Apple's best-selling laptop is in crisis, and its own promotions aren't hiding it

The MacBook Air M5 that Apple refreshed back in March has become hard to get. Bloomberg's lead Apple reporter Mark Gurman reports that base configurations are not shipping until late August and that Apple is steering shoppers toward the pricier MacBook Pro instead.

Apple's best-selling Mac is running out

Gurman's latest Power On newsletter says retail store sources describe MacBook Air shipments as more constrained than they can recall, and Apple's own online store backs that up.

Every base configuration now quotes a ship date at the end of August, while some combinations of screen size, color and memory slip into early September. For a laptop refreshed with the M5 chip in March, roughly a month of delay is close to unprecedented, and it follows the shortages that already hit the Mac mini and Mac Studio.



That line sits in a back-to-school promotion that was itself pushed back from June because of the memory crunch.

The memory crunch has reached the volume seller

AI data center demand has driven memory prices up across the industry, and Apple has already responded by raising prices on Macs and iPads, with a couple hundred dollars added across the lineup.

It is also preparing to source memory from Chinese suppliers for devices sold in China, after asking Washington for permission to buy from a blacklisted supplier, and it is prioritizing the entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro to clear the runway for an M6 refresh this fall.

If you are shopping for Windows laptops instead, the crunch is industrywide rather than an Apple problem, so switching brands does not get you around the underlying cause.

What to do if you need a laptop this month

The practical question is whether to wait, switch or settle, and each option costs you something different.

Here's how to handle the MacBook Air wait:

• Order the Air now and plan around a late-August or early-September arrival
• Take the base 14-inch MacBook Pro, which Apple is prioritizing and can ship
• Hold out for fall, though Gurman expects the M6 MacBook Pro first and a new Air a bit later

The upsell is what makes this different

Apple raising prices during a shortage is not surprising. Pushing customers off its most popular laptop and onto a more expensive one is, and by Gurman's account the company has rarely, if ever, done it this openly.

I'm assuming the Air comes back in stock once the M6 cycle starts, so I would not read this as the end of the cheaper Mac. Still, I'd rather Apple say plainly that supply is tight than let a back-to-school promotion point students toward a laptop that costs several hundred dollars more.

• Our comparison of where the Air and the Pro actually differ
• What we know about the M6 reshuffle and the wait ahead
• Follow me @jojothetechie on X and Threads for hot takes and behind-the-scenes coverage.

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