"Last year's M4 MacBook Air was pretty near the Platonic ideal of the $999 laptop that Apple has been refining since the introduction of the first $999 iBooks in the early 2000s. The Apple Silicon iteration of the Air has always been a solid, mass-market machine, but the M4 version was the rare iteration that didn't feel like it needed one or two $200 upgrades to be useful and future-proofed."
"The M5 Air brings good news and bad news on that front, depending on your perspective. The 13-inch M5 Air starts at $1,099, $100 more than before, and there's no Air at $999 anymore. Both the M1 and M2 Airs stuck around for a while in that spot after being replaced-not so for the M4 Air."
"But the M5 Air also comes with 512GB of storage rather than 256GB, previously a $200 upgrade. In an ideal world, I'd prefer to keep the $999 version and see Apple lower the price of its storage upgrades. But I suppose it's basically a wash, especially now that the Air sits upmarket."
Apple released the M5 MacBook Air alongside more notable M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pro models and the budget MacBook Neo. The M5 Air represents an incremental update rather than a significant leap. The 13-inch model now starts at $1,099, up $100 from the previous M4 generation, with the $999 entry point eliminated. However, the base storage doubles from 256GB to 512GB, offsetting some of the price increase. The 15-inch model starts at $1,299 with guaranteed 10-core GPU. Despite the price increase, the M5 Air remains Apple's mainstream laptop choice for most users, though it no longer offers the exceptional value proposition of its M4 predecessor.
#macbook-air-m5 #apple-pricing-strategy #laptop-specifications #storage-upgrades #consumer-value-proposition
Read at Ars Technica
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