This week, Apple announced a number of new Macs powered by the M5 chip. And an interesting new trend has emerged. You get more base storage, but the price is a little higher. This affected MacBook Air and MacBook Pro.
For now, the M4 versions of the Mac mini, Mac Studio, and iMac are still in the old price lineup, but that may change with the M5 lineup.
This week’s adjustments
For the M5 MacBook Air, Apple increased base storage from 256GB to 512GB, plus a $100 price increase.
This is great for many people because previously you had to pay $200 to get that level of storage. Basically, if you’re already paying for 512GB of storage, the MacBook Air is cheaper.
A similar price adjustment was made to the base 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5. It’s up $100 in price, but now comes with 1TB of storage as standard. Yes, it costs more than the previous baseline, but if you previously purchased 1 TB of storage, you’re better off.
The situation is slightly different for the M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pro. These come with 1TB of storage by default, but cost $200 more. So you’re essentially just paying for additional storage, with no real added value.
what’s next
Apple hasn’t made any changes to its desktop lineup yet, but we’re sure future models will see similar tweaks. I’m a little surprised they haven’t done it yet, but it’s probably not too far off.
We’ll likely see similar price changes for the next versions of the Mac mini, iMac, and Mac Studio.
- iMac: $1299 → 512GB is new standard at $1399
- Mac mini: $599 → 512GB is new standard at $699
- Mac Studio: $1999 → new standard at least $2199 for 1TB
As for the Mac mini and iMac, I don’t necessarily have a problem with price adjustments. 256GB of storage is honestly kind of a joke in 2026, so it’s actually a better value for those who have already bought the extra storage.
The flip side of this argument is that consumers would rather pay a little more for 512 GB of storage than buy 256 GB of storage and end up with a slower Mac because the storage is full and macOS can’t rely on swap memory. Or your storage needs may change and you need to upgrade quickly.
Mac Studio, on the other hand, is a little more complicated. With the M5 Max MacBook Pro, Apple started including 2TB of storage by default, making the M5 Max more expensive to upgrade than the M4 Max. So the next generation of Mac Studio could cost an additional $2,199 or more.
summary
As it turns out, this is all speculation. But given the tweaks Apple made to much of its Mac lineup this week, this seems pretty much a lock for everything else going forward. For now, there doesn’t seem to be any immediate concern as Apple hasn’t adjusted the unified price for memory despite the RAM crisis.
What do you think about Apple raising prices on their computers and adding base storage? Were you a stickler for base storage anyway? Let us know in the comments.
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