On March 8, news came out that the M3 MacBook Air went on sale in China, billed as "light but powerful," with a starting price of 8999 CNY.
This morning, Apple CEO Cook posted on his personal Weibo that the MacBook Air equipped with the M3 chip is launching in China. For students, business professionals, or anyone looking for a laptop that perfectly combines powerful performance, all-day battery life, and a light and portable design, it is undoubtedly an excellent choice.
Shortly after the post went live on Weibo, a huge number of netizens flocked to the comment section to vent their frustrations about the M3 MacBook Air's 8GB of RAM and the cost of upgrading its storage.
Some netizens express concerns like, "How can 8+256 be considered perfect?" "We're in the M3 era, and yet the budget version still has only 8GB, which is simply not enough." "The memory made of gold is not affordable for ordinary people." "Tell me, which regular student can afford the hard drive you're offering?" and so on.
The M3 MacBook Air, released in 2024 as a flagship ultrabook with a starting price of 8999 CNY, maintains a relatively uncommon configuration in the industry by starting with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD.
Apple does offer upgrade options for both memory and SSD, but these upgrades come at an additional cost.
Upgrading to 16GB of RAM costs an extra 1500 CNY, while opting for 24GB of RAM requires an additional 3000 CNY. For SSD upgrades, the prices are as follows: 1500 CNY for a 512GB SSD, 3000 CNY for a 1TB SSD, and a steep 6000 CNY for a 2TB SSD.
Worth mentioning, Apple's Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing, Bob Borchers, responded to the concerns regarding the 8GB memory on the M3 MacBook Pro.
He stated, "Our memory utilization is more efficient, and we have memory compression technology, plus our memory is based on a unified memory architecture."
"The 8GB memory on the M3 MacBook Pro might be quite comparable to 16GB memory on other systems," said Bob Borchers.
What's your take on the flagship Apple laptop starting with 8GB of memory?
