Following Apple’s announcement of the new MacBook Pro with M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max chips, they also updated the MacBook Air with a change that most users have been asking for.
The MacBook Air 13-inch with M2 and M3, along with the MacBook Air 15-inch with M3 now have 16GB of RAM as the base, up from 8GB. Don’t worry, the price remains the same, and hasn’t increased at all! This decision aligns well with other recent product announcements by Apple, including the M4 iMac and the redesigned Mac mini, which have 16GB of RAM as standard for the same price as before.
If you’re familiar with the recent releases of macOS, you’ll know that the OS itself and its features takes up more than 5GB of RAM (which is justified) upon booting up with nothing opened, so 8GB of RAM is pretty low. This leaves the user with less room to multitask, and it also unnecessarily offloads memory pressure onto the soldered SSD chips, which causes wear and a shorter lifespan of the SSD.
This was a long-awaited change, and users now have the liberty to either save the extra cash or use it to upgrade something else such as storage as it still comes with 256GB in the base model
The MacBook Air 13-inch with M2 still starts at $999 for 16GB of unified memory and 256GB of SSD Storage, while the 13-inch version with M3 starts at $1099 for the same configuration.
The MacBook Air 15-inch with M3 also still starts at $1299 for 16GB of unified memory and 256GB of SSD Storage.
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