5 Laptops Lighter Than The MacBook Air

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Apple's MacBook Air has always been the most sought-after productivity laptop for users wanting a balance of performance, portability, and style. After Apple released its M-series chips, said to be way beyond the performance of any Intel-based MacBook Air, this already favorable position turned into one of complete dominance. In the present, many believe the MacBook Air, with its 2.7 pounds, is the only Apple laptop you need.

There are many things to consider before buying a MacBook, though, including the various alternatives available. Laptops from other brands may offer better displays, higher storage, and longer battery life estimates than the Air's already impressive 18 hours, and almost all of them are more durable.

Even the "Air" in MacBook Air isn't safe from this evolution in laptop technology, as many of these competitor models are oftentimes just as light, if not lighter than even the smaller Air models. If you prioritize having an even easier laptop to carry or want a Windows or Linux-supporting MacBook Air alternative, you have many options to choose from.

Lightness is a luxury feature of laptops, as you'll rarely find a competitive device that's cheap and lightweight. You sacrifice a lot of better specs, even when paying premium prices, all to get that MacBook Air weight and ultra-portability. If you prioritize ease of taking your laptop wherever you want but aren't willing to spend a fortune, you can get the HP Pavilion Aero 13 for less than any other laptop in its weight class.

Despite its low price, the Pavilion Aero has a 13-inch display with a resolution of1920 pixels by 1200 pixels, all at just 2.2 pounds in weight. You can get a better resolution display by paying slightly more, but it's still a good deal. Both displays are anti-glare and can be used even in brighter rooms. 

Its performance isn't the best, but it's decent for this price point. The build quality and battery are other areas where the Pavilion Aero falls short compared to competitors and Apple's laptop. Certainly not a MacBook killer in performance, but a worthy purchase for its low weight and price if you're only getting something for simple day-to-day use.

Lenovo's ThinkPad laptops are almost the antithesis of everything the Apple MacBook and other modern-day laptops stand for. In situations where you'd constantly worry about damaging your Mac, you can trust the ThinkPad to handle it and keep functioning just fine. Paired with how you can customize an age-old $50 ThinkPad T60 with newer parts to have it handle modern tasks — something that's not the case with Apple's products, which have the internals soldered in — ThinkPads become an excellent, cheaper choice for productivity and office work.

If you take everything the ThinkPad is known for and give it the budgeting of a MacBook Air, you get the ThinkPad X1 Carbon. It's lighter than a MacBook Air — weighing 2.15 pounds for its Lunar Lake variant — but still feels durable and rigid. It also has a high-resolution 3K OLED display that supports 120-hertz refresh rates and a wide color gamut. The screen is anti-reflective, making it suitable for indoor and outdoor use despite not having a super-bright screen.

The X1 Carbon's latest generation, Generation 13, has decent performance when doing light tasks. Overall, its CPU lies between an M2 and an M3 MacBook Air when handling normal office work, and it can run almost as long as an M3 MacBook Air on a full charge. The laptop is absurdly expensive, though, and at a price around $2,000, there are better, stronger options available.

Portability and size don't go hand in hand: If you want a laptop with a bigger screen, that means extra weight, which is why the MacBook Air and most similar notebooks in the range opt for 13-inch displays. Some models have versions with larger screens, but despite being 15-inch, their weight increases to the point where they can't be called ultraportable anymore. The LG Gram 17 isn't just big; it has an absurdly large 17-inch display, but it still weighs as much as the lightest MacBook Air.

The base LG Gram 17, now discontinued, weighs 2.9 pounds, which is lighter than the 15-inch MacBook Air. In fact, it's closer to the 13-inch MacBook's 2.7 pounds than it is to the 15-inch's 3.3 pounds. You can even get the Gram's touch screen edition in a lighter weight than a 15-inch MacBook. By paying $200 more than an Air for this LG laptop, you also get double the RAM and 1 terabyte of storage.

If you're willing to pay more, the 2025 LG Gram Pro 17 is a little heavier than the base model but still lighter than the MacBook Air and the Gram touch screen version. It's a significant upgrade in all aspects, despite just being three pounds. It's a super-fast laptop that's good for gaming despite its weight, being capable of outputting over 120 frames per second even on high-end AAA titles. The Gram also has a feature-packed Nvidia RTX 5050 as a dedicated GPU, which can give it an edge over a MacBook in certain areas, alongside a larger 90 Wh battery and a 144-hertz refresh rate. Unfortunately, the build quality isn't too sturdy, with the screen wobbling more than other laptops on this list. The flexibility means the device resists physical stress more than sturdier models, though.

If the MacBook is a light laptop, then Asus' Zenbook series is truly ultra-lightweight, with the A14 being their lightest yet. It weighs 2.17 pounds (just under a kilogram) thanks to its Ceraluminum body, a special material made of ceramics and aluminum. Yet, despite feeling light, it doesn't skimp out in any other place. It comes with an OLED display instead of the MacBook's LCD, a robust build, and a longerbattery life. It only supports a 60-hertz refresh rate,the same as the MacBook Air.

The A14 uses the Snapdragon X processor, which can handle pretty much anything you'd want from a work computer. You can have YouTube open alongside your notes app, a photo editing software, and even Spotify, and the cooling fans would barely make any noise. This is still a productivity laptop, though, so it can't handle intense AAA gaming or heavy video editing.

The A14's 14-inch screen, lighter than the MacBook Air's 13-inch model, is already impressive, but what's even more surprising is that even the 16-inch variant weighs less than Apple's computer, at just 2.6 pounds. Other laptops in the Zenbook series are also lighter than the MacBook Air, including both the Zenbook 14 and the Zenbook S14. The Zenbook S14 is a great laptop, with a 120-hertz refresh rate and touch display. It does cost more and is slightly heavier, but it performs much better than the A14 for graphics-intensive work.

The weight laptops need to be for us to call them "light" has changed over time. When the MacBook Air came out, it became the benchmark for what an extremely lightweight laptop could be at the cost of performance. Now, it's not all that uncommon to see laptops weighing close to 2 pounds. The MSI Prestige 13 AI Evo is one such laptop, packing an OLED screen and a remarkably strong chassis despite weighing 2.18 pounds. 

Its screen wobble and keyboard flexibility are low, but its 3K display is very resistant to fingerprint smudges. The high-resolution OLED display supports a pretty good color gamut, which makes it a strong machine for photo editing — though it can fall short when editing large videos due to its lower specs. It has very good battery life, about the same as the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, though it still doesn't last as long as a Mac's. It also comes with every port that you'd need, including USB-A, USB-C Thunderbolt, an option for a microSD slot, and even a Kensington lock slot to keep it secure in public.

For all that it's good at, the MSI Prestige doesn't perform nearly as well as other light laptops, including the MacBook Air. It's slower when processing multiple apps at once and can heat up very easily under stress, which can make its loud fans work hard. It's good for most light work, but if you want something that can perform better, the MacBook Air's still a better choice, despite the extra weight.