Surprise MacBook Air RAM upgrade makes it Apple’s biggest bargain

The launch of the new MacBook Pro models with M4 and a surprise update for the MacBook Air range, means you can no longer buy a new Mac with less than 16GB of RAM.

The upgraded Pro notebooks now come with 16GB of RAM as standard, with the last-generation M3 models with minimum 8GB RAM configurations phased out completely.

The base MacBook Pro M3, released a year ago, was available in 8GB to 24GB of Unified Memory configurations. However, that’s now 16GB to 32GB. If you push the envelope to M4 Pro and Max chips the possible memory goes all the way up to 128GB.

Furthermore, Apple has also updated the base MacBook Air with M2 and M3 configurations from 8GB of RAM to 16GB of RAM. The increase in RAM is not accompanied by an increase in price. You can still get a MacBook Air M2 from £999 and a MacBook Air M3 from £1,099.

In the past, opting to configure the MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM would have incurred a couple of hundred pounds’ increase in total price, so this is a huge bonus for folks considering a MacBook Air M3 vs MacBook Pro M4 purchase.

With Apple updating the Mac product line this week, there are also new Mac mini models and new iMacs that start with 16GB RAM too.

There’s a pretty good reason Apple has decided on this new minimum standard for Mac RAM and that’s the fledgling Apple Intelligence technology.

The first features are now rolling out with macOS Sequoia 15.1, with some heavier hitters and more transformative tools to follow in later versions. The 16GB of RAM combined with the better NPU chips with M4 will better equip Macs of all kinds to handle the immense amount of data that needs to be processed by AI applications in a rapid manner.

Apple has probably decided upon the free RAM upgrade to avoid sluggish AI performance on 8GB models and didn’t want the PR hassle of the cheapest MacBook Air models becoming more expensive as a result.