I hear that 8 GB is quite usable on these machines. I don’t know to be honest. But 256 GB of SSD is truly a joke. I don’t understand why Apple would even sell such a machine that is sure to annoy it’s owner and give a subpar experience.
Just to make a few dollars more they sacrifice user experience and a great hardware platform. Apple's engineers are being held hostage by the idiots in the marketing department. This pricing policy only blocks the growth of macOS market share.
I have a feeling that Apple knows its target audience and their needs better than you or the O.P. do.
I personally haven't had a problem with 256 GB of storage on my Macs. But I work in my own way that doesn't include storing tons of data. So I guess do a lot of Mac owners.
'I have a feeling that Apple knows its target audience and their needs better than you or the O.P. do.'
The same fools with their easily-parted money who complained to 80s computer mags, via letters to editors, wanting to know why Apple wouldn't allow the 128K Mac to have upgradable RAM rather than an entire motherboard replacement.
It's not great, but there are people like students or strictly web/office/Netflix users, that will be more than happy even with 8GB/256GB s long as the price is as low as possible.
If you need to use a laptop for web/office/Netflix and you are strapped with cash, you can buy any Windows laptop that will offer a much more versatile configuration for half the price. There are capable Lenovo laptops with Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 at less than half the cost of these laptops. Like this one: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/ideapad/ide... $489, 16GB, Ryzen 5 with Zen3, 512GB SSD. These MB AIR laptops are priced for who is locked into Apple's ecosystem and is willing to spend an arm and leg to stay in it.
Apple users don't care that there are Lenovo laptops that are cheaper and more versatile. Also... compare weight and battery live on that Lenovo versus the MB Air.
Yeah, ok. Now see which one lasts longer and has a higher resale or trade in value. Which one has less bloatware, a better touchpad, screen, keyboard, speakers, battery life, and stronger case. There's a reason $500 laptops are $500.
8GB RAM is not actually fine on any modern OSX machine and Apple knows it - the MSRP is pure marketing and while it will be the highest volume model by sales, it won't be anything like entry-level iPhones (where the base model accounts for 90% of sales.) This is simply a money grab to milk more out of buyers. No matter what OS you run, a webkit browser like Safari or Chrome will use 4GB RAM across 30 tabs (the average for users these days) even with memory management idling stale tabs. Thinking you will edit 4K video on 8GB RAM is a joke - that isn't even enough memory to cache 60 seconds of raw video you are applying lives filters. In other words the experience will be laggy as shit regardless of your SSD performance.
Why do you imagine that EVERY mac users will (a) edit video (something I have never done in my life) (b) run 30 tabs – something I do but many non-tech friends do NOT do.
How many times do you have to be told that THESE MACHINES ARE NOT FOR YOU!!! If you want to bitch, in a very boring way that interests no-one, about the cost of the 15" MBP with 24GB DRAM and 1TB SSD that is right for you, go ahead. But don't pretend that what you want is exactly the same as EVERY OTHER PERSON ON EARTH.
As an AT reader you can't possible be so disconnected from the reality of average users: the vast majority of people never close tabs. I regularly see iPhones, iPads and Mac's with hundreds of tabs open.
Defending Apple putting 8GB RAM in a non-upgradable PC in 2024 is unfathomable. If anything, average users need MORE RAM because they are less efficient. These are the people with 50GB+ mailboxes, stale tabs, multiple programs left open and 500 files on the desktop.
1) Apple II. No lowercase letters. For the price Apple was charging that was ridiculous. I have read that so many of its school deals were settled at strip clubs, which can help to explain why such low-performance high-priced machines found their way into public schools.
2) Apple III. Overheated and the clock didn't work. Buyers told to drop it onto a desk to try to re-seat the RAM.
3) Apple IIGS. Massively overpriced for its paltry amount of RAM and low CPU clock rate.
4) Lisa. OS programmed mostly in Pascal so it ran like a slug. Floppy drives didn't actually work. Cheesy 5 MHz 68000 instead of a faster one. No graphics acceleration. Scrolling through a word processing document was horrendously slow.
5) Mac 128K. No hard disk support. Braindead file system. Absurdly small monitor considering the price tag. Designed so that the entire machine had to be replaced rather than the RAM be upgradable, even though Jobs conned the tech press by unveiling the 'first new Mac' which had 512K.
6) Mac XL. Apple decided to enrich humanity by burying these in landfills even though they were selling briskly. Why? Because Apple is beneficial for humanity. To further insult people, the company dropped OS support practically immediately.
