Apple Inc. has reduced the price of MacBook Air, its thinnest, lightest and most expensive notebook by $ 500, to $2,598. The price reductions with Apple are not common, but are only done when the company launches versions with enhanced or newer hardware.

In this case, it appears to be as a result of the $100 price drop in the 1.8-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor as well as a $ 400 price drop in the 64 GB solid state drive.  

The MacBook Air, launched in January, has a 13.3 inch display, weighs 3 pounds, has a full size keyboard, and measures three quarters of an inch in thickness at the hinge tapering to 0.16 of an inch on the opposite end. The thinness was the result of a miniaturized 65 nanometer Core 2 Duo processor from Intel, which is 60% smaller than the usual Merom chip.  

 It has been sold in two configurations, one with a traditional 80GB magnetic platter hard drive and a 1.6-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, and the other with a 64GB solid-state drive and a 1.8-GHz CPU.

Solid-state drives (SSD) are built from flash memory and, unlike hard drives, have no moving parts. The price drop is only on the MacBook Air with the solid state drive and not on the cheaper hard drive installed version. With the price cut, the title of most expensive notebook has shifted from the SSD equipped MacBook Air to the 17 inch MacBook Pro.