If you head to your local Apple Store to get a basic, workhorse MacBook Air, you might find that the shelves for the most popular laptop in the Apple lineup are mysteriously empty. You might then find that the same is true in the Apple Store one town over. This isn’t happening due to a rush of back-to-school shoppers in your area, according to an anonymously sourced report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman; it’s the latest retail symptom of the global memory shortage caused by the AI buildout. People started to notice the issue this past week. For instance, as one X user pointed out on Tuesday, Apple back-to-school ads including the MacBook Air have started to include a “MacBook Air subject to availability” disclaimer. As we noted back in June, Apple hiked the price of the M5 MacBook Air by $200, and that CEO Tim Cook said the memory shortage was like “a hundred-year flood” for his industry unlike anything he’s seen in more than 40 years. Certain memory options for other Apple products have essentially been abolished by removing them from the online Apple Store. But now, Bloomberg’s sources with Apple Store knowledge say supplies of the MacBook Air are, as Gurman phrased it, “more constrained than they can ever recall.”