Man, the releases recently are coming in fast and furious, today with Apple announcing new MacBook Airs and Mac Studios.

My MacBook Air predictions

The Air will likely get a bump to the M4 chip and I’m not totally sure what will happen to the $999 model. as far as I see it, there are three possibilities:

1. The M2 model sticks around at that $999 price point with the M4 starting at $100 more just like today’s M3
2. The M2 model gets an M3 upgrade and keeps the $999 price tag
3. The base M4 model starts at $999 and all MacBook Airs ship with an M4

I can see arguments for all three of these coming to pass. I’d love it if they could hit that important $999 price point with the M4, simplifying the lineup, but we’ll have to wait and see.

I'm happy to see that my hope was right and the MacBook Air once again starts at $999 with the latest chipset, and I think that's a huge win. Back in 2019, the MacBook Air started at $1,099, which works out to about $1,350 in 2025 dollars when adjusted for inflation. By that measure, the MacBook Air has gotten 25% cheaper over the past 6 years, and I think the baseline Air is a better product by today's standards than the 2019 model was compared to other laptops when it released.

Notable changes to the Air

Anyway, this was indeed just a spec bump with a few nice upgrades to boot, which as I mentioned yesterday is totally fine for Macs. Here's the notable specs that stood out to me:

  • The Air now has the same webcam as the MacBook Pros, which is lovely.
  • The Thunderbolt ports have been upgraded to Thunderbolt 4.
  • 256GB starting storage is not great. Pretty much every smartphone starts at 256GB these days, and it's much easier to fill up a Mac, so consider this my official hope that this is the last time we see a new Mac with this little storage.

Oh, and that new sky blue color looks so good and is absolutely what I would get if I were getting one of these.

My Mac Studio predictions

I hope we see the M4 Ultra released in 2025, bringing updates to Apple’s most expensive computers. it’s absurd that a $599 Mac mini is more performant at numerous tasks than these Macs that can easily cost 10x the money and they need to get off those M2 chips.

I'll be honest, I didn't expect the Mac Studio to get an update that included the M3 and M4 chips, but not in the order you thiiiiink. The new Studio can be specced out like crazy, so it's not like these are slow machines or anything, but I really didn't expect them to get the M4 Max and the M3 Ultra.

Notable changes to the Mac Studio

The biggest changes I see here have to do with how high some of the specs can go on this new Studio. In addition to the faster chips, max RAM jumps from 192GB to 512GB, and max internal storage doubles from 8TB to 16TB. On the base spec side of the world, things are much less shifted, with 512GB internal storage holding steady and base RAM bumping from 32GB to 36GB.

Beyond those changes, the Studio also gets Thunderbolt 5 to match the Mac mini as well as all of the performance advantages the M3 and M4 chips deliver. This is all for the same prices as before, and you can spec the thing up to an ungodly $14,099 if you want everything maxed out.

I'll also take this moment to once again express the weirdness of these new Studios having a mix of M3 and M4 chips. I mean pretty clearly the M4 Ultra isn't ready and Apple felt it was time to upgrade the Mac Studio, so they went with that they had. If anything, I'm mostly surprised that the M3 got a new variant at all. I guess this plus the M3 iPad Air announced yesterday show that generation of chips wasn't as dead as the general consensus thought.

Of note, the Mac Pro didn't get any updates today, so I guess we'll have to wait and see what the future holds for that line. The Mac Pro has always been a weird computer in the Apple silicon era as it really felt like you were paying thousands of dollars for zero performance boost and a few expansion slots. Now you're paying thousands of dollars more than the Studio for far worse performance and expansion slots. I don't know if I am ready to say Apple will kill this product line anytime soon, but it sure seems like the niche that the Mac Pro was built for is smaller than it's ever been in Apple's history.

All in all, fine updates across the board for products made for people who aren't me. My M2 Pro MacBook Pro continues to be a champ for my use cases, although the M5 models surely coming later this year will be tempting.