MacBook Air: Now Up To $500 US Cheaper
Yesterday, Apple quietly reduced the price of the Solid State Drive (SSD) option on the MacBook Air from $999 US to $599 US. Also, if you want to upgrade to the 1.8 GHz model, that option will now cost $200 US rather than $300 US. That’s a reduction of $500 US combined.
One wonders if the more pimped out configurations weren’t selling, or perhaps this report about Solid State Drives using more power than regular hard drives (despite claims to the contrary) made them take a pre-emptive move. Either way, buying a MacBook Air just got a bit cheaper.
July 4, 2008 at 2:51 pm
You missed the third and most obvious reason for the price drop:
SSD drives themselves are dropping in price because they are beginning to exit the expensive Version 1.0/Early-Adopter phase. The technology is maturing and production volumes are increasing. Just as it was with all other storage media that came before. The same may be true of the the CPU upgrade; it was a custom Intel chip and maybe they have volumes now.
So instead of the negative reason (they aren’t selling?) it could be a positive reason (we’ve made so many of these custom components that the initially expensive per unit cost has gone down). The power reason is probably completely irrelevant.
With the price drop, the MBA is now once again price competitive with its main competitor, the Lenovo ThinkPad X300, which recently dropped its price as well.