I think a non-anemic amount of memory is the most important feature lacking in the Air. I often find my 4GB 2011 Air chugging and breaking a sweat swapping to "disk" simply because I've had Firefox open for too long. Would it be that difficult for them to finally double the amount of memory in the next base model to 8GB and make 16GB an available option?
I think this could have something do with 16GB dimms being a new thing and not supported by Intel on the laptop chipsets.
Lenovo has a similar problem in their new models. X240 has only one dimm slot and currently supports max 8GB of memory. While investigating the issue I found a discussion[1] where somebody mentioned that Intel would need to add support for these new dimms in the "memory reference code"[2].
I solved that problem by not using Firefox. (And this is not intended to be snarky - Firefox was my preference, but under near-identical conditions, Firefox exhibited this problem while Safari did not.)
I agree 4 GB is getting to be a little low for a modern laptop, but I'm curious as to how bad this "chugging" is considering swapping to SSD isn't too bad and is many times faster than any swapping that occurred on those old 5400 RPM drives.
Honestly it's more than enough for many use cases. OSX is quite lean (for a non-minimalist OS) and memory compression saves quite a bit before having to hit swap. Activities such as word processing and typical (i.e not geeky 100+ tabs) surfing around workloads fit very well. My girlfriend has the base 2013 11" (Haswell, 4GB/128GB) as her main machine and it's perfectly snappy. I have an early 2013 base 13" Retina (pre-Haswell, 8GB/256GB), do loads of dev with huge terminal scrollbacks (a real memory eater) and a few throwaway non-GUI VMs (also, shared video memory) and it'll be fine for at least the next four years.
The takeaway is not everyone has the same use case. Also IMHO bloated DOMs and careless coding† are the real pain point.
† It doesn't have to be optimised to the metal but seriously, quite a few people just develop as if we all have ideal Turing machines.
I have 8GB of RAM in my Macbook Air that's over a year old. I just checked, and yes, it's still a $100 upgrade on either model.
I had 6GB of RAM in my main development box until very recently. Even ran a few VMs on it. 8GB is a good amount for most power users, especially considering that the limited CPU will probably be your bottleneck first.
