Apple’s upcoming Mac desktop computers may cost more, but not for the reason you might think

This week, Apple unveiled a slew of new Macs with M5 chips and revealed an interesting new trend. More basic storage, but at slightly higher prices. This impacted the macbook air and macbook pro.

At the moment, the M4 versions of the mac mini, Mac Studioand iMac They’re still sticking with their old price line, but that’s likely to change with the M5 line.

This week’s adjustments.

With MacBook Air M5Apple raised storage base from 256GB to 512GB, along with a $100 price increase.

This is great for a lot of people, since previously you had to pay $200 to get that level of storage. Essentially, the macbook air It became cheaper if you had already paid for 512GB of storage.

TO similar price adjustment came to Basic 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5. It’s up $100, but now comes with 1TB of storage as standard. Sure, it costs more than before as a base, but if you previously purchased 1TB of storage, it became more favorable.

Things differed slightly with the MacBook Pro M5 Pro and M5 Max. those have 1 TB of storage by defaultbut with a price increase of $200. So you’re really just paying for the extra storage, without any real added value.

Apple promotes Fusion architecture for M5 Pro and M5 Max chips with 'supercores' | Apple promotional graphic for the new chips.

What’s next?

Apple’s desktop lineup hasn’t been touched yet, but we’ll definitely see the same tweaks in future models. I’m a little surprised they haven’t done it yet, but it’s probably not too far away.

With upcoming versions of mac mini, iMacand Mac Studiowe will probably see similar price changes:

iMac: $1299 → $1399 with 512GB as new standard
mac mini: $599 → $699 with 512GB as new standard
Mac Studio: $1999 → at least $2199 with 1TB as new standard

For him mac mini and iMacI won’t necessarily disagree with the price adjustment. Honestly, 256GB of storage is a joke in 2026, so if you’ve already paid for more storage, it actually becomes a better value for you.

On the other side of that argument, I’d also rather see consumers pay a little more for 512GB of storage, rather than buying 256GB and ending up with a slow Mac because their storage is full and macOS can’t rely on swap memory, or having to quickly upgrade afterwards because their storage needs change.

Mac StudioOn the other hand, it is a bit heterogeneous. With the MacBook Pro M5 maxApple started including 2TB of storage by default, and as a result, an upgrade to the M5 Max cost more than it did with the M4 Max. For that reason, Mac Studio it may cost even more than $2,199 with the next generation.

Wrap

Ultimately, all of this is speculation. However, given Apple’s tweaks to much of the Mac lineup this week, it almost seems like a lock-in for everything to come. As things stand right now, Apple hasn’t adjusted any of its unified memory prices despite the RAM crisis, so it doesn’t seem like an immediate concern.

What do you think about Apple charging more for its computers and including more base storage? Were you someone who always stuck to base storage regardless? Let us know in the comments.

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