Apple Still Trying to Keep Up With M2 MacBook Air Demand Almost a Month After Launch
Almost a month after launch, demand for the new M2 MacBook Air continues to be high, with the notebook in relatively short supply. For just the baseline configuration, customers are facing up to a three-week wait, according to Apple's online store.
In the United States, Apple lists the MacBook Air as shipping out in two to three weeks for the baseline model with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD storage. Other configurations with varying storage and memory options are listed with a one to two weeks shipping estimate.
The delay is untimely, as Apple is currently running a Back to School promotion for students preparing for classes this fall. The new MacBook Air may be an attractive purchase for students thanks to its lightweight and thin design and the battery life and performance enabled by the M2 chip.
Apple has been facing supply chain constraints in recent months, but the situation does seem to be easing. Besides the long wait for the new MacBook Air, most other Macs in Apple's lineup remain readily available for shipping with no weeks-long delay.
The highest-end Mac Studio and the 24-inch iMac with the M1 chip are the two exceptions. The Mac Studio is listed with shipping estimates of one month or longer, and customers looking for an iMac face a three- to four-week delay, according to Apple's store at the time of writing.
In the third quarter of the year, Apple's Mac business was severely constrained. Apple CEO Tim Cook said that Mac supply was so low for the quarter that it was difficult to gauge actual demand for Apple's latest computers:
In terms of testing the demand, you can't really test demand unless you have the supply. We were so far from that last quarter that we have an estimate of what we believe demand was, but it is an estimate. We recognize how the industry is doing, we think that we've got a great story with the Mac, getting M1 out and now M2 out, we have a very strong offering for the back to school season and we'll see how we do this quarter. We'll report back in October.
Mac revenue for Q3 of 2022 was down to $7.3B from $8.2B in the year-ago quarter.
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Top Rated Comments
However, in the real world, this is just the coolest laptop apple has ever delivered and it’s faster than what 99% of people who buy it could ever need.
Don't buy the baseline M2 MBA under any circumstances - it's slow as molasses (you're obviously going to buy it to do 8k video editing, compositing and exporting everyday, right?).
Regular people:
I want the baseline MBA, just take my money.
Earlier this year my org waited well over two months between order and delivery of some completely boring midrange Dell laptops getting toward the end of a product cycle. I don't even have a clue when the recent-release model we ordered last month will ship, but at this point I'm downright excited when I see a lead time of only 3 weeks on just about anything from Dell.
Then again, even coming up on 3 decades after, I've still never forgotten the pain of excitedly ordering a Power Macintosh 8600 then waiting at least 3 months for it to arrive only for the ADB port to be stone dead.
Is Apple alone?
Hardly. Just try and buy a PS5 that's been out for nearly two years now.
Apple is handling the supply constraints better than any other company out there, but I understand headlines like this get people to click, so... here we are.