Walmart Selling M1 MacBook Air for $699
Walmart today announced that it has started selling the MacBook Air with the M1 chip in the U.S., with pricing set at a very reasonable $699. The laptop can be ordered now on Walmart.com, and it will be available soon at select Walmart stores.
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Apple first released the MacBook Air with the M1 chip in November 2020, as one of the first Macs with an Apple silicon chip instead of an Intel processor. The configuration being sold for $699 includes the M1 chip, 256GB of storage, and 8GB of RAM/unified memory, with Gold, Silver, and Space Gray color options available.
While Walmart has historically sold Apple devices like the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, it has never sold Macs directly.
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Apple reshuffled its MacBook lineup last week, introducing the M3 MacBook Air starting at $1099 and dropping the price of the M2 MacBook Air to $999. As part of these changes, Apple also stopped selling the M1 MacBook Air, which had previously been available for $999.
But it looks like Apple is going to keep producing the M1 MacBook Air for this deal with Walmart. These aren’t refurbs, or leftover stock[…] Fascinating example of pricing-as-branding that Apple won’t sell this machine in its own stores, but will through Walmart — which doesn’t sell any other Macs.
Apple did this sort of thing with iPhones, too. The M1 MacBook Air is still a solid Mac. I still wish Apple would design an actual lower cost MacBook, but this is great news nonetheless. I just wonder how long Apple will maintain OS support for it.
In response to the comments regarding its “excellent value” at $699, Lenovo is currently selling its 14" ThinkPad P14s Gen 3 for $699. It comes with a Ryzen 7 6850U that roughly matches the M1 in performance, 16GB of LPDDR5 and a 512GB SSD.
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I really like this idea, but 8/256 is tight under many common workloads.
A family member just got the base M1 Air for schoolwork and it's sluggish enough under a fairly typical modern K12 workflow of Google Docs + misc browser tabs + Visual Studio that he doesn't use it.
I agree Apple is imensely frustrating with its RAM & SSD allocations but my experience with the base m1 Air is quite different than you describe. We have one running Logic Pro, Final Cut, and Blender and they’re all perfectly usable, far moreso that any Intel Mac I ever used and I’ve owned many. Maybe the issue you describe is due to Visual Studio or GDocs?
Now where's the Mac Mini 8/512 for $499?