Tariffs. Inflation. Historic corporate shake-ups and mergers. With all the factors the tech industry is facing, you might think the price of a common product like a laptop would have risen this year. But just the opposite has been happening.
I’ve been watching laptop prices slowly drop throughout 2025, a trend that peaked during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Regardless of the state of the economy, I feel like I can say that laptop prices have never been lower. Some of my favorite laptops have recently offered significant price cuts across Macs, Windows, and Chromebooks. In a time when money is tight for so many of us, that’s welcome news. But with a RAM shortage brewing behind the scenes, there’s good reason to think it won’t last for much longer.
Just Look at the MacBook
Photograph: Brenda Stolyar
There’s one perfect example to demonstrate my point: the MacBook Air. For years now, the latest MacBook has been sold at $999. In 2022, Apple briefly bumped the price of the M2 version to $1,199 but kept the previous-gen M1 MacBook Air for $999. The last MacBook to be sold for less than $999 was in 2015, when Apple had an 11-inch model for $899. That’s a long time to stay static, considering how much more nearly everything in your life costs today than it did in 2015.
Don’t forget the discounts. The M4 MacBook Air is the latest model, and it dropped to $749 in November at retailers like Best Buy, Amazon, and Walmart. Before that, it was selling for $800 for many months. That’s an incredible price for this laptop, especially since the starting configuration comes with 16 GB of RAM.
Apple has offered a supply of older models through third-party retailers. Walmart briefly dropped the price of the M1 MacBook Air to $499. These aren’t refurbished or used; they’re new. That alone is unusual for Apple. There was a time when Apple was seen as the overpriced alternative. But for modern, entry-level Macs, that’s just not true anymore. Even the brand-new M5 MacBook Pro got an unprecedented $150 discount on Black Friday, just a month after it was announced, and that discount is still in place today.
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