No tax. Which I would estimate at about approx. $110. The overnight shipping eats some of that. The problem is that his is BTO any way so take all the savings you can find. Although I don't think you can return it to an Apple Store if there's a problem. He'll have to ship it back to MacMall for a return or exchange. Not sure of their return shipping policy. I would imagine that if there's a problem than return shipping is free. If he decides he doesn't want it there may be a return shipping fee. You would have to read the fine print in the shipping policies.
His was the configuration I was considering but I'm too impatient and just went with what they had in store. Which was a base model or a fully blinged model. I went full bling.
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I think it's a good deal and a great configuration. 256 is plenty of space for the majority of people. My last two Airs were 128 and I was only just recently getting close to max storage after a few years of adding photos. I keep most of my music in remote storage. Just 5,000 songs on the Air at any one time. I could get ALL 88,000 songs on this new Air but I don't think I'm going to do it. It would take up most of my space and I really don't need access to ALL my music All the time. And I'll likely NEVER need to manage space. I can just download whatever with no worries about if I have enough space.