M2 and M3 MacBook Air models get bumped to 16GB of RAM for no extra money

Apple’s week of Mac announcements isn’t extending to an M4 MacBook Air—rumors indicate that the Air, as well as desktops like the Mac Studio and Mac Pro, will get new processors sometime in 2025. But Apple is bringing one of the best features of the new M4 Macs to the M3 MacBook Airs, as well as the entry-level M2 model: All of the base models are being bumped from 8GB to 16GB of RAM for the same prices as before. The M2 MacBook Air still starts at $999, while the 13- and 15-inch M3 versions start at $1,099 and $1,299.

All of these laptops were available with 16GB of RAM before, but it was normally a $200 upgrade. All of them still top out at 24GB of RAM, which is now a $200 upgrade to the 16GB models rather than a $400 upgrade as it was before. All models still start with 256GB of storage.

This week’s launches mark the first time since 2012 that Apple has increased the amount of RAM in any of its base-model Macs, and the upgrade addresses one of our single biggest complaints about the laptops. Not all users will immediately notice the benefits of a 16GB RAM upgrade, but it will definitely make the laptops more versatile and capable of keeping up with users as their needs change.

Though none of the currently announced Apple Intelligence AI features require 16GB of RAM—8GB is currently the baseline across iPhones, iPads, and Macs, and an 8GB M1 Mac supports all the same features as a brand-new M4 Mac—this change is likely being made with future AI features in mind. Large language models and image-generation algorithms require a fair amount of RAM when they’re being run on-device, as many Apple Intelligence features are. The Xcode Predictive Code Completion feature briefly required a Mac with 16GB of RAM in early betas; while the current version works on 8GB Macs, it’s a sign that some of these features could be bumping up against this RAM limitation already.

Microsoft has similar baseline requirements for its Copilot+ PCs, which also claim to implement more AI features using on-device processing rather than cloud compute (there aren’t many of these features yet, but Microsoft’s current update strategy for Windows 11 is to slowly add features over time rather than to drop a bunch of them all at once). To qualify for the label, Copilot+ PCs also require at least 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, plus a neural processing unit (NPU) that meets Microsoft’s performance requirements. With this 16GB upgrade and their 16-core Neural Engine, all of the M2, M3, and M4 Macs in Apple’s lineup can check the same boxes.