If you head to your local Apple Store to get a basic, workhorse MacBook Air, you might find that the shelves for the most popular laptop in the Apple lineup are mysteriously empty. You might then find that the same is true in the Apple Store one town over. This isn’t happening due to a rush of back-to-school shoppers in your area, according to an anonymously sourced report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman; it’s the latest retail symptom of the global memory shortage caused by the AI buildout. People started to notice the issue this past week. For instance, as one X user pointed out on Tuesday, Apple back-to-school ads including the MacBook Air have started to include a “MacBook Air subject to availability” disclaimer.
As we noted back in June, Apple hiked the price of the M5 MacBook Air by $200, and that CEO Tim Cook said the memory shortage was like “a hundred-year flood” for his industry unlike anything he’s seen in more than 40 years. Certain memory options for other Apple products have essentially been abolished by removing them from the online Apple Store. But now, Bloomberg’s sources with Apple Store knowledge say supplies of the MacBook Air are, as Gurman phrased it, “more constrained than they can ever recall.”
Try to buy a MacBook Air online and the earliest it will likely ship is toward the end of this month, with some versions delayed until early next month. When I tried to buy a basic MacBook Air just now, the site said it wouldn’t arrive until the week of August 19-25. But when I tried to buy a basic iPad online, it said it would arrive on Tuesday, or I could pick it up today.
Gurman’s say this shortage “is indeed tied to the ongoing memory crunch,” and that one of Apple’s attempts at a solution is to find Chinese memory it can use in the devices it plans to sell in China—an effort he says is still ongoing.