Apple is doing something unusual: pushing customers away from its best-selling laptop, and toward a pricier one, on purpose. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, retail stores and Apple’s own website are now steering shoppers toward the base 14-inch MacBook Pro instead of the MacBook Air, something Gurman says Apple has rarely, if ever, done before.
The reasoning isn’t just about supply, it’s about clearing inventory. According to the reports Apple wants Air stock thinned out ahead of an M6 refresh coming later this year, meaning some of this steering is deliberate sales strategy layered on top of the actual memory shortage, not just a company scrambling to cope. Some of Apple’s own marketing materials have reportedly started including the line “MacBook Air subject to availability” an unusually blunt admission for a company that rarely flags its own inventory problems in customer-facing copy.
The shortage itself traces back to the same AI-driven memory crunch that already hit the Mac mini and Mac Studio, both of which saw configuration cuts earlier this year. Base MacBook Air orders are reportedly running 2-6 weeks out in the US, with higher-RAM configurations pushed even further. Apple is also said to be sourcing memory from Chinese suppliers specifically for devices sold in China, a workaround suggesting the company is treating this as regionally uneven rather than a single global fix.
None of this is confirmed by Apple directly. But the strategy tells its own story: when a company starts nudging buyers toward a $200-plus upgrade instead of just apologizing for delays, it’s a sign the shortage is being treated as semi-permanent, not a blip Apple expects to clear before the holidays.
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