7) Mac Portable. Lead acid is completely inappropriate battery technology for a laptop because its chemistry requires that it never be discharged, even more than a small amount. Plus, Apple's geniuses didn't give it a backlight and made it insanely expensive by using SRAM as main memory.
8) The Mac LC. 32-bit processor placed onto a 16-bit bus simply to prevent it from performing "too well.' Starved of RAM upgradability.
9) Mac Classic. 8 MHz 68000 that was cutting edge in 1980.
10) Mac TV. No more than 8 MB of RAM at time of release made zero sense to anyone, even people easily conned.
11) Performa 5000 series. 68K leftover parts used with a PPC CPU; trashed performance and reliability. Sold with too-little RAM to be usable on the Internet. Modem, which was too slow on its own, ran at a slug's pace because of the trash-tier design.
12) Mac OS X 1.x. Jobs sold this to the public as an incredibly advanced operating system mainly intended for high-end work, for $500. Didn't even support Firewire!
13) iMacs that were designed with no fan (later models, not the bulb-shaped ones). This caused them to eat their hard drives. A university I know that had them had a nearly 100% failure rate over time. Opening the case caused, much of the time, the wifi antenna or the webcam to break. I don't remember which.
14) Modern Macbook Pros, such as the 1 TB 2013 model with 16 GB of RAM. Perfectly usable but forced into the junk pile merely because Apple refuses to let them run current security patches. Yes, folks, these machines have double the RAM and quadruple the SSD storage of new Macs. They're obsolete, though, because Apple says so.
I forgot to mention some of the other 'greatest hits' with the Apple III, too. Poor backward compatibility. Too-high price. 8-bit machine with not even the most advanced 8-bit CPU released when it was = not competitive.
I also forgot to mention the glorious episode which was Apple's refusal to replace the graphics in 2008 or so Macbook Pros that had defective Nvidia GPUs (all of these GPUs were defective). Instead, the company would either install used ones (which were of the same defective design) or new ones (which were of the same defective design).
That a large corporation could get away with that speaks volumes about the state of corporate capture.
It depends on what you're doing with the computer. If you're a developer 16GB is a minimum because you'll hit that 8GB mark just running your programming tools and have no space to debug your code.
I have the 2015 Mac Book which is the first device that came in 256/8 config as a base. It felt quite high end then, and is still relativelly OK to use for regular task so I can imagine there are still many people OK with this config.
Make it positive. The more numerous is the installed base of 8 GB computers, the higher is the value of a 16 GB one as the software will be forced to be more memory efficient.... Right ?
Let me guess, 1) Memory is not user-upgradeable 2) SSD is not user-upgradeable 3) Battery is not user replaceable?
I have Late 2008 MacBook Pro from Jobs' days. User-replaceable memory (upgraded), user-replaceable HDD (I replaced with SSD long time ago of course), user-replaceable battery - no need to even use a screwdriver, replaced dead ones many times over the years. MagSafe BTW. Intel Core2 2.4GHz, can run Windows in Fusion...
It's 100% to make their obscene margins on the upgrades. I have a 16GB/512GB Macbook Pro. I'm kind of appalled that 4 years later, an extra 8GB of memory and 256GB of SSD is $400.
A frickin' 2230 SSD is like $100 today. The closest thing in RAM pricing is Dell's CAMM at $250, which is made by 1 company (CAMM2 en route) and even THAT is the full 16GB, not an additional 8GB. A single bloody 32GB stick of SO-DIMM RAM is in the $90-110 range.
The reason they do it is because consumer education understands 8GB RAM and 256 GB disk. That means it's a valid place to differentiate.
By contrast, learning different USB standards is not a valid place of differentiation for most end users. No one wants to find out their battery is 800mAH less but their CPU is binned for better voltage and set to max turbo 100Mhz lower for an hour better battery life and so forth.
I have a relative that just switched from WinPC to an MacBook Air. He mostly uses his iPhone and iPad, which is why he wanted to get a Mac now that he doesn't need Windows for work. He asked me what options he should get. I told him to get more than the default RAM because it will help with the longevity of device with annual macOS updates, but after looking at how much personal data he current uses on his devices and did a projection for the next 5 years I told him that 256 GB was more than enough for his needs. Not everyone uses their computers as data servers. I have 2 TB on my MacBook Pro, but I'm a very different user than he is.
