16GB of RAM Could Be the New Minimum in Apple's Upcoming M4 Macs

[dandeco]

This will be good. Back in spring 2021 when I ordered my M1 MacBook Air, I got it with 16 GB of RAM because I knew I'd be using it a lot and I also do a lot of multitasking and digital media work, and it's so far handled that exceptionally well. But for my next Apple Silicon Mac, I want a headless desktop with at least 32 GB of RAM. When the Mac Mini gets refreshed, if the base-line M4 comes with a 32 GB RAM option and they also make an M4 Pro Mac Mini, I might be torn a bit on what to get! I will likely be able to get away with a base-line M4 with 32 GB of RAM.
Of course, later in this decade when it's time to replace my M1 MacBook Air, I can likely still get away with 16 GB of RAM for laptop usage, along with a 512 GB SSD (I want a 1 TB SSD for my Mini).

 

[Chuckeee]

Some people think Apple is doing exactly that in the iPad Pros with M4. The base iPad Pro has user access to 8GB of RAM, but teardowns show there is 12GB of RAM on the package. What is Apple doing with that additional 4GB? Why would they waste resources by closing off those 4GB to the user? An assumption is that Apple is using it as a RAM disk for its on-board AI model that takes up… 4GB. We have no direct evidence they are actually doing that since we can’t look at their source code, but is an interesting idea to ponder.

The 12GB of RAM on package also fueled the rumors that Apple would raise the base M4 Mac models to 12GB since Apple doesn’t like to have too many SoC skus and tends to reuse them on multiple devices. But these new rumors put it at 16GB, which means Apple isn’t using those 12GB M4 skus on their Macs. So why did Apple create a 12GB version of the SoC package in the first place if they weren’t going to use it on anything but the iPads? Apple isn’t known for putting more RAM than is necessary, so what are they doing with that 4GB?

Least expensive available part readily available in required quantities?

Binned memory chips?

 

[tobybrut]

Least expensive available part readily available in required quantities?

Binned memory chips?

I’ve never heard of anyone binning memory chips since they’re fairly simple and cheap. If binned RAM even exists, it wouldn’t be labeled as having 6GB capacity since labeling is done well after the package is put together.

 

[Biro]

I’m glad I went with 64GB of RAM with my M2 Max Mac Studio. Because it’ll have to last me a number of years - AI or not.

 

[dwaite]

I don't understand why people are happy the minimum is 16GB. The system needs resources over time. Which means the 8GB slow performance you all know, is now carried over to 16GB. In other words 16GB is the 8GB you know now.

It should have been 24 GB, not to forget the AI needing 8GB.

On iOS, you are capped to a lower amount of memory usage unless you request a particular entitlement. This has helped fight inefficient software from grabbing/negating any increase in system memory. There is no equivalent for macOS (at least yet)

 

[dwaite]

I’ve never heard of anyone binning memory chips since they’re fairly simple and cheap. If binned RAM even exists, it wouldn’t be labeled as having 6GB capacity since labeling is done well after the package is put together.

Memory chips get regularly binned in the PC market but it is by heat tolerance and performance, not capacity.

 

[dwaite]

While many here blame greed, soldered in ram offers several advantages for Apple:
1. It allows for a slimmer machine, which has been part of Apple's push for a while
2. It eliminates and extra component, the socket, reducing costs and manufacturing complexity
3. It reduces support costs when people use cheap RAM or SSD that causes problems and the customer blames Apple when the machine doesn't work right; or get mad when Apple refuses support until the return the device to the original condition

Socketed parts tend to also need to be buffered, which adds additional latency and cost.

Not to mention support costs when those sockets fail or the parts become dislodged, which for laptops is WAY more common than was for desktops. I'm trying to think of a Mac laptop I had where I _didn't_ have an issue with such a failure case before my MacBook in 2016.

Once they got to the T1 Macs they were well on their way to taking more of an iPhone/iPad design methodology to the Mac. In particular, they no longer really had SSDs outside the Mac Pro - the T1 chip itself handled storage management on the attached flash memory, including things like the multi-level encrypted storage common across Apple platforms.

 

[ric22]

Socketed parts tend to also need to be buffered, which adds additional latency and cost.

Not to mention support costs when those sockets fail or the parts become dislodged, which for laptops is WAY more common than was for desktops. I'm trying to think of a Mac laptop I had where I _didn't_ have an issue with such a failure case before my MacBook in 2016.

