News.blog: MacBook Air SSD price drops

Apple has quietly reduced the price of the flash-memory version of the MacBook Air by £300.

Appleinsider tipped us to the new price in the US, which has fallen $500 (£250). Before today, you would have paid a £2,028 premium if you wanted a MacBook Air with a solid-state hard drive, but Apple has reduced that premium to £1,719.

PC companies have been interested in flash memory hard drives for some time, but it's not clear how well they are selling. Using flash memory instead of moving parts to store data improves the reliability of the system; hard drive failures are one of the most common problems experienced by laptop users.

But it's still very expensive to choose a flash drive over a regular hard drive and potential customers might not be able to justify spending that money. Reliability is important, but so is price, and recent news that flash-memory drives are actually a drain on battery life won't help sell them as an upgrade option.