Bridging the Gap: Maximizing Apple Intelligence on Older iPhones

On Wednesday, Apple announced new Macs again. This time, they updated the MacBook pros with the M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max. Before that, on Monday, the company showed new iMacs. And on Tuesday, they released new Mac mini models.

All of the updates are impressive. The iMac is an incredible all-in-one computer. The Mac mini got even smaller, in addition to getting significantly faster. But it was an easy-to-miss paragraph in the MacBook Pro announcement that might be the biggest update of all.

Apple did a "secret" thing. They put something in that you may not know about.

"MacBook Air is the world's most popular laptop, 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."

Look, people have been making noise about the base amount of memory for a long time. Previous base models of pretty much every Mac were limited to 8GB of memory. In some cases, that amount has stayed the same for over 10 years.

It's probably the single biggest complaint people have about the Mac, and Apple has been long overdue to increase the minimum configuration. Of course, the reason for the upgrade now should be obvious.

Apple Intelligence requires that a device have a minimum of 8GB of memory because it has to load the Large Language Model (LLM) into memory in order to process queries locally on-device. That means shipping a device with only 8GB of memory would essentially be a downgrade anytime you were using Apple Intelligence.

And, so, they doubled the memory in the base-level MacBook Air. And, not just the current M3 version, but also the M2 version that Apple still sells as a lower-cost option. Think about that—Apple will still let you buy a new M2 MacBook Air, a laptop that is over two years old at this point—and it just doubled the memory for free.

I'm not saying it's never happened before, but I cannot remember a time when Apple has done something like this. I don't know of any other product that Apple updated mid-cycle by just increasing the memory without changing anything else, including the price. In that sense, it's essentially a $200 price drop.

Look, I have a hard time recommending anyone buy a laptop with only 256GB of storage, especially since the MacBook Air is so good that you could easily rely on one for more than five years. But, the base M2 MacBook Air is an incredible value at $999.

I think Apple knows that the bar is pretty high for Apple Intelligence, and the company would have made different decisions when it was designing those older products had it known how important generative AI was going to be its business in 2024. The fact that every new Mac has a minimum of 16GB of memory is a meaningful advance-even if it took Apple Intelligence to get us there. On the other hand, the fact that even some of the older models now have that same amount is maybe the smartest thing I've seen yet.

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com

Source: https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/apple-just-quietly-updated-the-2-year-old-m2-macbook-air-its-the-most-brilliant-thing-ive-seen-yet/90997292 OCT 31, 2024