Once they got to the T1 Macs they were well on their way to taking more of an iPhone/iPad design methodology to the Mac. In particular, they no longer really had SSDs outside the Mac Pro - the T1 chip itself handled storage management on the attached flash memory, including things like the multi-level encrypted storage common across Apple platforms.

Performance differences are overblown between socketed and soldered... isn't it something like 0.1%? Plus, Apple typically don't use the fastest RAM so it's cancelled out anyway. You're right that it's cheaper- apparently to the tune of about a dollar.

I'm surprised you had issues with socketed RAM slipping out of place... in 35+ years of using laptops with socketed RAM that never happened to me. Meanwhile, my RAM did die in my last MacBook Air, writing off the device, which was infuriating.

 

[dwaite]

With the on-device machine learning and shared VRAM, how much does that realistically leave for everything else? Probably less than 4 GB.

If you want to do on-device training, you want at least 64GB RAM and you pray Apple makes chips that support more.

Running ML models to e.g. do object and face recognition to tag photos is something Apple has done on these 8 GB laptops for years, as well as doing so on phones with half the RAM. They're absolutely up for the task for efficient models.

I’ve opposed the 8 GB base models because of increasing future requirements and the inability to upgrade. Apple Intelligence is the increasing future requirement.

As long a you realize Apple isn't going to take a hit on their margins - a 16 GB base likely means that they will increase the base price of the new models. Rather, this is more likely to cause the old model with the current 8 GB baseline and current generation CPU to sit as the entry point for several Mac lines for an extended period of time.

 

[dwaite]

I do think 16 GB of RAM is the bare minimum, especially with Apple Intelligence active. It'll be interesting to see how the M4-based Macs perform with and without Apple Intelligence active.

By Apple's own product page, the baseline M1 MacBook Air with 8GB ram runs Apple Intelligence just fine.

If Apple does increase the baseline, their marketing material won't read "utilizing the M4 with 16 GB RAM, you now have capabilities that can match the $649 MacBook Air sold at Wal-mart"

 

[Velli]

Some people think Apple is doing exactly that in the iPad Pros with M4. The base iPad Pro has user access to 8GB of RAM, but teardowns show there is 12GB of RAM on the package. What is Apple doing with that additional 4GB? Why would they waste resources by closing off those 4GB to the user? An assumption is that Apple is using it as a RAM disk for its on-board AI model that takes up… 4GB. We have no direct evidence they are actually doing that since we can’t look at their source code, but is an interesting idea to ponder.

Exactly, it’s guesswork. It makes zero sense, since other devices with 8GB SOC’s will also run AI. So this provides zero evidence that 4GB needs to be locked out for AI.

I also fail to see why modern day Apple should design their software such that any amount of RAM is locked out for any purpose. Dynamically assigning stuff is the whole basis for the efficiency of modern Apple products. I’m not even close to being an expert on programming, but even I can see how stupid this assumption is. Something else is going on. We may never know.

 

[ric22]

By Apple's own product page, the baseline M1 MacBook Air with 8GB ram runs Apple Intelligence just fine.

If Apple does increase the baseline, their marketing material won't read "utilizing the M4 with 16 GB RAM, you now have capabilities that can match the $649 MacBook Air sold at Wal-mart"

Yeah, they'll have to limit certain features to the new models, even if they don't have to.

I would be surprised if LLM tasks, even the basic ones, didn't bog down MacOS on 8GB, considering how much it already has to swap on ordinary tasks.

 

[Velli]

I’ve never heard of anyone binning memory chips since they’re fairly simple and cheap. If binned RAM even exists, it wouldn’t be labeled as having 6GB capacity since labeling is done well after the package is put together.

My uneducated guess is that there was a supply issue with 4GB modules, so they put in 6GB but may revert to 4GB modules when they become available. To avoid different versions in the market, they cap them to be the same.

It could even be the supplier paying for it, with an agreement that Apple is not allowed to use them as 6GB modules.

This happens all the time in other businesses.

 

[dwaite]

I would hope not. Like I said ,ceteris paribus, if they made a million and 50% of the buyers upgraded, they could raise the price 100 and get the same revenue for the same sales volume. Of course they will do whatever they think makes the most sense from a financial perspective.

In terms of non-BTO MacBook Air configurations, the lowest price points are $649 for 8 GB option (the M1 MacBook Air) vs $1099 (base tier M3 MacBook Air) vs $1499 for 16 GB (the M3 MacBook Air "best" tier).

50% seems like it is overestimating at least a hair. My guidance even for developers is that you don't need more than 8GB ram unless you have a third-party creative application in mind which itself needs more than 8GB of ram to run properly.

