Apple Cuts Price Of SSD-based MacBook Air

The MacBook Air is no longer the most expensive laptop on the Apple website. A sudden price drop has forced it to move over and make way for the 17” MacBook Pro.

A lot of people dream of owning a MacBook Air. They’d buy one in a heartbeat if they could get their hands on $3,000, but unfortunately, not everyone has that kind of money lying around. Thankfully, Apple has made price changes to the MacBook Air, helping it to be a little less expensive.

Apple has two versions of the MacBook Air, one that uses an SSD drive for no moving parts at all and another that uses a traditional drive that is therefore cheaper. Up until now, Apple had been touting the SSD version of the Macbook Air for $3098. Yesterday this price dropped to $2598, a 16 percent drop.

While many would be forgiven for thinking the the price cut is solely a result of the dropping prices of SSDs these days (after all the price of the traditional hard drive version remains the same), that half grand decrease is actually a result of two separate price cuts. Indeed $400 of the cut is down to Apple reducing the price of an upgrade to the Flash memory-based 64GB SSD to $599 from $999, however the company is also reducing the cost of upgrading to a 1.8GHz processor option, from $300 extra to $200.

When Apple dropped the price of the iPhone soon after it was launched, there were a good few early adopters that weren’t happy they’d had to pay full price. Will the MBA early adopters feel the same way? It’s hard to tell. From what we’ve seen so far on forums, lots of fans feel the MacBook Air is still worth the money they paid in the first place and don’t really mind the price drop too much. Having said that, there’s also a decent amount of people that feel $2598 is still way too expensive for an ultra portable laptop, especially when you consider how many other “me too” products there are out there as of late.