M3 MacBook Air Models Now Arriving to Customers in New Zealand and Australia

I didn't get mine, and I've been waiting by the mailbox all day.

Didn't order one, but still.

Imagine if 16GB is the baseline but at US$1,299 (vs 8GB at US$1,099), many will be disappointed as well.

Yes, because the "starting spec" is not really the gripe: it's the outrageous relative cost to pay for that 16GB upgrade hop. Pretending like $200 is the RIGHT price is only applying Apple's outrageous pricing to the situation vs. say, 64GB RAM at a retail quantity ONE (unit) purchase with a nice profit for Amazon too (still costing substantially less than 8GB of Apple RAM)...



Else if 16GB is "enough" for someone, instead of only paying for 8 MORE GB in that upgrade for $200, one could buy the entire 16GB for considerably less than that $200...



Neither example is "cheapest"- shopping around would likely find even better pricing- but just representative of what fast RAM can cost... when there are competitors vs. a lone "company store" able to basically charge anything and if someone wants/needs "the rest", they have to just pay up.

So yes, if Apple just upped the RAM and charged $200 more, many people would likely react negatively. Looking at retail pricing of 16GB for $45, we can assume half of that (the upgrade) might be $22.50 at retail. Given Apple's near 50% margin, shall we assume in that it costs them about HALF of that: $11.25? Maybe fold that extra 8GB into Macs and keep the price the same? It never hurts to throw customers a value added bone from time to time and that one seems easy and inexpensive... especially if we further worked the numbers at Apple purchase volumes instead of pretending like Apple would be dealing with retail pricing all the way down to cost per unit. I'm confident that such a move would be very well received by Apple customers.

I'm an Apple "everything" guy for about 24 years now and this just erodes the halo for me... so much so that I find myself seriously considering a PC laptop to replace my aging MB, something that would not even had a moment of consideration as recently as 5 years ago. But hoorayyyy for them shareholders! ???

I still can't believe they start off with 8GB RAM.

Can you show us the price of the RAM that’s physically integrated into the SoC please? Ta.

I guarantee it doesn’t cost Apple 200, 100 or even 50 dollars to add that additional RAM to the SoC. You do too, if you’re being honest with yourself, you just chose to dig in and defend corporate fleecing.
Bizarre.

I still can't believe they start off with 8GB RAM.

It sucks but for a lot of people 8GB is more than enough so of course Apple will still sell it. It’s silly spending that much money and only getting 8GB though. 16GB should be minimum.

I had 8GB in my MacBook in 2011.

Can you show us the price of the RAM that’s physically integrated into the SoC please? Ta.

It is probably even less, that is one of the reasons Apple has moved to the SoC model.