Walmart Starts Selling Apple’s M1 MacBook Air for $699

Walmart announced today a new partnership with Apple to sell the company’s M1 MacBook Air directly at $699. The laptop is available to purchase today on Walmart.com, and it will be coming to select Walmart stores soon.

As you may know, Apple has just stopped selling this MacBook Air model, the first one with an M-Series chip, following the launch of the 13-inch and 15-inch M3 models starting at $1,099. The company is still selling the M2 model at $999, but the 15-inch version released last year has been discontinued.

“Our mission at Walmart is to help customers save money so they can live better – it’s not an either/or proposition. The very heart of that mission is the belief that customers should not have to sacrifice quality because of price,” said Julie Barber, executive vice president of Merchandising at Walmart U.S. “We’re working hard to bring premium brands to our physical and virtual shelves, and we’re excited to work with Apple to do just that.”

Apple’s partnership with Walmart is somewhat… surprising, considering that Apple is positioning itself as a somewhat aspirational brand designing premium products for people with generally good taste. However, Walmart is the biggest retailer in the US, and $699 is a good price for a laptop that, despite being almost 4 years old, remains very competitive next to midrange Windows laptops.

Be aware that the M1 MacBook Air Walmart is selling is the base model with just 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. That should be more than enough for most people, and the SSD storage on the M1 MacBook Air is actually faster than the one on the base M2 model. That one uses a single 256GB storage chip instead of two 128GB chips, resulting in slower read and write speeds. As noted by iFixit in a recent video teardown, Apple went back to two 128GB storage chips on the base M3 MacBook Air, which bring better SSD performance.

Last but not least, the M1 MacBook Air is the last model featuring the iconic wedge design that was first introduced on the 2010 model. The redesigned M2 and M3 MacBook Air now look almost identical to the redesigned 14″ and 16″ MacBook Pro, but the old MacBook Air design still has its charm today.