All MacBook Air Models Now Come With 16GB
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When Apple debuted its 2024 MacBook Pro lineup today, with even the most affordable base M4 model starting at 16 GB of RAM, I pondered whether Apple would make a similar move when it adds the M4 chip to the MacBook Air next year.
Well, it turns out that we won’t have to wait to find out. While the M4 MacBook Air is still a few months away, Apple has retroactively increased the base RAM for all of its current MacBook Air models to 16 GB across the board.
That includes not only the M3 MacBook Air lineup introduced in March but also the older M2 MacBook Air, which was released in mid-2022 but is still sold by Apple as an entry-level model.
Apple tucked the news into today’s MacBook Pro announcement, noting that “the World’s Most Popular Laptop Now Starts at 16GB.”
MacBook Air is the world’s most popular laptop, and with Apple Intelligence, it’s even better. Now, models with M2 and M3 double the starting memory to 16GB, while keeping the starting price at just $999 — a terrific value for the world’s best-selling laptop.
With this move, Apple no longer sells any current Macs with only 8 GB of RAM. While the Mac Studio and Mac Pro haven’t been updated since 2022, those ultra-high-end Macs already started at 32 GB with nothing less than M2 Max and M2 Ultra chips from the very start.
The rest of Apple’s Mac lineup has now been refreshed with at least 16 GB of RAM. The new iMac, Mac mini, and 14-inch and 16-inch MacBooks Pro all pack in variations on Apple’s latest M4 chips, and although the MacBook Air has yet to get Apple’s latest silicon, the company has clearly decided it’s time to put the 8 GB models out to pasture.
It’s a surprising turnabout for a company that was insisting the 8 GB was just fine just six months ago, with Apple product marketing VP Bob Borchers repeating the oft-cited company line that 8 B on an M-series Mac is equivalent to 16 GB on other systems.
While that’s partially true thanks to Apple’s Unified Memory Architecture, many folks who bought an Apple Silicon Mac with only 8 GB might disagree. My own experience is that the truth here lies somewhere in the middle. I’m still using a 2020-era M1 MacBook Pro with 8 GB. While Apple’s silicon definitely manages that 8 GB of RAM better than any of my Intel Macs ever did (much less a Windows PC), there are lots of times I’ve bumped up against that limit and wished I’d endured the longer shipping times to get a 16 GB upgrade.
After all, the Unified Memory Architecture can only do so much. With the RAM baked right onto the chip, access from the CPU and GPU is lightning-fast, with no external buses to create bottlenecks. The GPU also gets to use all the memory it needs.
However, that only helps with quickly swapping old data out of memory to free it for new tasks. It doesn’t change the fact that sometimes things simply need more memory that can’t be freed up. A common scenario that I’ve run into a few times is having a few dozen tabs open in Safari, which can quickly cause things to slow to a crawl, particularly with web apps or ad-heavy sites, which consume more memory. Ironically, Chrome often does better than Safari in some cases, perhaps because web apps are better optimized for it.
So, why the turnabout from Apple? While a lot can change in six months, it’s more likely that the writing has been on the wall for a while. It’s not at all uncommon for Apple executives — especially marketing executives — to toe the company line and insist that its product decisions are just fine — until they aren’t. Then, it quietly reverses course and makes whatever changes are necessary. Even Steve Jobs famously ridiculed the idea of a video-capable iPod only to stand up on stage a year later to announce a video-capable iPod.