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The subscription ties the customer into a £35 per month contract over 18 months, which the more mathematically minded will have noted equates to an extra £630 in the long term.

However, for those interested in a HSDPA connection together with their MacBook Air, 3 offers a free dongle, a data-transfer limit of 3GB a month and speeds of up to 2.8Mb/sec.

The offer is an extension of the one announced at the end of January, which knocked £350 off the price of a Windows-based laptop in return for signing up to a 3 subscription. At the time of writing PC World had yet to respond on the reason for the difference in discounts.

PC World says it has stock arriving on 11 February, though the deal also applies to pre-orders.

Vodafone recently announced that it was slashing the price of its 3GB mobile data packages from £30 to £15 as attempts to gain some ground in the mobile data market.