 

[dwaite]

As I said before, there is a huge implication in raising the baseline RAM for M4 Macs, even if Apple were to raise the MSRP to match the pre-M4 upgraded Mac pricing.

RAM upgraded models are only available as BTO (build to order) from Apple previously, which means retailers (Amazon, BestBuy, Costco) would not stock them. Apple allows official retail distributors to discount Macs by about 10-20% compared to official pricing, but Apple would never discount Macs on Apple.com or in Apple stores.

By putting 16GB in the baseline, you can buy 16GB Macs at a discount of 10-20%, whereas there would have been no discount before because you're limited to purchasing from Apple.

Costco sells the 16GB MacBook Air "best" models with 16GB for $1299/$1499. Best Buy sells them for the same price. Both of them have stock in-store here.

Amazon has them for $1249/$1449, with two day delivery.

There already are 16GB configurations, non-BTO, which go on sale and are in fact currently on sale.

 

[rumagent]

If Linux worked properly on the new Snapdragon-based laptops I would seriously consider migrating away from Mac. The specs you get for 1300-1600 USD is so much better.

Not touching Windows, though

 

[TLuc]

No not even slightly. I work for a large company that buys a hell of a lot of high end PC laptops and they are universally garbage across the board.

We actually lose staff because they don't want to use Windows on laptops as well. Fine on a desktop but not a laptop. (I have a 14500 desktop as well)

Until recently I had a cupboard full of workstation class Dells which have all blown up (precision 5550, 7670 and a recently failed 7680)

Its funny to see how convinced you are that Windows PCs and Laptops are bad based on experience with corporate computers.

I have a lot of experience with tech in general and a lot corporate corporate computers are bad simply because of the countless corporate trash apps and services companies force into these computers and have to be active in the background all the time, which is the main reason they run slower, have more software problems and have worse battery life than the consumer devices. Consumer variants are also generally friendlier and better looking. They also run much much better and have low failure rates.

The failure rate is off the scale and the things are heavy, unreliable, run burning hot and have poor battery life.

I generally had Lenovo's as company laptops and none was anywhere near as bad as you claim here. Actually I stopped having failures with the Windows 10 era.

 

[TLuc]

That CPU only came out a month ago so there's not more than a few samples out there. I also don't believe it for a moment. And it's Asus. Have you ever dealt with Asus? Urgh.

The ASUS Zenbook S16 got universal praise and positive reviews. I don't understand why you try to deny this. And the AMD CPU in this laptop is entry level, so M3 class competitor that's very good both in terms of performance as well as efficiency, even if its still on 4nm unlike the M3.

Also I do own a midrange Asus laptop(with a gorgeous OLED display) and it's still very good even if it's more than 3 years old now, it never skipped a beat.

 

[cjsuk]

The ASUS Zenbook S16 got universal praise and positive reviews. I don't understand why you try to deny this. And the AMD CPU in this laptop is entry level, so M3 class competitor that's very good both in terms of performance as well as efficiency, even if its still on 4nm unlike the M3.

Also I do own a midrange Asus laptop(with a gorgeous OLED display) and it's still very good even if it's more than 3 years old now, it never skipped a beat.

I have a fairly hefty desktop PC which has (well had) Asus parts in it. Board and GPU (for numerical computing not games). Have you tried their warranty service? It's garbage. Absolutely the worst.

I actually rent compute from AWS now because it's more reliable.

 

[cjsuk]

Its funny to see how convinced you are that Windows PCs and Laptops are bad based on experience with corporate computers.

I'm not talking cheap things. I'm talking $3000-4500 workstations and the higher end business laptops.

I have a lot of experience with tech in general and a lot corporate corporate computers are bad simply because of the countless corporate trash apps and services companies force into these computers and have to be active in the background all the time, which is the main reason they run slower, have more software problems and have worse battery life than the consumer devices. Consumer variants are also generally friendlier and better looking. They also run much much better and have low failure rates.

While that is partially the case, that does not account for thermal failures and abysmal battery life.

Nor if you do a differential analysis with our MBPs which have the same software (MDM tools / CS etc), they don't have these issues.

I generally had Lenovo's as company laptops and none was anywhere near as bad as you claim here. Actually I stopped having failures with the Windows 10 era.

Maybe for your sample size but when you start buying lots of things, the picture isn't so pretty.

 

[theluggage]

As long a you realize Apple isn't going to take a hit on their margins - a 16 GB base likely means that they will increase the base price of the new models. Rather, this is more likely to cause the old model with the current 8 GB baseline and current generation CPU to sit as the entry point for several Mac lines for an extended period of time.

