About time. This also applies to their older models such as M2 and M3 laptops.
In the U.S., the MacBook Air lineup continues to start at $999, so there is no price increase associated with the boost in RAM.
The M2 macbook air now starts at $1000 for 16GB RAM and 256GB storage. Limited storage aside, that’s surprisingly competitive with most modern Windows laptops.
It is “efficient” because they just dump everything on swap. If I cold boot my M1 air, it’ll be using 7GB of RAM and 4GB of swap without anything running in the background. I have this ongoing bug as well where some background apps will stop responding and the system can’t stop the process, so it starts a new one and it keeps doing this until I either stop the app manually, or my storage is completely full because swap is taking 80GB of my internal storage.