
During October Prime Day, You Can Get a MacBook Air for What It Cost Before the RAM Crisis
If you bought one of Apple's M5 MacBook Airs at launch, it would have cost you $1,099 for the base model. Then, the memory crisis took its toll, and all of a sudden, that same machine shot up in price by $200 without any new features or changes. The MacBook Air, which for years has started at $999 and jumped to $1,099 with the M5 (while also giving you more storage, at least), now starts at $1,299.
- ▪If you bought one of Apple's M5 MacBook Airs at launch, it would have cost you $1,099 for the base model.
- ▪Then, the memory crisis took its toll, and all of a sudden, that same machine shot up in price by $200 without any new features or changes.
- ▪The MacBook Air, which for years has started at $999 and jumped to $1,099 with the M5 (while also giving you more storage, at least), now starts at $1,299.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Lifehacker |
| Canonical URL | https://lifehacker.com/tech/macbook-air-deal-october-prime-day-2026?utm_medium=RSS |
| Publication time | Mon, 05 Oct 2026 20:51:54 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-05T20:55:43.870Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-05T20:55:43.870Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | VFlVSO0bp73Y · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
If you bought one of Apple's M5 MacBook Airs at launch, it would have cost you $1,099 for the base model. Then, the memory crisis took its toll, and all of a sudden, that same machine shot up in price by $200 without any new features or changes. The MacBook Air, which for years has started at $999 and jumped to $1,099 with the M5 (while also giving you more storage, at least), now starts at $1,299. If you want more storage, or to upgrade to the 15-inch model, it'll only cost you more. These prices only push customers towards Apple's less expensive MacBook Neo. That's not necessarily a bad thing: the Neo comes with most of the features that people are looking for in an Apple laptop, at about half the cost of the MacBook Air. But these are not identical machines.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Lifehacker.