March 3 (Reuters) - Apple on Tuesday unveiled updated MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models, featuring its latest M5-series chips and bigger base storage, in a bid to lure buyers in a softening PC market squeezed by rising memory costs.
The update includes a new MacBook Air powered by Apple's latest M5 chip and higher-end MacBook Pro models equipped with the new M5 Pro and M5 Max processors, which the company says deliver significant gains in performance and on-device AI capabilities.
The 13-inch MacBook Air starts at $1,099 and now comes with 512 gigabytes of storage as standard, double the base storage of the previous generation. In the older lineup, customers had to pay $1,199 to get a 512GB configuration, making the new starting price effectively a price cut for the same storage tier.
Since transitioning from Intel processors to its in-house M-series chips beginning in 2020, Apple has touted gains in performance and battery life, helping it differentiate from Windows-based PC makers.
The 14-inch MacBook Pro models powered by the M5 Pro chip start at $2,199 and now come with 1 terabyte of storage as standard, up from 512GB in many earlier base configurations.
With higher base storage on the MacBook Pro, Apple has adopted a similar pricing strategy, bumping up standard configurations while keeping headline prices largely unchanged.
The broader PC market has faced uneven demand in recent years, with vendors competing aggressively on price as consumers and businesses delay upgrades following the pandemic-era surge in laptop purchases.
Memory chips such as DRAM and NAND flash are critical components in laptops, affecting performance and storage capacity, and their prices have sharply increased with limited supply as chipmakers focus on manufacturing for AI applications.
On Monday, Apple launched the iPhone 17e, its more affordable smartphone model starting at $599, and increased the base storage to 256 gigabytes.
(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D'Silva)
