MacBook Air Gets a Surprising Upgrade This Week – At No Extra Cost

While the new iMac, Mac mini, and MacBook Pro models introduced this week were all widely anticipated, Apple surprised us this week with its MacBook Air upgrade.

In its press release for the new MacBook Pro models, Apple announced that all MacBook Air models it currently sells now start with 16GB of RAM, down from 8GB previously. This change applies to the previous generation 13-inch model with M2 chip, 13-inch model with M3 chip and 15-inch model with M3 chip.

Even better, Apple hasn’t increased the price of any MacBook Air models, despite the upgrade to 16GB of RAM. In the US, the MacBook Air series continues to start at $999, so the upgrade is done at home. In addition, top-end MacBook Air configurations now include 24GB of RAM at no extra cost as part of the relevant series tweak.

With this upgrade, every new Mac model Apple sells starts with at least 16GB of RAM for the first time. The end of the 8GB Mac era. There’s one exception from Apple: Walmart continues to sell the two-generation-old 13-inch MacBook Air with the M1 chip for $649 in the US, and that model still has 8GB of RAM.

Apple reiterated this week that the MacBook Air is the “world’s most popular laptop” and that increasing the RAM from 8GB to 16GB makes it an even better value.

Other than RAM, no other changes were announced for the MacBook Air this week.

The latest 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air models with M3 chips were released in March, and new models with M4 chips are expected to be released in March next year.