The 13-inch MacBook Air with Apple’s M5 chip is selling for $1,099.99 at Amazon, Best Buy, and B&H Photo. That is about $200 off its current list price, the second time the discount has appeared, and the lowest price the machine has carried since July.
It is also, by the measure that matters most to a buyer’s wallet, a worse price than the one available in May. Shortly after the laptop launched that month, the same base model — M5 processor, 16GB of RAM, 512GB of storage — often sold for around $950 to $1,000. Today’s deal price is about $100 to $150 above that. The discount is real. The yardstick moved.
The MacBook Air’s price rose first
On June 25, 2026, Apple’s online store went briefly offline and came back with new prices across nearly the whole Mac and iPad lineup. The 13-inch MacBook Air went from $1,099 to $1,299. The 15-inch went from $1,299 to $1,499. Fourteen products rose, by an average of about $247, and not one of them gained a new chip, a new display, or an extra gigabyte of storage in the process. The machine that cost $1,299 on June 25 was the same machine that cost $1,099 on June 24.
Apple blamed a shortage of memory and storage chips, driven by the AI data-center boom. In a statement accompanying the changes, the company said it had “never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly.” Tim Cook had warned the week before, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, that increases were “unavoidable,” and described the supply crunch as a “hundred-year flood.” DRAM prices had surged 98% in the first quarter of 2026 alone. In late October, SK Hynix said it expected demand to exceed supply through 2030.
That is the context in which a discount of about $200 becomes news. Savings on the Air have been rare since July, and the rarity is the story as much as the saving: when a laptop almost never goes on sale, a routine cut reads as an event. But the arithmetic underneath is blunt. The deal price of $1,099.99 sits 99 cents above the $1,099 list price the 13-inch Air carried before the hike. The 15-inch deal price of $1,299.99 sits 99 cents above its own pre-hike list price of $1,299. In both sizes, the promotion restores — to within a dollar — the price the machine carried before the summer.
For buyers, the terms are straightforward. The 13-inch price holds across all color options, and the 15-inch price across most colors, at the same three retailers — Amazon, Best Buy, and B&H Photo. It is only the second time a reduction of about $200 has appeared since the hike, which is why the deal is being flagged at all: the Air has spent the months since July almost never on sale.
What the money buys
None of this makes the laptop a bad buy. The base model remains the M5 machine with 16GB of memory and 512GB of storage — the same hardware, at the same specs, as before the hike. The 15-inch version is also about $200 off at $1,299.99.
Against Apple’s newer, cheaper MacBook Neo, the Air still has a case to make, and the discount helps it. The Air costs more, but it offers double the RAM, a speedier CPU with more cores, twice the storage, better speakers, a backlit keyboard, and a larger, higher-resolution screen. For a buyer weighing the two, about $200 off the Air makes the spec advantage cheaper to buy.
The hike, notably, spared the iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods, whose prices were left unchanged on June 25, while the Mac and iPad lines absorbed the increase. The Air now starts $200 higher than it did at launch — and the discount on offer today merely returns it to its starting line.
The question nobody has answered
One thing the deal does not reveal is who is paying for it. Amazon, Best Buy, and B&H Photo are all honoring the same reduction of about $200 at the same time, and the reporting supplied for this story does not say whether Apple or the retailers are funding it, or coordinating it. Whether the price goes back to $1,299 when the promotion ends is a separate open question — either funder could be behind a temporary cut or a sustained lower price.
There is a second open question, about how long the higher prices last at all. SK Hynix has said it expects memory demand to exceed supply through 2030, but that is one supplier’s forecast, not a settled timeline for relief — and whether the $1,299 list price holds, or discounts like this one become the usual way the Air gets cheaper, is unresolved.
The bottom line
For now, the practical read is simple. If you need a MacBook Air today, $1,099.99 is the best price since July, and it is a good machine at that price. If you can wait, watch what happens when the promotion ends: a return to $1,299 means this was a window, while a lower street price would mean the market is doing what Apple has not — bringing the Air back toward the price it sold for in May.
Either way, measure the bargain against May, not against the summer sticker. The discount is genuine. So is the hike that preceded it — and the $950 to $1,000 the same laptop sold for in its first weeks is the number that tells you how much room there still is.
