Apple has quietly dropped the price of its fastest MacBook Air, the company’s thinnest and lightest notebook, by $500.The price reduction appears to be the result of a $100 drop in the price of the 1.8-GHz Intel (NSDQ: INTC) Core 2 Duo processor and a $400 reduction in the price of the 64-GB solid-state drive. The deluxe model is now priced at $2,598. The price of the base model with a 1.6-GHz processor remains unchanged at $1,799. As early as last week, the faster notebook was priced at $3,098, according to a blurb found on Google (NSDQ: GOOG)’s search cache. The item was uncovered by the Apple-enthusiast site MacRumors.com. The processor upgrade was cut to $200 from $300 and the solid-state drive to $599 from $999.

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