Ordering a MacBook Air from Apple today will get you a delivery estimate at the very end of the month, and the shortage is real enough that Apple has started flagging availability warnings inside its own back-to-school promotions, an unusual move for a product that isn’t near end-of-life. This comes from the latest report by Bloomberg.
The supply crunch has two causes, the broader AI datacenter buildout has consumed enormous quantities of high-end HBM2 DRAM, pulling supply chains away from consumer-grade memory and storage since the start of 2026. SSDs and DDR5 RAM have both spiked in price as a result, and Apple has already passed those costs on to customers: M5 MacBook Air prices increased from $1,099 to $1,299 in June 2026, after already rising from $999 to $1,099 in March with the debut of the M5 model, as Apple made a wider pricing adjustment that added $100 to $400 or more across its product lineup. Even at the higher price, Apple cannot keep units on shelves.
Apple is reportedly prioritizing inventory of the entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro, working to clear that model ahead of an M6 refresh coming this fall. The MacBook Air sits lower on that priority list, and a new Air isn’t expected until later in the product cycle. The combination of constrained memory supply and Apple steering available components toward the Pro lineup has left the Air in short supply at exactly the moment students and professionals are actively shopping.
Back-to-school season is the MacBook Air’s single strongest sales window of the year, which makes the timing especially damaging. Students buying their first Mac, educators replacing aging machines, and budget-conscious professionals who don’t need the Pro’s extra cores are all looking at a weeks-long wait, and retail channels like Best Buy have shown only intermittent availability, not consistently enough to serve as a real alternative for most buyers.
This is also the first back-to-school cycle at the Air’s new $1,299 entry price, which matters because that $300 increase from the historical $999 baseline narrows the gap between the Air and the 14-inch MacBook Pro considerably. The M4 MacBook Air launched at $999 just over a year ago; a buyer who might previously have defaulted to the Air without much deliberation now has to actually weigh whether the Pro’s additional cost is worth it, and Apple’s current inventory situation is effectively making that decision for some of them.
Tim Cook has described the surge in RAM demand as a “100-year flood,” and the MacBook Air situation is a concrete illustration of what that means in practice. Apple is better positioned than most PC makers to absorb the cost pressure, as the company demonstrated when it reported record Q3 2026 revenue earlier this week. Being better positioned doesn’t mean being immune to allocation problems when memory supply is genuinely constrained across the industry. The Air is the most popular Mac Apple sells by a significant margin, and it’s the one model where a supply disruption affects the broadest range of buyers.
If you need a Mac before September, the 14-inch MacBook Pro is the more available option right now, and given Apple’s apparent interest in keeping that inventory moving ahead of the M6 refresh, possibly a less frustrating one to actually order. It costs more, but at least you can get it.
