forever.

See MacBook Air 13″ at Amazon

See MacBook Air 15″ at Amazon

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October 6, 2025 0 comments

Watch out, Hollow Knight: Silksong's hiding a sneaky Stardew Valley creatorman cameo

Game Updates

Yes, Hollow Knight: Silksong has “some moments of steep difficulty” Team Cherry admit, but have you considered going for a pre-boss walk

by admin September 19, 2025

Something Hollow Knight: Silksong-related has happened at an Australian museum again. This time, rather than the game being confirmed for an appearance back when it was still infinitely mysterious and sans release date, it’s Team Cherry devs addressing just how difficult their creation is, following plenty of post-release discourse on the subject.

This follows the metroidvania’s first patch making a couple of its early bosses a bit easier to tackle, amid debate as to whether it’s just good and hard, or pushes into unnecessarily annoying slog territory via the likes of bench placement and hazards being able to deal out two masks of damage. As with every FromSoft game since time itself began with the release of Demon’s Souls, where you stand on that bickering will likely depend on how prepared you are to spend hours battling one foe over and over again.

Naturally, the appropriate venue for Team Cherry co-directors Ari Gibson and William Pellen to weigh in on this conundrum of our time is Australia’s national museum of screen culture, ACMI, where the launch of a new exhibition was attended and reported on by Dexerto.

“The important thing for us is that we allow you to go way off the path,” Gibson said when asked about the difficulty by exhibition co-curator Jini Maxwell. “So one player may choose to follow it directly to its conclusion, and then another may choose to constantly divert from it and find all the other things that are waiting and all the other ways and routes.”

While acknowledging that Skong packs “some moments of steep difficulty”, Gibson stuck to emphasising that going for a wander is the best medicine if you get stuck banging your head against a bug-shaped wall, as there are “ways to mitigate the difficulty via exploration, or learning, or even circumventing the challenge entirely”. Learning? In a video game? Come on lads, I can’t be doing that. I use my brain for marginally more important things during the average day, but by the time I get to playing games for non-work purposes, it’s all just mush up there.

Anyway, I digress. Gibson and Pellen also explained the differences between developing Silksong and the original Hollow Knight from a hardness perspective. Hornet, with her superior zippiness and superior skills to the knight, demanded more complicated base enemies to make sure she still faced a good challenge.

“The basic ant warrior is built from the same move-set as the original Hornet boss,” Pellen said. “The same core set of dashing, jumping, and dashing down at you, plus we added the ability to evade and check you. In contrast to the Knight’s enemies, Hornet’s enemies had to have more ways of catching her as she tries to move away.”

I imagine this was followed up with a gesture to some screens of culture as the devs indicated that the time had come to check out the Aussie exhibitions. If you’re still struggling with Silksong, definitely check out our great Silksong walkthrough Ollie’s worked very hard on. There are also mods.

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September 19, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Hollow Knight: Silksong devs admit it has “moments of steep difficulty” but also a “higher level of freedom” to avoid getting stonewalled

by admin September 18, 2025

Team Cherry’s long-awaited Hollow Knight follow-up Silksong has spawned lengthy discourse around difficulty in games, and now the developers have addressed the topic too.

The game is part of the Game Worlds exhibition at Australia’s national museum of screen culture (ACMI), which was attended by Dexerto. The exhibition’s co-curator Jini Maxwell spoke with Ari Gibson and William Pellen from Team Cherry at the event.

“The important thing for us is that we allow you to go way off the path,” Gibson explained. “So one player may choose to follow it directly to its conclusion, and then another may choose to constantly divert from it and find all the other things that are waiting and all the other ways and routes.”

Hollow Knight: Silksong Review – Beautiful, Thrilling And CruelWatch on YouTube

While Gibson admitted Silksong “has some moments of steep difficulty”, he added “part of allowing a higher level of freedom within the world means that you have choices all the time about where you’re going and what you’re doing.”

So instead of players repeatedly attempting a particular boss fight, they “have ways to mitigate the difficulty via exploration, or learning, or even circumventing the challenge entirely, rather than getting stonewalled.”

Gibson further noted that as Hornet is “inherently faster and more skillful than the Knight” of the first game, even base level enemies had to be “more complicated, more intelligent”.

Added Pellen: “The basic ant warrior is built from the same move-set as the original Hornet boss. The same core set of dashing, jumping, and dashing down at you, plus we added the ability to evade and check you. In contrast to the Knight’s enemies, Hornet’s enemies had to have more ways of catching her as she tries to move away.”

Team Cherry’s approach was therefore to “bring everyone else up to match [Hornet’s] level”.

One other area of contention are the boss runbacks, which often task players with repeating difficult platform sections before re-attempting a boss. But have boss runbacks had their day?

“Pretty and charmingly mean-spirited, this is a game filled with revelations and genuine personality,” reads our Silksong review.

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September 18, 2025 0 comments