The M5 MacBook Air Is Great. But Apple Still Won't Build the Mac Everyone Actually Needs.

The M5 MacBook Air Is Great. But Apple Still Won't Build the Mac Everyone Actually Needs.

$1,099. That's the starting price of the new M5 MacBook Air, available March 11th. A 10-core CPU, up to 10-core GPU, 16GB unified memory base config, 18 hours of battery, dual external display support. It's a genuinely excellent laptop.

And it costs exactly what the MacBook Air has cost since the M1 era. The number hasn't moved. Meanwhile, inflation has chewed through purchasing power and the global developer population has exploded. Every year, Apple makes the Air better. Every year, they refuse to make a Mac cheaper.

I think this is the single biggest strategic blind spot in Apple's product lineup.

The M5 Air Deserves the Praise It'll Get

I'm not here to trash this machine. The M5 chip is a real upgrade. Apple claims LLM prompt processing is up to 4x faster than the M4 Air and 9.5x faster than the M1 Air. The Neural Accelerators baked into each GPU core are purpose-built for on-device AI workloads. Apple Silicon has been delivering on its performance-per-watt promises since 2020, and the M5 keeps that streak alive.

Base config: 16GB unified memory, 512GB storage. Configurable up to 32GB and 4TB. Runs macOS Tahoe with Apple Intelligence. The 13-inch weighs 2.7 pounds, less than half an inch thin, made with over 50% recycled materials. For a working dev who's upgrading from an older Mac, the dual external display support alone makes it worth it.

But here's the thing nobody's saying about the M5 Air: it solves the upgrade problem. It does nothing for the access problem. Those are very different things.

The $800 Mac That Doesn't Exist

Look at Apple's current laptop lineup. Tell me where a CS student in São Paulo, a self-taught developer in Lagos, or a bootcamp grad in rural Ontario is supposed to enter this ecosystem.

13-inch M5 Air: $1,099. 15-inch: $1,299. MacBook Pro with M4: $1,599. M4 Pro: $1,999. Nothing below $1,099.

Now look at the other side. A competent Windows laptop with a Ryzen 7 or Intel Core Ultra, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD runs $600-700. Chromebooks with decent specs start under $400. A solid ThinkPad running Linux goes for $700.

Apple's answer to budget buyers has always been "buy last year's model." But they've stopped selling the M2 Air through official channels. The refurb store is a lottery. "Budget Apple" still means $999 for a previous-gen machine if you can even find one.

There's a massive gap between $0 and $1,099 where Apple just doesn't show up.

This Gap Hits Different in the AI Era

This is what actually frustrates me.

Apple has spent two years telling us on-device AI is the future. Apple Intelligence, local LLM inference, private machine learning. The M5's Neural Engine and unified memory architecture are excellent for running local models. Apple Silicon is probably the best consumer hardware for local AI work right now.

So who gets access? People who can spend $1,099 minimum.

The developer community is more global and more economically diverse than ever. GitHub's Octoverse reports show the fastest-growing developer populations are in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia. In those regions, $1,099 is months of salary for many working professionals. Not students. Professionals.

If Apple actually believes on-device AI is a competitive advantage, locking it behind $1,099 is leaving an enormous market on the table. Every developer who buys a $600 Windows laptop and runs models on cloud GPUs instead is a developer who's not building Core ML models. Not optimizing for the Neural Engine. Not shipping apps that make Apple Intelligence look good.

The cheapest Mac laptop costs more than the median monthly salary in most of the world's fastest-growing developer markets. That's not a feature. It's a failure of product strategy.

Apple has done this before, by the way. The white polycarbonate MacBook from the mid-2000s was one of the most popular Macs ever made. It started at $999 in 2006, roughly $750 in today's purchasing power adjusted for tech pricing. It was unapologetically a consumer machine. Not thin. Not light. Mediocre screen. But it pulled millions of people into the Mac ecosystem, and many of them eventually upgraded to MacBook Pros, iMacs, and later, iPhones.

That pipeline barely exists today.

What a Budget Mac Could Actually Look Like

I'm not asking Apple to build a bad computer. I'm asking them to build a focused one.

Picture a 13-inch Mac laptop at $699-799. You sacrifice the premium aluminum enclosure and use recycled polycarbonate like the old MacBooks. Swap the Liquid Retina display for a standard IPS panel. Drop MagSafe, just use USB-C charging. Go a little thicker for cheaper thermals and a bigger battery.

What you keep: Apple Silicon (even an M3 or M4 would be incredible at that price), 8-16GB unified memory, 256-512GB SSD, macOS, and the full ecosystem integration.

This isn't fantasy. Apple's chip costs decrease on older nodes. They sell the iPad Air with an M2 starting at $599. The entry-level iPad ships an A16 chip for $349. Apple clearly knows how to hit lower price points with capable silicon. They just choose not to do it with the Mac.

The question isn't whether Apple can build a $799 Mac laptop. It's whether they want to.

Apple's Math Is Wrong on This

I think the reluctance comes down to margin protection and brand positioning. Both arguments fall apart under scrutiny.

The MacBook Air likely generates north of 30% gross margin at $1,099. A $799 laptop compresses that, maybe to the low 20s. Apple's Mac business did roughly $9 billion in Q1 FY2025 alone. Protecting that margin feels rational quarter-to-quarter.

But it ignores lifetime value. A 22-year-old developer in Nairobi who buys a $799 Mac and spends the next 30 years in the Apple ecosystem is worth far more than the $300 of margin Apple preserved by not building that machine. Apple understands this perfectly in other categories. The iPhone SE exists. Apple Music student pricing exists. Education iPad pricing exists.

On brand: the fear is that a polycarbonate MacBook at $799 cannibalizes Air sales and dilutes the premium image. Except Apple has disproven this fear over and over. The iPod Mini and Nano didn't destroy the iPod. The iPhone SE didn't destroy the iPhone. The iPad mini didn't destroy the iPad. A lower-priced entry point expands the total addressable market. It strengthens the premium tier. Apple knows this.

The Mac is the only major Apple product line without a real budget entry point. That's not strategic discipline. It's a blind spot.

The Real Competition Isn't Windows. It's Cloud.

Here's what I think Apple is missing entirely: their biggest threat at the low end isn't Dell or Lenovo. It's cloud development environments.

GitHub Codespaces, Gitpod, Google's Project IDX, Replit. These tools make it possible to do serious development work from any device with a browser. A developer with a $300 Chromebook and a Codespaces subscription can write, build, test, and deploy production software without ever touching a Mac.

Every year Apple doesn't have a sub-$900 laptop, more developers discover they don't need one at all. And once someone builds their entire workflow around cloud dev environments, they never come back. The lock-in works in reverse.

The M5 MacBook Air is a fantastic machine for people already in the ecosystem. It does nothing to grow that ecosystem at the bottom, which is exactly where the next hundred million developers are coming from.

Apple's M5 Air will sell millions of units. It'll get glowing reviews. It deserves them. But ten years from now, I think we'll look back at this era and wonder why Apple left the most important market in computing completely uncontested. The next generation of developers is choosing their tools right now. Most of them can't afford $1,099.

Apple should not be okay with that.

Photo by Jakub Żerdzicki on Unsplash.