I had the M1 mini with 8GB/512GB and the M1 Air with 16GB/512GB. For the most part they were comparable in performance, with the Air edging out the mini during heavy multitasking, while the mini never once thermally throttled, unlike the Air. So basically if the mini had 16GB of RAM it would have beaten the Air on any heavy workloads.
I haven't yet used a M2 or M3 machine of any sort so I have no idea how much better (or worse) RAM management is on the newer chips.
I have a 15" MacBook Air and I use it for software development. It never overheats. Most people posting sh*t here don't have a f***ing clue about what they say.
I have a M2 MacBook Air and the overheating is not really an issue. Unlike my experience with Intel-based Windows laptops, CPU throttling doesn't result in the whole system being nearly unusable, it just throttles to about 70% max performance under high load.
While not perfect, it's pretty reasonable. Just make the assumption that the Air is 70% as powerful as an equivalent Pro. I'm happy enough to make that trade off because my notebook is just the machine I use on the go. I have a more powerful desktop machine as well.
While true, it's not really that heavy if you think about what people were carrying around 10 years ago. Unless you're disabled it probably won't be an issue.
Well yeah, I miss that there should be successor to the eternally light 12" Mac Book. hardly anything comes close to that. Also @Flunk, it is almost a decade old but it makes the new notebooks feel like a brick.
Also the have an iPad Pro with oled in line witch should be significally lighter than the LCD iPad "Air" which weights basically the same as the iPad Air from 2013.
I do not like how we moved from Air being a super light thin sexy, but still quite OK deal notebook to just a budget stripped down option of the Pro line. I am OK to pay up for compactness.
I have been using the 2020 MBA M1 8GB/256GB since Day 1. Other than the Touch ID dying (which is more a gimmick anyways), everything else is still going strong. It's a shame that 4 years later, Apple hasn't come up with anything I want to pay to upgrade to with mere minor spec changes, and I actually like the wedge shape better than the new rectangle. I love Mac though; once you use Mac you don't go back to Windows (my work computer is Windows laptop so I am very familiar with it and I contrast the two every day).
the upgrade pricing is very high. going from 8gb/256gb to a more usable 16gb/1tb doubles the price. But I guess if people will pay it. I didn't, but I know lots of people who do.
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48 Comments
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kirsch - Monday, March 4, 2024 - link
I hear that 8 GB is quite usable on these machines. I don’t know to be honest. But 256 GB of SSD is truly a joke. I don’t understand why Apple would even sell such a machine that is sure to annoy it’s owner and give a subpar experience.Scabies - Monday, March 4, 2024 - link
To monetize cloud servicesatomek - Tuesday, March 5, 2024 - link
Just to make a few dollars more they sacrifice user experience and a great hardware platform. Apple's engineers are being held hostage by the idiots in the marketing department. This pricing policy only blocks the growth of macOS market share.peevee - Tuesday, March 5, 2024 - link
Hear, hear!Totally agree. MBAs are pure evil.
bji - Tuesday, March 5, 2024 - link
I have a feeling that Apple knows its target audience and their needs better than you or the O.P. do.I personally haven't had a problem with 256 GB of storage on my Macs. But I work in my own way that doesn't include storing tons of data. So I guess do a lot of Mac owners.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, March 14, 2024 - link
'I have a feeling that Apple knows its target audience and their needs better than you or the O.P. do.'The same fools with their easily-parted money who complained to 80s computer mags, via letters to editors, wanting to know why Apple wouldn't allow the 128K Mac to have upgradable RAM rather than an entire motherboard replacement.
Klapper.cz - Monday, March 4, 2024 - link
It's not great, but there are people like students or strictly web/office/Netflix users, that will be more than happy even with 8GB/256GB s long as the price is as low as possible.yankeeDDL - Tuesday, March 5, 2024 - link
If you need to use a laptop for web/office/Netflix and you are strapped with cash, you can buy any Windows laptop that will offer a much more versatile configuration for half the price.There are capable Lenovo laptops with Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 at less than half the cost of these laptops. Like this one: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/ideapad/ide...
$489, 16GB, Ryzen 5 with Zen3, 512GB SSD. These MB AIR laptops are priced for who is locked into Apple's ecosystem and is willing to spend an arm and leg to stay in it.
heffeque - Tuesday, March 5, 2024 - link
Apple users don't care that there are Lenovo laptops that are cheaper and more versatile.Also... compare weight and battery live on that Lenovo versus the MB Air.
