It has been a busy week for Mac updates — with a new iMac, new accessories, and new smaller-than-ever Mac Mini — but all of it has been leading up to these; the new MacBooks. Though Apple still makes their desktop range, and they remain profitable, their biggest computer product, by far, is the MacBook line, and with the shift to their new M4 chips, they are better than ever before.

To start with the smallest but probably best change; the MacBook Air. The MacBook Air is still using the older — but still great — M2 and M3 chips, and will not be getting the upgrade to M4. This is an odd decision, given that you can now buy an iPad with a more powerful processor than their base laptop; but the change they have made is lifting the minimum RAM configuration from eight gigabytes to 16 gigabytes, but keeping the price the same. This is a big deal as eight gigabytes of RAM on a laptop was inexcusable, but you had to pay $200 more to get the necessary upgrade to 16 gigabytes; and now 16 gigabytes is included at that $999 starting price. Put simply, when you are in the market for a small, thin and light laptop, and are agnostic about your operating system of choice, there is no better option than the base MacBook Air.

When you want to get more power though, you have to upgrade to the MacBook Pro line, all now available in the three skews of the M4 chip; M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max. They also all get a new, upgraded web camera, and an additional USB C port on the right side; however, when you want these USB C ports to run the brand-new Thunderbolt 5 standard, instead of the slower Thunderbolt 4, you have to upgrade to the M4 Pro or Max chips. Worth mentioning though; the Space Black option is no longer reserved for the higher-end models, and can be situated on the entry MacBook Pros.

This is a relatively small upgrade to the line, as the M4 chips likely will not be a significant performance improvement about the M3; however, like the MacBook Airs, they all come with more RAM, for less money than before.

When companies announce a “new” model, which is an incremental upgrade, I usually recommend buying the previous year’s version, as you get almost exactly the same product but at a significant discount. That would be true here, but because of Apple’s unusual choice to bump the base RAM in these models, they are essentially reducing the price on new MacBook Pros by about $200 to about $300 a skew.

So, when you are thinking about getting a M3 MacBook Pro, which will now be aggressively discounted, please check to compare the price of that RAM configuration against the new models. For example, when you can get a base M3 MacBook Pro for $200 less than the base M4, you are not actually getting a discount — and please do not buy that anyway, as it would only have eight gigabytes of RAM.

When you want a M3 MacBook Pro, it should be discounted by about $300; and given that those aggressive discounts will be hard to find, this is one of the rare occurrences when it is a good time to buy a new MacBook. It is not a big upgrade about the last version, but that was a great computer, and Apple made them less expensive than ever.

Pre-orders are open today, and they go on sale on November 8.