No, Apple isn’t putting an M4 chip into the MacBook Air lineup just yet, but it is giving the ultraportable a healthy memory bump. Starting today, every M2 and M3-equipped MacBook Air will come with 16GB of RAM by default, making them better equipped for multitasking and memory-hungry Apple intelligence features.
Thankfully, Apple isn’t changing its pricing: The M2 model still starts at $999, while the 13-inch M3 MacBook Air runs for $1,099 and the 15-inch variant for $1,299. (It’s no surprise we’ve seen 8GB systems go as low as $700.)
You’ll still have to stick with 256GB of storage on all base MacBook Air systems, but hey, at least Apple is finally listening to our demands. We’ve long argued that bumping up to 16GB of RAM is reasonable for most laptops. This is especially true for Apple Silicon systems, which have memory built directly into their SoCs (System on a Chip) and can’t expand their RAM going forward.
You can thank AI as the main reason why Apple and Microsoft (with the Copilot+ AI PC) are now pushing 16GB of RAM. While Apple Intelligence requires 8GB of RAM to function, the company previously admitted that this may not be enough to run AI features in Xcode 16. As AI models grow and become more complex, their memory demands will only increase. More than ever, it pays to invest in as much RAM as you can.
You can order the refreshed MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM online today, and they should be available in stores soon.
It looks like the ultra-thin iPhone we’ve been hearing about for the past few months will get Apple’s “Air” branding. In the Power On newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says the iPhone 17 lineup will feature a new model that could be called the iPhone 17 Air, and it will be about 2 millimeters thinner than any other model we’ve seen so far.
“It will have a base-level A19 chip and a single-lens camera system,” Gurman says, and it will “serve as a testbed for future technologies, including technologies that allow for foldable devices.” According to Gurman, it and the upcoming new iPhone SE will use Apple’s first in-house modem.
We may also see upgrades to the entry-level iPad that will make it compatible with Apple intelligence. Gurman revealed that the next-generation iPad will get an A17 Pro chip and 8 GB of memory. According to Gurman, this news should arrive in the spring alongside the iPhone SE and new iPad Air models.
The rise of AI NPCs has felt like a threat for years, as if developers couldn’t wait to dump human writers and offload NPC conversations to generative AI models. At CES 2025, NVIDIA made it clear that this technology is coming very soon.
For example, PUBG developer Krafton plans to use NVIDIA’s ACE (Avatar Cloud Engine) to power AI companions that will assist you and joke around with you during matches. Krafton isn’t just stopping there – it’s also using ACE in its life simulation title InZOI to make characters smarter and generate objects.
While the use of generative AI in games seems almost inevitable, as the medium has always toyed with new ways to make enemies and NPCs smarter and more realistic, seeing multiple NVIDIA ACE demos one after another really made me cringe. It wasn’t just slightly smarter enemy AI – ACE can create entire conversations out of thin air, imitate voices and try to give NPCs a sense of personality.
It’s even doing this locally on your PC, powered by NVIDIA’s RTX GPUs. But while this might all sound great on paper, I disliked every moment I saw the AI NPCs in action.