Dug - Tuesday, March 5, 2024 - link
Yeah, ok. Now see which one lasts longer and has a higher resale or trade in value.Which one has less bloatware, a better touchpad, screen, keyboard, speakers, battery life, and stronger case. There's a reason $500 laptops are $500.
bji - Tuesday, March 5, 2024 - link
The spec jockeys will never understand. You are wasting your time trying to explain it to them.meacupla - Monday, March 4, 2024 - link
It is until you use any kind of video editing software, which is where M series excels at. It will constantly crash when it runs out of RAM.The 8gb/256gb model is part of the pricing strategy.
I think it's called "Decoy Pricing", and it's to entice customers to buy the next step up.
lemurbutton - Monday, March 4, 2024 - link
If you're a Youtuber starting out, 8GB of RAM is actually fine on an M3 machine. Just get an external SSD to store your files.Samus - Wednesday, March 6, 2024 - link
8GB RAM is not actually fine on any modern OSX machine and Apple knows it - the MSRP is pure marketing and while it will be the highest volume model by sales, it won't be anything like entry-level iPhones (where the base model accounts for 90% of sales.) This is simply a money grab to milk more out of buyers. No matter what OS you run, a webkit browser like Safari or Chrome will use 4GB RAM across 30 tabs (the average for users these days) even with memory management idling stale tabs. Thinking you will edit 4K video on 8GB RAM is a joke - that isn't even enough memory to cache 60 seconds of raw video you are applying lives filters. In other words the experience will be laggy as shit regardless of your SSD performance.name99 - Wednesday, March 6, 2024 - link
Why do you imagine that EVERY mac users will(a) edit video (something I have never done in my life)
(b) run 30 tabs – something I do but many non-tech friends do NOT do.
How many times do you have to be told that THESE MACHINES ARE NOT FOR YOU!!!
If you want to bitch, in a very boring way that interests no-one, about the cost of the 15" MBP with 24GB DRAM and 1TB SSD that is right for you, go ahead.
But don't pretend that what you want is exactly the same as EVERY OTHER PERSON ON EARTH.
Samus - Wednesday, March 6, 2024 - link
As an AT reader you can't possible be so disconnected from the reality of average users: the vast majority of people never close tabs. I regularly see iPhones, iPads and Mac's with hundreds of tabs open.Defending Apple putting 8GB RAM in a non-upgradable PC in 2024 is unfathomable. If anything, average users need MORE RAM because they are less efficient. These are the people with 50GB+ mailboxes, stale tabs, multiple programs left open and 500 files on the desktop.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, March 14, 2024 - link
Apple does it again and again.1) Apple II. No lowercase letters. For the price Apple was charging that was ridiculous. I have read that so many of its school deals were settled at strip clubs, which can help to explain why such low-performance high-priced machines found their way into public schools.
2) Apple III. Overheated and the clock didn't work. Buyers told to drop it onto a desk to try to re-seat the RAM.
3) Apple IIGS. Massively overpriced for its paltry amount of RAM and low CPU clock rate.
4) Lisa. OS programmed mostly in Pascal so it ran like a slug. Floppy drives didn't actually work. Cheesy 5 MHz 68000 instead of a faster one. No graphics acceleration. Scrolling through a word processing document was horrendously slow.
5) Mac 128K. No hard disk support. Braindead file system. Absurdly small monitor considering the price tag. Designed so that the entire machine had to be replaced rather than the RAM be upgradable, even though Jobs conned the tech press by unveiling the 'first new Mac' which had 512K.
6) Mac XL. Apple decided to enrich humanity by burying these in landfills even though they were selling briskly. Why? Because Apple is beneficial for humanity. To further insult people, the company dropped OS support practically immediately.
7) Mac Portable. Lead acid is completely inappropriate battery technology for a laptop because its chemistry requires that it never be discharged, even more than a small amount. Plus, Apple's geniuses didn't give it a backlight and made it insanely expensive by using SRAM as main memory.
8) The Mac LC. 32-bit processor placed onto a 16-bit bus simply to prevent it from performing "too well.' Starved of RAM upgradability.
9) Mac Classic. 8 MHz 68000 that was cutting edge in 1980.
10) Mac TV. No more than 8 MB of RAM at time of release made zero sense to anyone, even people easily conned.
11) Performa 5000 series. 68K leftover parts used with a PPC CPU; trashed performance and reliability. Sold with too-little RAM to be usable on the Internet. Modem, which was too slow on its own, ran at a slug's pace because of the trash-tier design.
12) Mac OS X 1.x. Jobs sold this to the public as an incredibly advanced operating system mainly intended for high-end work, for $500. Didn't even support Firewire!
