A surprising bit of news this week was that Apple doubled the base memory on the M2 and M3 MacBook Air. Before this week, if you bought the entry-level model, you got 8GB. That has now increased to 16. I’m sure this is entirely attributable to Apple Intelligence. 8 gigabytes simply isn’t enough to run those AI models and keep the computer running. Whatever the reason, I’m glad they finally did it.

When my daughter bought a new MacBook Air a few months ago, I counseled her to upgrade primarily because of the base model’s woeful 8GB of memory. This also came up in a recent MacSparky Labs event: the importance of memory when purchasing a new Mac.

My general experience in dealing with Labs members and podcast listeners is that people upgrade their computers because of a lack of storage. The base models don’t have much of it, and between our photo libraries and other bits of large data, we fill it up pretty quickly. For many folks, it’s not that the computer is running too slowly; it doesn’t have enough storage to keep up with them.

However, I expect that in the future, memory could become a similar problem. Apple is only at the beginning of its Apple Intelligence journey, and the AI models will only get bigger. Fast forward a few years, and the reason you need to upgrade your computer might simply be that it doesn’t have enough memory. I’m glad Apple is taking care of this problem on the low end, but when buying a new Mac, particularly if you’re looking toward longevity it may now make sense to upgrade both the storage and the memory a bit more than you think is necessary.