You're highlighting Apple's strategy very well, with one omission: the M1 Macbook Air at Wal-Mart was US only. Even next door in Canada with the same retailer, Wal-Mart didn't have that deal.
This is the M1 Macbook Air deal for the rest of the world as well as the US. This is huge, it's the cheapest Mac laptop of all time. Apple Silicon is paying dividends!
Except sadly it is not using M.
My first Mac was a Mac - ie the first Mac. 128k of memory and $1000 (with the student discount!) in 1994. I've had every architecture of Mac since then - except for M. This one might just have inspired me to try a Mac again - if it had an M.
The M-series is just marketing. They're just the A-series with more cores and IO. Apple has one family of CPUs, but they give them different names.
They dont need to use an M series. The chip they are using isn't far off (spec wise) a base M4. It's single threaded performance is damn good.
's/in 1994/in 1984/', perhaps?