For those who missed out on the MacBook Air M2 from this deal, Costco are having a sale on the 13" MacBook Air M3 16GB/256GB model. (Was $1,699.98 / Now $1,299.98 - Save $400)
Website states: Price valid from 25/04/2025 to 25/04/2025. and considering Costco is closed today, this is online only.
Get in quick!
Lest we forget
Where did you find the M4 for that price?
Amazing price, worth it for the multiple screens output without closing your lid (2x screens)
Can anyone buy from here ?
Or about $40 more here using GCs. M3 at this price is not a deal.
Can't they make it 32GB and at least 512GB or even 1 TB as a standard now?
I agree their SSD should be larger in the base model without charging hundreds to upgrade but generally speaking 16gb RAM is plenty on Apple Silicon, imo.
I’ve currently got the M1 Macbook Air with 8gb and the only time I run into ram issues is when using Luminar AI to edit raw images while using their AI features. Other than that, it works flawlessly
Storage is cheap. They can increase base storage to 1TB for very little in cost but then 90% of the mom and pops won't pay a monthly icloud storage fee for life to store photos and iPhone backups. It's a perfect business model. Hard drive storage fee.
Please stop trying to increase the base price.
I mean sure they can but price is going to be much higher
It doesn't have to be though, apart from Apple tax. The wholesale costs for Apple wouldn't be a lot at all.
Why would a company that runs a cloud storage service provide adequate local storage?
@Raynes: They definitely want to extract as much cash they can from you whatever way you turn. They just use the jacked pricing to force their costumers into exactly where they want them to be, so they pay the price regardless of what's best for the customer.
it doesn't have to be but it WILL be.
not that much higher if they actually cares about customers…….but that would be dreaming wouldnt it.
They do care about their customer. They offer Apple Care but you need to buy it within 7 days of you start using apple products.
yeah their SSD is really small, i am buying 256GB and gonna do replacement in asia later this year to 4T with much lower the cost when i am over there…….
You seem like you know a decent amount about computers, is there a reason you have all of those apps open at the same time? Is this a work device? I would never recommend an MBA for software dev, but as a school teacher who uses an 8GB RAM M1 MBA I only occasionally have issues with RAM. It sounds like you have a reasonably "intense" work use case, which this device is never going to be ideal for. It's meant for having 2-3 apps open at a time (plus background services, obviously).
I do a bunch of hobbyist self hosting, so am no stranger to having 10-20 tabs, but it honestly hasn't felt like much of an issue, especially with only a chromium browser open most of the time.
Also, RAM being fully utilised doesn't inherently mean you need to upgrade? The system is designed to use all the RAM all the time.
Yes, I do agree memory usage alone doesn’t tell the full story. Memory pressure is a much better indicator.
https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/activity-monitor/actmn…
In my case, the memory pressure graph is almost always yellow, which means my laptop is constantly struggling for RAM. and I do also notice the system is slowing down significantly after a while.
Many of the apps I run are essential, messaging, email, cloud storage. and some help fill gaps in macOS, like better window management or font scaling on 4k monitors. If you only have 2–3 apps open at a time, then sure 8GB is likely enough. But I feel 8GB really doesn’t do the CPU justice.
Browsers of all apps are most likely to use any available RAM as cache.
Also, I think more CPU (and GPU) cores have more impact than RAM, so upgrading to an M* Pro device (or at least something that uses a fan rather than throttling CPU) will have better yield.
In my case CPU is sufficient. you can easily see the CPU usage in Activty monitor. I don't use much graphic heavy apps either.
16GB is more than sufficient for 99% of people. Even for video editing, programming, VM’s etc 16GB will do the job albeit maybe slightly slower with a bit more compression happening in the background but still completely usable.
Everyone’s use case will vary though so it’s not a blanket scenario but for the vast majority 16GB is fine considering most people were OK with 8GB going back just a year ago.
Rubbish, I’m a fairly heavy user and also run Fusion and I barely notice the difference in speed on my M2 8GB.
If 8GB works for you, that’s great, but clearly even Apple doesn’t think it’s enough anymore, or they wouldn’t have bumped the base models up to 16GB.
Probably due to fact they’re trying to make AI compatible across the line and that’s pretty difficult to do decently with 8GB.
Disagree. I have a 16gb M1 MBA and i make video games, edit 4k videos in Final Cut Pro and raw photo editing in photoshop.
At times i have unity, blender, visual studio and mulitple safari tabs and YouTube open (as well as music and many background monitors for battery ram cpu usgae running ) and have never run into any ram issues, or even seen a ram dialogue box pop up.
This is what mine looks like during a normal final cut pro edit with pixelmator pro, and runnning a handful of tabs
youve got a lot of swapped ram so that is probably affecting it. need to restart ur mac once in a while.
check how much swap is involved? I was on base MBP 16 (16GB) and while it was amazing, it was a bit strained in ram department and quite a bit of swap use, despite not keeping applications open when I don't need them, and keeping browser tabs in check, too (tidy operator here). now I run MBP 16 with M1 Max (64GB) and haven't seen any swap, and can leave my applications running.
each workload would be different, sure.
❯ sysctl -a | grep swap
vm.swapusage: total = 12288.00M used = 11163.75M free = 1124.25M (encrypted)
vm.swap_enabled: 1
Swap is almost full as shown, sure If I reboot it it will be working fine again. 24-32GB would be ideal for my work load.
Swap is almost full as shown, sure If I reboot it it will be working fine again
What’s the uptime of your machine? One thing I notice is some apps/services just continuously use more RAM, and eventually you either need to kill the app or restart your laptop.
@Randolph Duke: A little less than a month, I restarted it now its running normal again. Some people here believe their 16GB Mac performs like 32GB on a PC that's just untrue.
@OzHan: yeah there's no magic there. yes it's more optimised, there's compression if need be, and swap is super fast too (no match for RAM bandwidth though), so it's certainly better than on windows, but there's no magic.
Apple Ram is better. Tim cooked so that 16GB Apple Ram is the same as having 32GB Windows Ram. Also if you need more Apple Ram, I heard in the next update you can subscribe for a monthly fee to get extra Apple Ram so theoretically you could have unlimited Apple Ram. You can't do that with Windows.
Does JB hi-fi match that price?
tried in OW too, not stock at all
But $187 more you can get the latest M4 version instead, maybe worth to do that if you got apple giftcards too