Last year, Apple’s VP of Worldwide Product Marketing Bob Borchers claimed that “8GB [of RAM] on an M3 MacBook Pro is probably analogous to 16GB on other systems” because its machines make more efficient use of memory through advanced memory compression and a unified memory architecture.

Although Macs have gained a lot of RAM upgrade options over the past few years, Apple has never changed anything in the base models since 2016, when the MacBook Air with 4GB of RAM was discontinued and the 8GB version became the standard. Since then, most Macs (except for the Mac Studio and Mac Pro) still came with 8GB RAM.

The Apple MAcBook Air M2 with 16GB of RAM just got heavily discounted. Should you get this version, or save more cash with the 8GB version?

Apple had transitioned most of its Macs to 8GB of RAM by 2016. But now, after eight years, that quantity feels increasingly insufficient. Reviewers have criticized the entry-level RAM as limited since at least 2022. Local AI features like Apple Intelligence, which need constant RAM to work, have only accentuated the need to change things.

Amazon today introduced a price drop on the upgraded M2 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM, specifically for the 13-inch model with 256GB of storage.