As I've already posted - if prices go up (which can't be ruled out) then that will be purely because Apple has decided that the market will bear higher Mac prices. The actual cost of having to supply 16GB rather than 8GB will probably be minimal - with the rest of the PC industry increasing minimum RAM "because AI" the smaller chips will rapidly become uneconomical due to falling demand, and Apple may also save money on logistics by having fewer permutations of the SoC package to manage.

The "hit" will be from the potential loss of those $200 8-16GB upgrades (already 4x the retail cost of 8GB of LPDDR5x - let alone whatever trade price a giant like Apple can get) - but, then, it's likely that many of the customers who'd currently get the 8 to 16GB upgrade will now get the 16 to 24GB upgrade instead - that's still not an over-generous amount of RAM for photo, video editing etc.

Apple's price increment of $200 for 8GB of RAM has little to do with the cost of RAM and everything to do with their strategic price structure and model differentiation - which will likely stay the same (maybe plus a price bump that was coming anyway).

In fact if, as some are speculating, the M4 can support 32GB, we could be back to the same 3 levels of RAM option as before, just 16/24/32 instead of 8/16/24 - which would be a good reason to want to drop the 8GB option.

Anyway, everybody except the hardcore "Apple is always right" brigade can see that 8GB on a $1600 MacBook Pro in 2024 is getting indefensible - and if it isn't already losing them sales it will do soon.

 

[jlc1978]

50% seems like it is overestimating at least a hair.

I just picked a number to make the math easier, but the idea the same no matter the percentage. Rain teh price at least to cover the lost upgrade revenue and spread it out over all he projected sales. Any additional increase is more marginal revenue.

If Linux worked properly on the new Snapdragon-based laptops I would seriously consider migrating away from Mac. The specs you get for 1300-1600 USD is so much better.

If Linux has the programs you need, go or it. For me, it doesn't.

As I've already posted - if prices go up (which can't be ruled out) then that will be purely because Apple has decided that the market will bear higher Mac prices.

That's basic economics and capitalism. If you can sell enough at 1Euro there is no reason to price it at 50 cents.

The "hit" will be from the potential loss of those $200 8-16GB upgrades

Nah, they can just spread out the cost over the machines with a price increase, so everyone makes up for the lost upgrade revenue, even if a lower priced 8GB machine would have met their needs.

 

[theluggage]

Performance differences are overblown between socketed and soldered... isn't it something like 0.1%? Plus, Apple typically don't use the fastest RAM so it's cancelled out anyway. You're right that it's cheaper- apparently to the tune of about a dollar.

Apple uses low-power LPDDR chips, rather than DDR, which - until very recently - were only available as surface-mount packages and had to be soldered to the motherboard. There was no equivalent of plug-in DDR modules.

The LPCAMM format for plug-in LPDDR memory only came out in the last year or so, and if Apple did want to use it they'd clearly have to U-turn on the idea of mounting the RAM chips on the processor package.

There are very good technical reasons for Apple's soldered-in RAM - unfortunately they're also using it to create "artificial scarcity" and demand huge premiums for larger RAM configurations.

 

[ric22]

I have a fairly hefty desktop PC which has (well had) Asus parts in it. Board and GPU (for numerical computing not games). Have you tried their warranty service? It's garbage. Absolutely the worst.

I actually rent compute from AWS now because it's more reliable.

I had to use ASUS's customer service last year, and they were good with me 🤷🏼‍♂️ What problem did they refuse to resolve? I liked the free telephone support, speedy answer, and helpful resolution. My immediate family and I have two of their laptops, one desktop, and two routers.

Edit: I will say I hate their bullsh*t router software and App and dodgy terms and conditions. Basically stating they reserve the right to spy on us. Upgrade to Merlin firmware and dodge any software they make. I don't know why they thought people would be accepting of such untrustworthy behaviour.

 

[playtech1]

It makes sense for Apple to draw a line in the sand with M4 by going 16GB across the board, so it can stop providing the latest MacOS for any 8GB RAM models.

It means Apple will have a nice carrot (Apple Intelligence) and stick (lack of latest OS updates) with which to encourage M1 to M3 adopters with 8GB RAM models to upgrade.

Without this, I can see Apple struggling to encourage M1 to M3 owners to upgrade, since even M1 machines are still likely to be more than acceptable for daily use in 2025/26, except for the many who bought 8GB RAM models.