Upgrading the Air's RAM to 16GB costs CAD$250, but includes the CAD$125 GPU upgrade. So the RAM, while overpriced, sure, is not as overpriced as it initially seems...
Sort of - If you
wanted the extra GPU and
didn't want a larger SSD. Otherwise it's rather offset by the $200 they want for an extra 256GB of storage:
(A) M3 Air, 8 CPU, 8 GPU, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD 30W PSU = US$1099
(A+BTO) M3 Air, 8 CPU,
10 GPU, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD 30W PSU = US$1299
(B) M3 Air, 8 CPU,
10 GPU, 8GB RAM,
512GB SSD
35W dual PSU = US$1299
(C) M3 Air, 8 CPU, 10 GPU, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD 35W dual PSU = US$1499
Nobody is expecting the low-end entry level 8GB system to run the same AI models that a PC w/ 64GB + 4090 w/ 24GB can't even run.
If you look at what Microsoft/Qualcomm are promoting with the new Snapdragon systems, what Apple have said so far about the M4 iPad and the speculation for WWDC, the "next big thing"
is running AI models locally (no spies-in-the-cloud) on thin'n'crispy ultraportable devices, using the dedicated "neural engines" on the SoCs rather than GPUs alone. The AI applications they are talking about are largely "personal productivity" things aimed at regular users - better searching, automatically writing emails etc. and not developers
training AI models. Microsoft's recommended minimum RAM for these wonderful (/s) new features is 16GB, and there's no reason to expect that to decrease on Macs (...since in many cases they're going to be buying in the exact same software). Now, I'm struggling to get excited about the monstrous lovechild of ELiza and Clippy - but it's where the market is heading.
Ironically, teardowns show that they are actually 12 GB, with 4 GB deactivated (or at least some of them are).
Highly plausible - economies of scale are everything with electronics, and as the industry moves to larger RAM capacity (esp. 16GB now being the minimum for son-of-Clippy), smaller capacity chips/dies will start to become disproportionately expensive as demand decreases - plus there are economies in using the same 6GB chips across more products, so 12GB with 4GB disabled could easily become cheaper (for Apple) than "true" 8GB machines.
Of course, those sorts of shenanigans really don't play well with consumers when they find out...
And see 13GB used even though I'm using very little RAM
Well, no, if you're using 13GB of RAM,
you're using 13GB of RAM but the data shows that the system is already having to compress some application data and "only" has 3GB spare for caching files. For comparison, my 32GB machine (which
is overkill, but that was the minimum on the M1 Max Studio I got for other reasons) with a few Chrome tabs and Logic playing multi-track audio is showing no compressed RAM, 15GB of cached files and minimum memory pressure.
The "green" memory pressure is confirming that you don't have a RAM
shortage that might be significantly slowing things down - by some arbitrary threshold between green, orange and red decided by Apple - but it ain't at minimum. Overall, I'd read that screenshot as saying that you have an appropriate amount of memory - including a bit of headroom - for what you're doing. Which is what you want. Your 16GB RAM is working for its keep. You certainly don't need a system to be running with orange or red memory pressure to justify having so much RAM - it's an almost universal rule that running
any resource at 100% is ineffective.
If you want more, pay up.
If it were just the entry-level $999 M2 Air or $600 M2 Mini that came with 8GB that might be defensible... but by the time you pay $1200 for a "better" M3 Air - and
certainly $1600 for a MacBook Pro then, sorry, "good enough for many" doesn't cut it. A refurb M1 Air, or even a $300 Chromebook is "good enough for many".
The root problem is the cost of the upgrades (esp. paired with the equally overpriced SSD bumps). It's just that if Apple weren't trousering such huge upgrade fees it would probably cost them
less - after logistics and economies of scale - to standardise on 16GB. Nobody is asking for the base price to go up to pay for 16GB.
