I've been waiting over a year for this. My M1 8GB is simply not up to spec for iOS Dev work. Apple Store literally had nothing with 16GB when I had to buy it. I asked about when they could get one in -- Apple store assistant told me it would be at least 3 months. This was in Ireland during Covid.
For reference my 2016 MacBook Pro had 16GB RAM so it was surprising to me that 6 years later I would be unable to buy one with 16 GB of RAM. So while the CPUs are amazing what the hell are Apple doing selling machines with such little amounts of RAM?
I would strongly recommend the M2 air at 24GB, I too bought one of the first M1 airs with 8GB ram and that laptop is just gathering dust right now, but the latest ones are great, the increase in RAM really lets the processor shine.
Would you recommend it over the 32GB 14" M2 MBP? The price difference is $500 but for the same amount of storage and cores, you get another 8GB of memory, multi-monitor support, faster wifi, another tb4 port, etc. Honestly despite their newness I was hoping the airs would see a small price drop.
Only if you are doing long sessions of heavy processing. Even then it just slows down by 15-20% so if you aren’t doing that on a regular basis it shouldn’t be a problem. Under normal loads there is no throttling. If you do video editing on a daily basis, you probably want to look at the MacBook Pros.
To make money just like you showed. You got the 8gb and now you want to pay more to get another one with M2 and 16gb+. Apple product segmentation is legendary for extracting the most from consumers.
It's also not enough for VSCode and Web Development. Opening VSCode on a medium sized Next.js project takes a good minute or so before Intellisense kicks in.
But I'm not willing to pay the prices on the UK website. I think an M3 Air with 32GB will be my next purchase.
For reference my 2016 MacBook Pro had 16GB RAM so it was surprising to me that 6 years later I would be unable to buy one with 16 GB of RAM. So while the CPUs are amazing what the hell are Apple doing selling machines with such little amounts of RAM?