Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
New M3 MacBook Air Models Expected Around March 2024
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Next time perhaps buy adequate RAM for a longer life cycle.
DownUnderDan
macrumors 6502a
Here I was thinking this could be the point, no matter how remote, that 12 or 16 gigabytes of ram could be introduced as standard to avoid the chip being negatively impacted by swap use. I completely forgot about the "real" question of what colour does it come in? Sometimes I wonder how Apple lets me buy their stuff.
I wasn’t aware there was a color palette associated to different tones of midnight. To be fair, Apple’s website only says midnight. No reference to blue or black. I personally think it’s trash.
How much trade in would I get for a 16 GB ram 1TB M1 Mac air and should I trade it at Best Buy or Apple for best bang for buck?
mdhaus72
macrumors regular
...Except I don't think it would be significantly better for a lot of these people.
Not everybody is running a bunch of apps all at the same time or insists on having dozens of tabs open in their internet browser. A lot of people out there are like my wife - a teacher who has 3 or 4 tabs open in her browser while working on her Google slides presentations for lesson planning.
She has a base-level M2 Air provided by her school district for work. Just for the fun of it, I've taken several looks at her machine's Activity Monitor to see how the 8GB of RAM is holding up...and honestly, it's been fine. Green all around and no significant swap.
And for a lot of people out there who are casual users, I think their experience is similar.
Why return it? The whole world knew/knows there will be an M3 and an M4, M5, etc. A good thing. We all just buy when we choose.I think you can still return it upto Jan 8th. Holiday return policy in effect.
Returns & Refunds - Shopping Help
Find out how you can return an item, how long the refund process takes, what to do if your invoice is not with your order, and much more.www.apple.com
The only people who have need to return M2 if feasible are those with recent M2 Max who use apps like Maya, Blender, etc. and will see big improvement with M3 Max hardware ray tracing et al.
Last edited:
Apple is pretty much never best bang for the buck. They specialize in being less hassle. We all decide how much hassle we want to deal with. YMMV
TVreporter
macrumors 68030
Tim is probably grinding his teeth now when he sees this article "Now folks wouldn't buy for the holidays! There goes my Christmas bonus!"
My not sensible either. I have an 8GB 13" Air but found a grand lying around that wasn't expected so I picked up a 15" M2 16/512 from Best Buy, tax free. It's a beautiful machine.
Suicidy
macrumors regular
i replaced my 2014 MBP in June of 2021 because the screen was dying.
Yup. In my experience at ~6-7 years things start happening to make a Mac no longer cost effectively useful even if the CPU is still strong enough: inadequate RAM, deteriorating display quality vis-a-vis modern displays, lame battery, slow WiFi, dead ports, some darn thing. And I always start with a maximum-built box.
Lioness~
macrumors 601
Same current portable machine, and I don't use it much since Mac Studio entered the house.
As a portable outside home, it's good to have at times, but honestly I use my iPad Mini more at those times nowadays. See where it will go? If I am in a buyers mode next fall? I would love a 11-12" MBA much more then a 13" actually.
If they were going to do that they would have updated the recent MacBook Pros to have 16GB on the base model.
I don’t see how they can have an 8GB base model MacBook Pro with a 12GB base model MacBook.
Yes I agree it's likely the M3 MBAs will still come w/ 8gb memory. I personally don't mind that much that Apple does this for its entry level MBAs to maintain a very affordable entry-level price, for the large number of casual users who just want a nice looking Mac but use it for word-processing / e-mails / web-surfing. While it would be nice if in 2024 Apple FINALLY decreased its ridiculous ram/ssd upgrade pricing so that going from 8gb > 16gb wouldn't be $200...
Let's not forget too this is the first time Apple has put the newest generation M3 chips in the MBPs first (eg. w/ M3 Pro and M3 Max), whereas with M1 and M2, it started with the MBAs / Mac Minis / iMacs with the base chips. It kind of makes more sense to do it this way (eg. give the premium line the chips first, so you don't have these awkward times where the MBAs have M2 but MBPs still have M1 Pro/Maxs), so I wouldn't be surprised if this is the norm going forward with subsequent Apple silicon generations.
mdhaus72
macrumors regular
I personally love the color...although, admittedly, dark blue is my favorite color. 🙂
The main downside to me for that color selection is the fingerprint issue. If Apple fixes it, that will solidify it even further for a lot of people.
And it's a popular color, too - I recently saw survey results in an article that showed that Midnight is by far the most-bought color among the M2 Airs, followed by Space Gray, and then Starlight and Silver much further behind.
Abazigal
Contributor
We have been through this a hundred times. Nothing is stopping users who desire more ram from simply choosing a model with more ram, except maybe the unwillingness to pay a little more extra cash.
There is also no guarantee that if the starting model sported more ram and / or storage, its starting price wouldn’t increase accordingly as well.
Which is really all it boils down to here. Not that macOS is somehow so bloated that it can’t run on 8 gb of ram.
Sales are down because of people like me who have a 2015 MacBook Pro tethered to the wall from a dead battery, running their system off an external usb drive who are dying to buy a new computer, but can't pull the trigger due to an asinine release schedule with 8GB base model computers.
I was waiting for the M3....but I can't afford the 16gb upgrade and I'm priced out....I was ready to buy an M2 Air today, seriously....but now this news. I start thinking, maybe I'll buy any base model air on sale to tide me over, and get the M3 in mini, and make sure that one has the 16gb.... but .... Apple has driven customers nuts.
I was waiting for the M3....but I can't afford the 16gb upgrade and I'm priced out....I was ready to buy an M2 Air today, seriously....but now this news. I start thinking, maybe I'll buy any base model air on sale to tide me over, and get the M3 in mini, and make sure that one has the 16gb.... but .... Apple has driven customers nuts.
You're talking about a $30 chip, retail. It's been 10 years, it's time to upgrade base ram.
A couple hundred responses is hardly proof that it’s the best seller in the US or the world. It may be, but I wouldn’t bet on it based on that sample size. To my knowledge, Costco warehouses only stock the midnight as well. That hardly means it’s most folks preferred color when it’s the only option. Rose gold and gold were also extremely popular on iPhone pro’s too and Apple axed them.
Attachments
They are smart, they know that 8GB is pathetically low and at least 50% of the people who feel that, will upgrade to 16GB, thus spending money to do so.
