It seems they also update the base memory on MacBook Air:
> MacBook Air: The World’s Most Popular Laptop Now Starts at 16GB
> MacBook Air is the world’s most popular laptop, and with Apple Intelligence, it’s even better. Now, models with M2 and M3 double the starting memory to 16GB, while keeping the starting price at just $999 — a terrific value for the world’s best-selling laptop.
Wow, I didn't expect them to update the older models to start at 16GB and no price increase. I guess that is why Amazon was blowing the 8GB models out at crazy low prices over the past few days.
Costco was selling MB Air M2 8 GB for $699! Incredible deal.
I’ve been using the exact model for about a year and I rarely find limitations for my typical office type work. The only time I’ve managed to thermally throttle it has been with some super suboptimal Excel Macros.
See that’s the thing. Given that somehow you need 1TB to get the matte screen, I feel like Apple is using it as a way to upsell. It would indicate that perhaps Apple won’t offer a matte MacBook Air.
They did? The tweet that announced stuff from the head of marketing did not mention 3 days.
That said, I believe you. Some press gets a hands-on on Wednesday (today) so unless they plan to pre-announce something (unlikely) or announce software only stuff, I think today is it.
"This is a huge week for the Mac, and this morning, we begin a series of three exciting new product announcements that will take place over the coming days," said Apple's hardware engineering chief John Ternus, in a video announcing the new iMac.
That's disappointing. I was expecting a new Apple TV because mine needs replacement and I don't really feel inclined to get one that's due for an upgrade very soon.
The current-gen Apple TV is already overpowered for what it does, and extremely nice to use. I can think of very few changes I would like to see, and most of them are purely software.
Mine has 128GB of onboard storage... but Apple still bans apps from downloading video, which annoys me.
The streaming apps virtually all support downloading for offline viewing on iPhone, but the Apple TV just becomes a paperweight when the internet goes out, because I'm not allowed to use the 128GB of storage for anything.
If they're not going to let you use the onboard storage, then it seems unlikely for them to let you use USB storage. So, first, I would like them to change their app policies regarding internal storage, which is one of the purely software improvements I would like to see.
I use a dedicated NAS as a Plex server + Plex app on Apple TV itself for local streaming, which generally works fine. Infuse app can also index and stream from local sources.
But there are some cases like e.g. watching high-res high-FPS fractal zoom videos (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cgp2WNNKmQ) where even brief random skipped frames from other things trying to use WiFi at the same time can be really noticeable and annoying.
It would make more sense to discontinue the smaller model along with some other updates to the line. Or in other words, Air won't receive any other updates this week unfortunately.
It'll be interesting to see the reaction of tech commentators about this. So many people have been screaming at Apple to increase the base RAM and stop price gouging their customers on memory upgrades. If Apple Intelligence is the excuse the hardware team needed to get the bean counters on board, I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth!
It wouldn't surprise me if people typically use more storage on their phone than their computer. The phone should probably have a higher base storage than the base storage of their laptops.
Extremely interesting point. My initial reaction to your comment is that it is a crazy thing to say, but the more I think about it the more I agree with you. On my phone is where I have tons of 4k 30/60FPS videos, high resolution photos (with live), and videos downloaded on Netflix and YouTube.
On my Mac I don't have any of these things, it's mostly for programming and some packages. I'm almost always connected to Wi-Fi (except on planes) so I don't really need any photos or videos.
The only people that I see have high storage requirements on Macs are probably video/media creators? As a programmer I'm totally fine with 512GB, but could probably live with 256GB if I wanted to be super lean.
The only older configs that Apple sells are the M2 and M3 Airs, which were bumped. Everything else is now on M4, or didn't have an 8gb base config (Mac Studio, Mac Pro)
Ohh, good catch. Sneaking that into the MBP announcement. I skimmed the page and missed that. So a fourth announcement couched within the biggest of the three days.
Well, the issue for me with memory on these new models is that for the Max, it ships with 36GB and NO expandable memory option. To get more memory that's gated behind a $300 CPU upgrade (plus the memory cost).
I've seen a lot of people complaining about 8GB but honestly my min spec M1 Air has continued to be great. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend a refurb M1 8GB Air for anyone price conscious.
Thanks to your comment. I persuaded my friend who purchased an M3 Air 24GB recently and we got 200$ back (Remuneration for price drop valid for 14 days after the date of DELIVERY) where we live
I think spec-wise the Air is good enough for almost everyone who isn't doing video production or running local LLMs, I just wish it had the much nicer screen that the Pro has. But I suppose they have to segregate the product lines somehow.
Yeah, this one caught me off guard. We just purchased a MacBook Air in the last month and if we bought the same one now, we would save $200. Apple support would not price match/correct that, so we will be returning it and purchasing anew.
Love the comments under the post :)
For me it means no more notifications in Teams, as our organisation policy blocks all the useful workflow features.
