Well well well. Well well well well well. Look who's decided to leave behind the 2010s and make computers with a reasonable amount of memory for modern-day tasks. Apple's been on a tear of announcing new Mac hardware this week, including a new teensy Mac Mini, but the biggest news, to me, is that the company renowned for selling very expensive laptops is now putting more than 8GB of RAM in them across-the-board. No more paying an extortionate $200 to upgrade to a reasonable 16GB!
Despite making generally fantastic laptops, there's almost always something Apple will charge an eye-watering upgrade fee for, and for years that's been an adequate amount of RAM. This criticism has been around for years, but it wasn't until late 2023 that someone got an Apple VP, Bob Borchers, to address it.
"Comparing our memory to other system's memory actually isn't equivalent, because of the fact that we have such an efficient use of memory, and we use memory compression, and we have a unified memory architecture," he said. "Actually, 8GB on an M3 MacBook Pro is probably analogous to 16GB on other systems. We just happen to be able to use it much more efficiently."
Naturally this answer raised both eyebrows and guffaws and was immediately put to the test. And sorry, Bob, but it turns out that opening more than a handful of browser tabs or doing light multitasking sucked up all that memory and slowed the system down noticeably, which didn't happen on a Windows laptop with 16GB of memory. As we pointed out at the time, the "insult to injury" with Apple's miserly 8GB RAM models is there's no way to upgrade them later on. The RAM is soldered to the motherboard, so you either pay Apple's pricey upgrade fee up front or you're stuck.
With today's new MacBook models Apple will still charge you $200 for an additional 8GB of RAM. But that upgrade is now much less vital. Every MacBook Apple sells now comes equipped with 16GB of RAM minimum, including older machines:
- 13-inch MacBook Air (M2 chip from 2022): 16GB RAM
- 13-inch MacBook Air (M3 chip from March 2024): 16GB RAM
- 15-inch MacBook Air (M3 chip from March 2024): 16GB RAM
- 14-inch MacBook Pro (new M4 chip): 16GB RAM
- 16-inch MacBook Pro (new M4 Pro chip): 24GB RAM
- 16-inch MacBook Pro (new M4 Max chip): 36GB RAM
Those are the baseline configs for each system; the MacBook Air maxes out at 24GB of RAM for $200, while certain models of the MacBook Pro can go up to 128GB, if you're willing to drop $300 on a GPU upgrade and another $1,000 on memory upgrades. Throw in a 2TB SSD for a borderline-unbelievable $400—because even a system this premium defaults to 1TB of storage!—and you've got yourself a $4,999 PC. Before taxes, of course.
Apple's upgrade prices remain as ridiculous as ever, but at least the company has given its computers enough memory to work efficiently with modern software. The 13-inch MacBook Air with a still-kickass M3 chip is only $1,099, which seems like a pretty great price for an ultraportable, wonderfully built system. There's gotta be some catch, right? Apple wouldn't sell a computer at that friendly a price. Let's just check the SSD…
Ahh, there it is. Never change, Apple. Anyone have a spare $800?
