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Apple Announces MacBook Air Now Starts With Increased 16GB of RAM With No Price Increase

HobeSoundDarryl said:
If I only had a nickel for how many defender posts I've read making Apple RAM out to be super special and thus rationalizing $200 for 8GB more vs. commoditized RAM available at retail for quantity 1 unit at peanuts. Here's absolute evidence that Apple RAM is not so expensive because we know they don't just throw away "nearly $200" cost for nothing.

And once again, I'm looking for those defenders who wrote thousands of posts about how 8GB was plenty for nearly all users to now rip into Apple for "forcing too much" RAM on all buyers. But I haven't even seen 1 such post yet... as if they didn't really mean what they were writing but just pushing whatever the company was selling. If they believed what they wrote as recently as last few weeks (and often throughout 2024), they should now find fault with Apple for "forcing" too much. Where's those comments? (rhetorical- we know- as Apple makes such hops, so evolves their passionate opinions to align with the Corp).

Congrats to all who look forward to buying base spec Macs at third party retailer sale prices. We finally were thrown a consumer bone instead of having every bit of focus on shareholder maximization. More of this Apple! More!

A magical side effect of delivering more consumer value is that it can move customers to BUY MORE and/or BUY NOW... which then benefits them shareholders too via volume accumulations instead of squeezing every penny out of each transaction.
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I think sales tanked in last monts so they needed to do something about it. You could see so many deals lately....
 
CraigsDog said:
Still the M4 Air is coming early 2025 so its a questionable move to buy one currently but this is great news
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I wonder if it will come in early 2025, though?

I wonder if this might be a new line of separation/differentiation between product lines?
 
m1mini said:
All Apple Intelligence features work flawlessly on my sisters 8gb m2 13 inch mbp (sonoma 18.2). I don't know what the fuss is about. Yes it was vile to keep the base ram of macbooks at 8, but base macs are over %50 of the active user base so they will obviously keep feature parity for at least 2 more major software updates.
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This is true, the installed user base on 8 GB Mac’s is huge. But yes, it’s vile that such a large spec bump, presumably only in response to their scrambled AI drive, is happening to devices that are otherwise actually overpowered. Now people have M2 plus Mac’s with super fast SoC and storage etc but with RAM that cant be upgraded.

I think everyone knew the RAM situation was precarious for them. They probably knew but the bottom line is what’s more important.
 
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HobeSoundDarryl said:
If I only had a nickel for how many defender posts I've read making Apple RAM out to be super special and thus rationalizing $200 for 8GB more vs. commoditized RAM available at retail for quantity 1 unit at peanuts. Here's absolute evidence that Apple RAM is not so expensive because we know they don't just throw away "nearly $200" cost for nothing.
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I actually looked it up, and since the last time they increased ram in 2012, memory prices are almost down 75%

ourworldindata.org

Historical price of computer memory and storage

This data is expressed in US dollars per terabyte (TB), adjusted for inflation. "Memory" refers to random access memory (RAM), "disk" to magnetic storage, "flash" to special memory used for rapid data access and rewriting, and "solid state" to solid-state drives (SSDs).
ourworldindata.org ourworldindata.org

So they could’ve done this a long time ago.
 
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mrhick01 said:
I wonder if it will come in early 2025, though?

I wonder if this might be a new line of separation/differentiation between product lines?
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Who knows but the same sources that said these new Macs would come in October said the Air would come in early 2025.
 
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minik said:
By now, people with Intel-based Mac should have no excuses to not upgrade unless they're stuck with some decade old software or attach to the 27-inch iMac form factor.
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Who needs an excuse not to upgrade? Upgrading is a choice, not an obligation. Intel Macs still run great, I have one of them. And in any case, once Apple drops support I’m going to Linux on it.

Ive gradually been more and more interested in non Apple devices lately. I appreciate a system that I can upgrade. Although I have many apples devices I can easily walk away if I wish too.
 
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Fuzzball84 said:
Who needs an excuse not to upgrade? Upgrading is a choice, not an obligation. Intel Macs still run great, I have one of them. And in any case, once Apple drops support I’m going to Linux on it.

Ive gradually been more and more interested in non Apple devices lately. I appreciate a system that I can upgrade. Although I have many apples devices I can easily walk away if I wish too.
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Amen to all of this

I literally still use my 2015 15" MBP as my laptop, as my laptop needs are extremely minimal and infrequent

Most of the time it's just an extra around the house machine that I pop open to look something up or reply to something in a pinch

With NVMe + OCLP, it's remarkably capable and runs Sequoia very well

To this day, it has a gorgeous screen also. That's probably the real reason I keep using it.
If I hated the screen I would have moved on
 
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turbineseaplane said:
It's a going point about MBA

It may not even get an M4
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I don't see any reason why it wouldn't get the M4, and I'm confident it will be here in the spring.

I don't think it be a worthwhile upgrade for any M-series Air owners, including myself, but it'll be there.
 
Awesome announcement but now I have a feeling theres gonna end up being a hard cutoff for macOS updates/features for Macs with 8GB RAM in the near future lol
 
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M3 air users: it is impossible apple dumps us only after 6 month right?
 
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turbineseaplane said:
Oh? Great!

Why have they suddenly scrambled to get 16GB minimum everywhere in that case?

Apple literally changed nothing about the MBA other than making sure it has 16GB RAM for all buyers

That cost them money
They don't do that for free or without a very good reason
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Apple was always going to be constrained on the base spec RAM for the M3 MBA because they offered an 8GB RAM base variant of the M3 MBP. There is no way they could release an updated MBA that had more base RAM than the current MBP. Now that they've iterated the MBP and increased the base spec RAM, they can finally bump it on the MBA. Yes, they should have done both in the last iteration instead of waiting so long, but the driving pressure is certainly AI.

M3 MBP released October 23, 2023 with 8GB RAM base spec
M3 MBA released March 4, 2024 with 8GB RAM base spec
 
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Fuzzball84 said:
It’s a pity for people who recently bought MacBooks as essentially those who bought the 8GB versions could end up horribly hobbled in terms of AI support and Apple will probably use the RAM spec as a cut off for OS support.
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That's what I was thinking. AI is a memory hog. By upgrading everything to 16 GB Apple just admitted it. As many have mentioned, AI caught Apple off guard and most of their machines are marginal at best. So a mad scramble is in progress.

I have 2 GB of free memory on my base M1 Air. There is no way that will do anything useful with AI.
 
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More or less confirmation that 8GB will be barely enough to run OSX (with Apple Intelligence) from now on.

And they're taking +€230 for 8GB more. So, the first extra 8GB are now free but the second ones even had a price increase. Man, I wished, that AI needed more storage space as well.
 
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