Walmart Now Selling M1 MacBook Air for $549
Joe Rossignol reported this week for MacRumors Walmart is selling the M1 MacBook Air, brand-new, for $549 as part of its Black Friday sales. The laptop was amongst the first Mac machines fitted with Apple’s homemade silicon, announced in November 2020.
Walmart’s M1 MacBook Air is the base configuration, featuring 8GB RAM and 256GB solid-state storage, in silver and space gray. Gold is sold out as of this writing.
“Apple discontinued the MacBook Air with the M1 chip last year, after it launched models with the M3 chip, and it has since updated the MacBook Air with the M4 chip,” Rossignol wrote on Tuesday. “Prior to being discontinued, the model with the M1 chip was being sold for a starting price of $999 brand new, but Amazon sometimes offered it on sale for $899 or less.”
As Rossignol rightly notes, the M1 Air is extraordinarily competent despite being 5 years old now. I covered a similar price drop of the computer back in August, and the points I made in that story are worth reiterating here. In terms of literal accessibility, buying power-wise, the $549 price tag on the M1 Air has a stratospherically high value proposition. For a disabled person who must pinch their pennies, the M1 Air may well be the best, least expensive option to upgrade their laptop. While it admittedly isn’t as svelte and “modern” as the redesign ushered in with the M2 generation—the version I have, by the way—the industrial design still smokes any PC laptop, and importantly retains its hallmark thinness and lightness. Moreover, from a software perspective, the M1 chip is performant and affords amenities like iPhone Mirroring in addition to the typical cavalcade of macOS accessibility features. And although Rossignol also rightly caveats next year’s macOS 27 release theoretically could drop support for the M1 chip, I’d say chances are pretty good it’ll stay supported for some time. This means a person buying this discounted M1 Air at Walmart right now could take comfort in the notion their (relatively) minimal investment won’t reach end-of-life for several years yet.