I live somewhere where travelling by train is limited to basically local journeys, but love when I see this site get mentioned anywhere, because it reminds me of what the internet can be!
Don't know enough about Vertex AI, SageMaker is great though. But on BigQuery v Redshift: Having used both over many years, BigQuery is the clear winner. It's a much better, much more modern product.
BigQuery is also a central part of GCP, with almost all services having integrations to it (PubSub, CloudSQL, Bigtable, etc). It also seems to get a lot of resources and is continuously improved. That is not the case for Redshift, which is not as important to AWS.
Do you really have to wonder? I think it's one of his episodes, just like the purchase of Twitter itself, where the too quickly decides on something and pushes it through.
Why? I'd be hanging out with my loved ones in mountain cabins and beach houses. I truly cannot comprehend what makes these people want to spend their time and money on internet nonsense.
If your character is about chilling and hanging out it's unlikely to be one a billionaire.
Most people getting into that group donthat by focussing their time on making money. This usually requires quite some dedication, which is a character trait you can't simply replace for going to the beach.
There are exceptions, but it's rare. And then there are the ones who got spoiled as a kid and were lucky with some decisions, like making some good real estate deals in Manhatten or finding the right partners to build some online payment service, who never learned about responsibility.
Do you see other billionaires wasting time on “internet nonsense”? This guy bought a social media network and was on it 24/7 before that.
Even Zuckerberg who made his fortune with social media seem to post less than him. I have never even heard of Bezos posting while Gates probably only post as PR for his foundation.
Yes, but the prompt was that I'm a billionaire. And I'm the way I am, and described the way I believe I would be as a billionaire. But there was no part of the prompt about the path I took to become a billionaire, just that I am one.
Right? I would be enjoying life to the fullest, privately. This guy has already reached end game, instead of enjoying it, he's squandering his name/reputation for internet points.
That's true: most people want to hoard wealth for personal consumption. That's the normal way for wealthy people to behave. Very few want to change the world. Some of those who want to change the world will change it for the better and some for the worse, but the hoard-and-consume lifestyle is most definitely the common lifestyle.
Personally, I think the "spend time with loved ones and donate money" approach is the far preferable wealthy lifestyle over the "narcissistic egomaniac constantly talking about how theyre 'changing the world for the better' while mostly just being an asshole" approach.
I'd like to think if I was a billionaire I would act the way that I think an ideal billionaire would, being shrewd with my money and making myself richer in an upright and respectable manner while also ensuring that the people who work with me get wealthy as well.
Proving to others that you can act like an 8th grader while pissing away $44 Billion (actually, closer to $33 Billion, maybe $24 Billion if we ignore the outside $9 Billion investors) on an asinine project and still living the life of private jets, and party yachts is the point.
Flaunting your wealth attracts supporters in this day and age. People *like* rich assholes. Its fashionable, or at least it was in the 2010s. The pendulum of society is finally swinging back and demonizing this outrageous display of wealth but we're still in an age where people literally worship wealth. Not the "figuratively literally", I mean literally literally worship as per the prosperity gospel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology).
Its not just Elon Musk, but also Arkk's Cathie Wood and Bill Hwang.
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The outrageous displays of wealth is proof that you've achieved God's good graces. Its basically Mandate of Heaven (Chinese concept) except the American version of it.
Once you make $999,999,999.99 dollars, congratulations you have won at life!
All future income you make beyond $1B goes to helping society.
You should probably get a say into where the money goes (so it aligns with your values, whatever those may be) but that's it. You are done enriching yourself personally.
I kind of like that (although I'm sure plenty of people hate it).
Norway doesn’t have that, but it does have a wealth tax, which I like. If your net wealth sums to over 2mnok (approx $200k), you pay some percentage of tax on that wealth, every year. There are plenty of exemptions, your primary residence is only worth a quarter of assessed value, and of course this is net wealth, so mortgages and things subtract from this. But it does mean that if you’re just sitting on a horde of gold, you’ll anyways pay taxes, which makes sense to me. Just because you became wealthy enough to stop earning any income doesn’t mean you aren’t responsible for your share of keeping society running.
I've done some math on this. It's INSANE how tiny of a percentage you can usefully tax away and get enormous societal benefits. You really, really don't need to go all 'Beatles Taxman' on it and confiscate everything over X amount. You can take just 1% of the pool of wealth and come out with enormous funding by the standards of what we use social benefits for.
The play money is so many orders of magnitude beyond what's used to keep society creaking along, that it's positively silly. The tiniest of wealth tax percentages can amount to whole social services budgets. These social services stop people with pitchforks from going after the billionaires and each other.
A though occurred to me the other day. Taxes have become the offset for the inefficiencies capitalism. Each entity is independent, and therefore has to reproduce common things that could have been shared if society was organized differently.
