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
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
Cool cool cool cool. Can I buy 16GB now and upgrade my Mac later ?
Just in time for 32gb to become the necessary standard, so they can still sell you egregiously overpriced ram upgrades.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your MacBook is a cell phone?! Hahaha jk
Now that 64GB is the standard
Where? Workstations at best.
Gaming at home
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!
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).
Completely laughable. Literally had 16 GB of DDR3-1600 for my 2600K from 2011 that I handed down to a kid nephew for their first PC to tinker with. Hell, my local NAS has more than that…
Fucking PHONES had more RAM. It was so fucking stupid. And despite their arguments, it was proven time and time again 8GB was not enough.
We use windows PCs at work as software engineers now, but when I was training I used a MacBook Pro M1 with 16GB of RAM and that thing was incredibly performant.
I know it in vogue to shit in Apple, but they build the hardware and the software and they’re incredibly efficient at what they do and I don’t think I ever saw the beachball loading icon thing.
Now the prices they charge to upgrade the RAM is something I can get behind shitting on.
You can use Linux with RAM compression to have the same kind of economy that MacOS does.
Just nobody bothers.
I know it’s in vogue to shit on Apple…
Apple does have a lot of vertical integration which allows first party stuff to function well and they work closely with a lot of their premium 3rd party software partners, but you try running an actual RAM hungry process like a local LLM model, for example, and all but the highest end latest edition MacBook Pro WILL shit the bed.
The chip and OS won’t do shit when your ram is saturated by electron apps taking 800MB each. Maybe MacOS behaves better under very high memory pressure than windows does, but it doesn’t mean it’s okay to rip off consumers. That whole 8GB on mac = 16GB on windows has been bullshit all along, and is mostly based on people looking at the task manager and seeing high ram usage on windows (which is a good thing)
Haha no MacOs is not better performing under very high memory pressure. Rip me working on a macbook air.
I have to make sure not to run too many things at once…
Now that I think of it yeah, my work mac simply shows a popup telling me to kill an app. It just doesn’t deal with high mem pressure lol
I used Windows, Mac and Linux in the past year.
It’s not Mac that’s fast, it’s Windows that sucks hard.
Same.
- Mac - Fast, user friendly, and UNIX based.
- Windows - Fast (I have a beast), bloated, stupid command prompt (“Add-Migration”, capital letters really.), wants to spy on me.
- Linux - Fast, a lot of work to get everything working as you would on Windows or Mac and I’m past those days, I just want to turn the thing on and play Factorio or Minecraft, not figure out if my 4080 will run on it etc.
it’s almost like people make choices to suit their needs and there isn’t a single solution for everybody.
I wonder what the industry standard is for developers? Genuinely. I’ve heard it’s Max, but my company is all in on Microsoft, not really heard of companies developing on Linux. Which isn’t to say Linux doesn’t have its place, but I’m aware this place is insanely biased towards Linux.
I wonder what the industry standard is for developers?
The Stack Overflow developer survey (which has it’s bias towards people who use Stack Overflow)… says 47% use Windows, 32% use Mac, and uh, Linux is split up by distro so it’s hard to make sense of the numbers but Ubuntu alone is at 27%. (each developer can use multiple platforms so they don’t add up to 100%)
I almost never use Windows, but aren’t commands and variables in PowerShell case insensitive?
My current Linux machine needed exactly zero config post install, and even stuff like the fingerprint reader is working, I’m using it instead of passwords in a terminal.
I can also play games pretty well, it’s usually smoother and less buggy than on Windows.
I feel Linux is not a compromise for me anymore, Windows is fast becoming one though.
What distro would you recommend, I’m prepared to try over the weekend.
How does it work with GPU drivers for a GeForce RTX 4080?
Anything else I need to be aware of
I’m running Fedora KDE on a Framework laptop and a custom built machine, but they are all AMD so IDK about Nvidia cards.
As I’ve heard Nvidia nowadays releases Linux drivers.
TBH I haven’t had any problems installing and using Linux for years now, I think just go for it and see what happens.
I just want to turn the thing on and play Factorio or Minecraft, not figure out if my 4080 will run on it etc.
Funny that you chose two games that run natively on Linux.
Every place I’ve been at had developers using windows machines and then ssh into a linux environment
Makes sense for sysadmin or something but little sense for developers and engineers writing code to build enterprise software.
Well enterprise software is either going to run on windows or Linux servers, so sounds like windows and Linux make good dev workstations.
My current work gives devs macs but we build everything for Linux so it’s a bit of a nuisance. And Apple moving to arm made running vms basically impossible for a while, it’s a bit better now.
Still a giant pain in the butt to have your dev environment not match the build environment architecture.
As a developer writing code who used windows to ssh to linux servers I would disagree. But of course it depends on the company and the nature of the work, just offering my experience
What are you writing code for?
I literally can’t think of an example where ssh’ing into a terminal is going to give good workflow. Just using Nano or Vi?
Like no IDE.
And here I thought that 8GB on Mac was at least as good as 16GB on plebian PCs.
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.
“640k is enough for anyone.”
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.