13) iMacs that were designed with no fan (later models, not the bulb-shaped ones). This caused them to eat their hard drives. A university I know that had them had a nearly 100% failure rate over time. Opening the case caused, much of the time, the wifi antenna or the webcam to break. I don't remember which.
14) Modern Macbook Pros, such as the 1 TB 2013 model with 16 GB of RAM. Perfectly usable but forced into the junk pile merely because Apple refuses to let them run current security patches. Yes, folks, these machines have double the RAM and quadruple the SSD storage of new Macs. They're obsolete, though, because Apple says so.
and on and on
GeoffreyA - Sunday, March 17, 2024 - link
10/10. Excellent post. It made me chuckle.Oxford Guy - Thursday, March 14, 2024 - link
I forgot to mention some of the other 'greatest hits' with the Apple III, too. Poor backward compatibility. Too-high price. 8-bit machine with not even the most advanced 8-bit CPU released when it was = not competitive.Oxford Guy - Thursday, March 14, 2024 - link
I also forgot to mention the glorious episode which was Apple's refusal to replace the graphics in 2008 or so Macbook Pros that had defective Nvidia GPUs (all of these GPUs were defective). Instead, the company would either install used ones (which were of the same defective design) or new ones (which were of the same defective design).That a large corporation could get away with that speaks volumes about the state of corporate capture.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, March 14, 2024 - link
I keep remembering more fiascos.So... the Lisa shipped with a power supply that was inadequate. Apple learned its lesson and...
shipped the Mac Plus with a power supply that was inadequate.
GeoffreyA - Thursday, March 7, 2024 - link
"THESE MACHINES ARE NOT FOR YOU!!!"Of course. We lesser beings will stick with our Stone Age x86 junk.
Flunk - Tuesday, March 5, 2024 - link
It depends on what you're doing with the computer. If you're a developer 16GB is a minimum because you'll hit that 8GB mark just running your programming tools and have no space to debug your code.GC2:CS - Tuesday, March 5, 2024 - link
I have the 2015 Mac Book which is the first device that came in 256/8 config as a base. It felt quite high end then, and is still relativelly OK to use for regular task so I can imagine there are still many people OK with this config.Make it positive. The more numerous is the installed base of 8 GB computers, the higher is the value of a 16 GB one as the software will be forced to be more memory efficient.... Right ?
peevee - Tuesday, March 5, 2024 - link
Let me guess,1) Memory is not user-upgradeable
2) SSD is not user-upgradeable
3) Battery is not user replaceable?
I have Late 2008 MacBook Pro from Jobs' days.
User-replaceable memory (upgraded), user-replaceable HDD (I replaced with SSD long time ago of course), user-replaceable battery - no need to even use a screwdriver, replaced dead ones many times over the years. MagSafe BTW. Intel Core2 2.4GHz, can run Windows in Fusion...
Things are only going worse for customers.
mukiex - Tuesday, March 5, 2024 - link
It's 100% to make their obscene margins on the upgrades. I have a 16GB/512GB Macbook Pro. I'm kind of appalled that 4 years later, an extra 8GB of memory and 256GB of SSD is $400.A frickin' 2230 SSD is like $100 today. The closest thing in RAM pricing is Dell's CAMM at $250, which is made by 1 company (CAMM2 en route) and even THAT is the full 16GB, not an additional 8GB. A single bloody 32GB stick of SO-DIMM RAM is in the $90-110 range.
lmcd - Wednesday, March 6, 2024 - link
The reason they do it is because consumer education understands 8GB RAM and 256 GB disk. That means it's a valid place to differentiate.By contrast, learning different USB standards is not a valid place of differentiation for most end users. No one wants to find out their battery is 800mAH less but their CPU is binned for better voltage and set to max turbo 100Mhz lower for an hour better battery life and so forth.
