The MacBook Air M4, Age One: A Longitudinal Pricing Study

Background and Aims

The MacBook Air M4 13-inch went on sale March 12, 2025, at $999 for the 16GB/256GB configuration, with a 15-inch sibling at $1,199. It has now existed for slightly more than one year. In February we published a 90-day interim report on this laptop's pricing; several readers asked what happens over a longer horizon. The Editorial Staff, which had never stopped logging, is pleased to present the complete dataset: 382 consecutive days of observation, March 12, 2025 through March 28, 2026.

Our aims were four: determine how often the price meaningfully dips, how deep the dips run, which months produce them, and what any of this predicts for a person standing in a checkout flow this spring. This is an observational study. No laptops were harmed, purchased, or, on most days, discounted.

Methods

We recorded the listed price of the 13-inch M4 Air (16GB/256GB, first-party sellers only) twice daily at Amazon, Best Buy, and B&H Photo, and once daily at Apple.com, which required less vigilance for reasons that will become apparent. That is 2,674 scheduled checks. We completed 2,674. Open-box units, refurbished stock, and third-party marketplace listings were excluded. A "dip event" was defined in advance as a price at least 10% below the trailing 90-day average — our standard threshold for a real deal — sustained for at least six hours.

One methodological complication surfaced mid-study and deserves disclosure: as the street price decays, the 90-day average decays behind it, and the bar for a "dip" sinks accordingly. In April 2025, $899 qualified as an event. By January 2026, $899 was simply the weather, and only $849 or below cleared the threshold. The definition held; the world moved underneath it. This happens more often than statisticians enjoy discussing.

Results

Apple.com: $999 on 382 of 382 days. The control group performed flawlessly.

Everyone else: The modal price began at $999, slipped to $949 by early summer, and settled at $899 by autumn, where it has largely stayed. Across the year we logged $999 on 171 days, $949 on 63 days, $899 on 96 days, $849 or $849.99 on 38 days, and below $849 on 14 days, all of those between November 20 and January 18. The figures sum to 382. We checked.

Qualifying dip events: nine. Their depths clustered obediently between $100 and $150 below MSRP — $849 to $899 in the early months, $799 to $849 later, once the average had sagged enough to demand more. The absolute floor was $799, which appeared exactly twice: December 1 at 2:14 PM, lasting under eight hours, and January 18 at approximately 11:00 AM, lasting about the same. Readers of our February report will recognize those timestamps. They have not changed. Historical prices rarely do.

The nine events, by month: one in May 2025 (Memorial Day week, $899 — the laptop's first $100 markdown), one in July 2025 (Prime Day, $849, roughly 60 hours), one in late August ($899, back-to-school), three across the November 20 to December 2 corridor ($849 punctuated by the $799 spike), one in mid-January (the second, unexplained $799, which Best Buy accompanied with an equally unexplained $849.99), one in late February ($849.99 at Best Buy for four days), and one two weeks ago, when Amazon's Big Spring Sale produced $849 for five days, ending March 25.

The Calendar, Observed

Sorted by yield, the productive periods were: first, the Thanksgiving-to-early-December corridor; second, mid-July; third, mid-January; fourth, late March. September and October produced nothing — 61 consecutive days without a qualifying event, a stillness we attribute, speculatively, to promotional budgets migrating toward the new iPhones. February was nearly as barren until its final week. We advise no one to need a laptop in early October.

We also note, for completeness, the Best Buy gift-card ritual: on 11 scattered days, the $899 or $849.99 price arrived accompanied by a $50 gift card, which is not a discount but a promise of future spending. We logged these separately and regarded them with the appropriate ambivalence.

Limitations

We observed one SKU, in one country, at four retailers, for one year. The 15-inch model appeared to behave similarly at a $200 offset but was not formally enrolled in the study. Nothing here is causal. We cannot say why January 18 happened; we can only report that it did, briefly, while most people were doing something else.

Implications for the Prospective Buyer

As of this morning's verification, the Big Spring Sale price has receded and the listing sits back in the $899 to $949 band — roughly 2 to 4% below its current 90-day average of about $921, which is under our threshold. The next high-probability window is Prime Day in mid-July, approximately 107 days after the sale that just ended. Waiting that long to save the historical median of $50 to $100 works out to between 47 and 93 cents per day of patience. Whether your patience is worth 93 cents per day is a question outside our methodology, though several staff members attempted to answer it anyway and had to be redirected.

If the price in front of you is 10% or more below its 90-day average, our data says buy without ceremony. If it is not, our data says July. The laptop, for its part, says nothing. It has been remarkably consistent about that all year.

— The BuyGetRewards Editorial Staff

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