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.