A little holiday gift from Apple: Today, they quietly dropped the price of the high-end MacBook Air by $500, making it only (“only”) $799 more than the 1.6GHz model.
There are only two differences between the two models: the high-end has a 1.8GHz processor (as opposed to 1.6GHz), which dropped $100 in component price, and uses a 64GB solid-state disk (instead of an 80GB standard HD), which dropped $400. Jacqui Cheng at Ars Technica, saving me from having to think too hard about all this (I’m sorry, I’m tired), explains the implications of the change:
One, you can now buy a refurbished SSD MacBook Air for more than it costs to buy a new one. Oops. Two, it means that if you want to upgrade the 1.6GHz MacBook Air to an SSD drive (forgoing the 1.8GHz processor upgrade), you can do so for a total of only $2400 now.
So if you wanted a SSD Air, but were waiting for them to actually be affordable…well, you have to wait some more. But $500 isn’t chump change, and ‘affordable’ is relative. Just don’t buy one if you think it means better battery life…
Still too expensive. I may consider it if goes down to $500