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.
Apple does have a lot of vertical integration which allows first party stuff to function well and they work closely with a lot of their premium 3rd party software partners, but you try running an actual RAM hungry process like a local LLM model, for example, and all but the highest end latest edition MacBook Pro WILL shit the bed.