FakThisShttyGame - Thursday, March 7, 2024 - link
8gbs on mac is like 16gbs on win 11 as long as you are not gaming. (Who game on mac anyway?)256gb is lame but who cares besides haters to be honest.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, March 14, 2024 - link
'8gbs on mac is like 16gbs on win 11'No, it isn't.
solipsism - Thursday, March 7, 2024 - link
I have a relative that just switched from WinPC to an MacBook Air. He mostly uses his iPhone and iPad, which is why he wanted to get a Mac now that he doesn't need Windows for work. He asked me what options he should get. I told him to get more than the default RAM because it will help with the longevity of device with annual macOS updates, but after looking at how much personal data he current uses on his devices and did a projection for the next 5 years I told him that 256 GB was more than enough for his needs. Not everyone uses their computers as data servers. I have 2 TB on my MacBook Pro, but I'm a very different user than he is.kaidenshi - Monday, March 11, 2024 - link
I had the M1 mini with 8GB/512GB and the M1 Air with 16GB/512GB. For the most part they were comparable in performance, with the Air edging out the mini during heavy multitasking, while the mini never once thermally throttled, unlike the Air. So basically if the mini had 16GB of RAM it would have beaten the Air on any heavy workloads.I haven't yet used a M2 or M3 machine of any sort so I have no idea how much better (or worse) RAM management is on the newer chips.
meacupla - Monday, March 4, 2024 - link
I wonder if they fixed the overheating issue for MBA this time around. I found it funny that the M2 MBA would overheat and perform worse than MBP.lemurbutton - Monday, March 4, 2024 - link
Why would it funny for a fanless MBA to perform worse than a MBP that has a fan?fazalmajid - Tuesday, March 5, 2024 - link
The new chassis thermal design was probably designed for the M3 and overwhelmed by the less efficient 5nm M2.TEAMSWITCHER - Tuesday, March 5, 2024 - link
I have a 15" MacBook Air and I use it for software development. It never overheats. Most people posting sh*t here don't have a f***ing clue about what they say.Flunk - Tuesday, March 5, 2024 - link
I have a M2 MacBook Air and the overheating is not really an issue. Unlike my experience with Intel-based Windows laptops, CPU throttling doesn't result in the whole system being nearly unusable, it just throttles to about 70% max performance under high load.While not perfect, it's pretty reasonable. Just make the assumption that the Air is 70% as powerful as an equivalent Pro. I'm happy enough to make that trade off because my notebook is just the machine I use on the go. I have a more powerful desktop machine as well.
wr3zzz - Tuesday, March 5, 2024 - link
Hardly "Air" if the entire lineup is now on the heavier side among the current crop of light weight notebooks.lemurbutton - Tuesday, March 5, 2024 - link
That's because it uses premium metal enclosure while PCs use cheap plastic.Flunk - Tuesday, March 5, 2024 - link
While true, it's not really that heavy if you think about what people were carrying around 10 years ago. Unless you're disabled it probably won't be an issue.GC2:CS - Tuesday, March 5, 2024 - link
Well yeah, I miss that there should be successor to the eternally light 12" Mac Book. hardly anything comes close to that. Also @Flunk, it is almost a decade old but it makes the new notebooks feel like a brick.Also the have an iPad Pro with oled in line witch should be significally lighter than the LCD iPad "Air" which weights basically the same as the iPad Air from 2013.
I do not like how we moved from Air being a super light thin sexy, but still quite OK deal notebook to just a budget stripped down option of the Pro line. I am OK to pay up for compactness.
name99 - Wednesday, March 6, 2024 - link
It's not the MacBook Air, it's the MacBook AI...The branding change was subtle in the product announcement. I expect it will be rather more obvious after WWDC.
(Half joke, half deadly serious...)
SydneyBlue120d - Tuesday, March 5, 2024 - link
At the moment Apple products are the only consumer products you can buy using TSMC 3nm, right?GeoffreyA - Tuesday, March 5, 2024 - link
256 GB SSD. *Rubs eyes.*Oxford Guy - Thursday, March 14, 2024 - link
Not even a phone would be proud.GeoffreyA - Sunday, March 17, 2024 - link
You're right. I didn't even think of that. Phones are at that size.tipoo - Tuesday, March 5, 2024 - link
To date I would still love to see an Anandtech M3 deep dive, we're still sorely missing this in the industryshermanx - Tuesday, March 5, 2024 - link
I have been using the 2020 MBA M1 8GB/256GB since Day 1. Other than the Touch ID dying (which is more a gimmick anyways), everything else is still going strong. It's a shame that 4 years later, Apple hasn't come up with anything I want to pay to upgrade to with mere minor spec changes, and I actually like the wedge shape better than the new rectangle. I love Mac though; once you use Mac you don't go back to Windows (my work computer is Windows laptop so I am very familiar with it and I contrast the two every day).andrewaggb - Wednesday, March 6, 2024 - link
the upgrade pricing is very high. going from 8gb/256gb to a more usable 16gb/1tb doubles the price. But I guess if people will pay it. I didn't, but I know lots of people who do.