There needs to be something new that is demanding more memory and storage.
Like AI?
I assume if iOS 18 is going to stuffed with AI features then so will the next MacOS.
If Apple wants to store models locally then they need to offer larger SSDs. On the smaller side LLMs are 30-40GB but can be much larger (100-400GB)
Also AI is very memory intensive. On my PC I have 64GB RAM and 16GB VRAM. Quite a bit of RAM is used but VRAM is crucial and AI will use as much as possible. I wish I had bought a 4090 with 24GB for AI work. Even if I did I have no doubt that I’d see ~23GB usage. Since Apple uses unified memory there is really no difference.
When you think of a MacBook Air today with 8GB RAM you realise it’s not going be anywhere near enough if Apple are going to start pushing AI heavily. They could do all the processing in the cloud but Apple like to run things locally. Maybe to start off with they will do cloud processing but I suspect the next MacBook Air release will see a big upgrade in base RAM and storage so they can start to shift to local processing.
I think 16/512 will be base specs from next year. 8GB VRAM is about minimum for AI and of course you’d have 8GB for everything else running on the system.