About time. This also applies to their older models such as M2 and M3 laptops.
In the U.S., the MacBook Air lineup continues to start at $999, so there is no price increase associated with the boost in RAM.
The M2 macbook air now starts at $1000 for 16GB RAM and 256GB storage. Limited storage aside, that’s surprisingly competitive with most modern Windows laptops.
Apple finally caught up with 2018 technology
Just in time for 32gb to become the necessary standard, so they can still sell you egregiously overpriced ram upgrades.
I can’t imagine that being the case for most users. I’m absolutely a power user and I keep being surprised at how consistently high the performance is of my base model M1 Air w/16GB even when compared to another Mac workstation of mine with 64GB.
I can run two VMs, a ton of live loading development tooling, several JVM programs and so much more on that little Air and it won’t even sweat.
I’m not an Apple apologist - lots of poor decisions these days and software quality has taken a real hit. While 16GB means everyone’s getting a machine that should last much longer, I can’t see a normal user needing more any time soon, especially when Apple is optimizing their local machine learning models for their 8GB iOS platforms first and foremost.
I think the next thing people should complain about is the abysmal 256 GB of storage. That’s barely enough to fit the OS plus updates at this point. Should be at least 512 GB, given how basically free NVMe storage is these days.
watch how operating systems will now be heavier accordingly.
Yes it’s described as being for “Apple intelligence” which I’m sure won’t be bloated nor hard to disable at all… sigh
It’s literally a toggle in the settings under apple intelligence
The M2 macbook air now starts at $1000 for 16GB RAM and 256GB storage. Limited storage aside, that’s surprisingly competitive with most modern Windows laptops.
What do you mean limited storage aside?
If we disregard the fact that it’s terrible value for money, it’s a good deal. No laptop sold in 2025 and costing over a grand, should have anything less than a terabyte.
But it has a apple logo and it browses facebook just fine.
The localllama people are feeling quite mixed about this, as they’re still charging through the nose for more RAM. Like, orders of magnitude more than the bigger ICs actually cost.
It’s kinda poetic. Apple wants to go all in on self-hosted AI now, yet their incredible RAM stinginess over the years is derailing that.
I do have a 64gb m1 MacBook Pro and man that thing screams at doing LLM AI. I use it to serve models locally throughout my house, while it otherwise still works as a fantastic computer (usually using about half the ram for llm usage). I still prefer a 4080 for image generation though.
“640k is enough for anyone.”
My daily driver MacBook Pro has 8GB of RAM, and so far, that’s been perfectly sufficient for my needs. Some might argue that 8GB is inadequate for a 1,700€ device, but I don’t think most people would notice a difference. This focus on specs might make more sense with computers, but with smartphones especially, I never understood the obsession with performance. My mid-range Samsung handles everything instantly - I can’t think of a reason it would need to be any faster. Numbers on a paper seem irrelevant when it doesn’t translate to everyday use.
Your MacBook is a cell phone?! Hahaha jk
MacOS, no matter what anyone says, has extremely efficient memory management. It’s seriously impressive how efficient that OS truly is, and it’s no surprise they stuck with 8GB for so long. The thing these clickbait articles don’t really bring to light is that the 16GB increase is really for Apple intelligence. If that wasn’t a thing these Macs would stick to 8GB.
It is “efficient” because they just dump everything on swap. If I cold boot my M1 air, it’ll be using 7GB of RAM and 4GB of swap without anything running in the background. I have this ongoing bug as well where some background apps will stop responding and the system can’t stop the process, so it starts a new one and it keeps doing this until I either stop the app manually, or my storage is completely full because swap is taking 80GB of my internal storage.
Cool cool cool cool. Can I buy 16GB now and upgrade my Mac later ?
Their sales figures seem to show that the majority of people don’t care. For my needs when I’m using my MacBook, I’m one of those people who don’t care. That’s probably because it’s not my main PC, so I use it for the things most people probably use it for (browsing, watching media, some light work).
Now that 64GB is the standard
Where? Workstations at best.
Gaming at home
Perfect, just when I’ve decided 16GB is the bare minimum these days too. My day to day I max out 16 on my laptops without even trying. 32 is my new minimum.
Finally the RAM on that thousand dollar machine is on par with my decade old T420!
Hello fellow 7-row-keyboard Thinkpad user! (I use a W520)
EDIT: btw it’s a bit older than a decade ago
Even better!
With no programs running my mac mini is using 16gb so I’m not surprised
That’s normal for these computers. Idea being it doesn’t really benefit you to have a ton of empty ram sitting around waiting to be used. So the OS makes no effort to clear it out until the space is needed.
If you believe their marketing it’s actually doing the opposite, and preemptively loading stuff into ram in order to make your common tasks feel as snappy as possible. But yeah either way you’ll notice the memory is always “full”, but you never seem run out
Well that would be good, but it goes completely against how i’ve learned to manage my machine these past three decades.
Yeah it was a trip for me as well to adapt to the new ways. For example it took me a long long time to adjust to allowing the computer to manage the multitasking for me. I would habitually always close out programs I wasn’t using, because I felt deeply from my decades of experience that running tons of things at once would cause many issues.
I was very uncomfortable letting all these “active” programs pile up, but it really turned out to be all good. The computers are designed to be used this way. And really, I’m better off for it, not having to go in and micromanage everything constantly.
What I’m trying to say is that learning is not something that is ever finished, you know? There came a day when we stopped defragmenting our hard drives, and now the day has arrived where the computer utilizes all the ram all the time
Interesting, I didn’t know that. Is that controlled by the operating system or something else? I’m curious about whether my Debian laptop does the same.
Considering their industry-leader status, it’s about 5-7 years too late.
I dunno if I’d even consider them an industry leader, unless you break down their ubiquity by industry category (in which they lead graphic design and maybe video editing, iirc). They lead phone sales in the US by a lot, but their overall desktop share is still relatively small (<10%), and their global footprint is buoyed only by iOS (which is still below Windows and Android).
I would say they’re an innovator, and they push certain companies to innovate, but they don’t really lead by that many metrics.
I meant leading as in “if Apple does something, others will too”. That has been true for quite a long time now.
And by that definition, I agree
People don’t want the 8gb ram because they are all used to windows I bet it.
Or Linux Or MacOS Or any computer really
