On Thursday, Apple did a rather surprising thing: it reduced the price of its MacBook Air from $3,098 to $2,598. Yes, your math is accurate, that’s $500.

If you have had your eyes on the higher-end Air (1.8GHz with a 64GB solid-state flash drive replacing the traditional ATA hard drive), this may very well be your chance to get one.

The other model, powered by Intel's 1.6 GHZ Core 2 Duo processor as standard, with an available 1.8GHZ upgrade, 2GB of RAM, battery life of 5 hours and an 80 GB hard drive, will continue to be priced at $1,799.

The MacBook Air laptop is less than 2 centimetres thick, features a backlit 13-inch (33-centimeter) screen, a full-size keyboard and a pad responsive to Apple's multi-touch control gestures. It weighs in at less than 1.5 kilograms. It has no built in CD drive, but does offer an external drive for an additional 99 dollars.

When launched in January, the Air was called the world's thinnest notebook computer. Since then however, things have changed a bit.

At the beginning of June, Hewlett-Packard (HP) unveiled its new laptop called Voodoo Envy, thus plunging in the race against Apple’s machine. The Voodoo, only 0.70 inches thin and weighing less than 3.4 pounds, is being offered for the price of $2,099.

One week after HP’s launch, Toshiba introduced its new Portégé R500-S5007V laptop. As it weighs only 2.38 pounds (1.08 kilos), the company claims it is the lightest laptop (packing a 128-GB solid-state drive and a DVD drive) on the market.
As the market is getting increasingly crowded, companies are looking for ways to make their products more appealing; lowering prices usually works.