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Entire Mac Lineup Now Starts With at Least 16GB RAM, Ending 8GB Era
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Good chance the iPhone 17 Pros will be bumped up to 12GB. I'm betting the non-Pro iPhones stick with 8GB for now though.
Actually, I think this is the way.
If you're comfortable with reselling, then late-model Macs seem to sell for a good chunk of what you paid after 1-2 years of use. I had an M2 Air for close to a year and sold it for about $200 less than I bought it for. Sure, I 'burned' the $200, but I also had the use of the Mac for a year.
Building it for the long term or 'future-proofing' doesn't make sense because of what Apple charges for upgrades. Increasing RAM and SSD addshundreds to the cost of a new Mac, and you just don't get those dollars back on resale - especially if you keep the machine a long time. I'm not going to bitch at Apple's cost for RAM and SSD costs because no one is compelled to pay them. Apple is a for-profit company and, as I learned in business school, there is no such thing as unreasonable profit.
Oh please. My 8gb M1 Pro has several gigabytes of swap data just from very basic freaking apps and a safari tab or two open.
Gone are the days of the gilded 8GB age, when you had it think about which app to open and which to close. Good bye to the active user… 😂😂😂
I think it's been 8 years since the baseline was bumped to 8GB from 4GB, so see you in 2032?
People underestimate or either lie about what you can do on a 8GB ram Mac. 8GB may be low but you can still do a lot. I can run either Premiere Pro or Photoshop or Lightroom, Safari with 8-10 tabs, MS Office with 4 documents, FB messenger, Apple Mail.
And when I open up Activity Monitor, Safari is what eats up the most RAM. You have to do a force quit on Safari every week or so just to refresh the cache or (unless you shut down each day) it will just eat more ram over time. And people complain about Chrome, Safari isn't any better for hogging RAM.
And when I open up Activity Monitor, Safari is what eats up the most RAM. You have to do a force quit on Safari every week or so just to refresh the cache or (unless you shut down each day) it will just eat more ram over time. And people complain about Chrome, Safari isn't any better for hogging RAM.
I have clients that have the M1 iMac with 8GB. They do 4K video editing and photoshop. Works fine for them. No memory pressure issues.
Exactly. So these people who say that 8GB isn't enough to even run the OS are full of crap. I purposely bought the base model because I refuse to be another victim of the Apple tax and I got mine on sale with a decent discount because I know Apple MSRPs are over inflated. if I need to edit a movie production then I have my desktop with 128GB ram. I only render out simple videos on the Air and it's more than capable with 8GB and Im still able to keep my other programs open.
Safari is the biggest memory hog of them all, that's right Apples own browser. It's just as bad as Chrome. Keep your same websites open for 4 or 5 days without shutting the laptop down and each website will consume 1.5+GB of ram EACh.
It's 2024, it really should be. 16gb was pretty standard like 8-9yrs ago in any mid level machine.
Hallmark of bad punditry: statistics pulled out of the derriere and condescending attitude toward others
THEY watch bad movies and don't read. THEY are horrible drivers who text while driving. THEY don't do anything on their computers but email and browsing (as if the modem browser isn't one of the biggest memory hogs around).
I just hope they don’t make software even sloppier and more bloated with establishing 16gb as new baseline and leaving people who bought devices recently in the dust
That's an empty claim because most PC company's "standard" laptops are $500 flying bricks. You can probably find them with 4GB if you look... Apple simply doesn't have a dog in that race.
Look at any premium "ultrabook"-type PC with a remotely comparable price-, spec- or brand-wise to - say - a M4 MacBook Pro and 32GB of LPDDR5 is not hard to find (often with 1TB SSD as well) e.g.
ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 Laptop | Hi-Performance Next-Gen AI PC for Business
Meet the hi-performance powerhouse, the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 laptop, fueled by Snapdragon X Elite with generative AI onboard.
www.lenovo.com
...all of those come with 32GB LPDDR5X and by the time you're spending over $1500 they come with 1TB SSD. Where you can't find models with 32GB base, the upgrade is often cheaper - Lenovo wants about $200 for an extra 32GB (Apple still wants $200-per-8GB for upgrades)
It's true that Apple's bump to 16GB base has levelled the playing field a lot and it's nowhere near as ridiculous as it was a week ago - they've just about caught up, but they're hardly ahead of the game and they're still charging a ludicrous rate for upgrades.
Why would I need to buy a PC? Macs come with 16GB by default now. You’re the one complaining about the RAM amount in new Macs, not me.
On what level does your reply make any sort of sense? Should I tell you to buy a PC so that you can have a machine with 8GB of ram? Because it makes just as much sense as you saying it to me.
Good news: The absolute minimum for Macs is 16gb now.
Bad news:The absolute minimum for Macs will be 16gb….until 2040
Bad news:The absolute minimum for Macs will be 16gb….until 2040
4 GB was not enough for Mac OS in 2020, and 8 GB was the next step up. It was not Cook being benevolent.
Tim said if 16gb ever became the base he would retire on bean counting principle
/s … sorta
The real issue was - and still is - the $200-per-8GB upgrade charge which is totally disproportionate to the actual cost of LPDDR5x RAM. As per my earlier post, for example, Lenovo want $200 for a 32GB to 64GB LPDDR5X upgrade on a Thinkpad.
8GB may be fine for some people, but some people do need more (and some people will need more than 16GB) and Apple wants a small fortune for what should be a fairly minor upgrade.
Upgrading the old $600 Mac Mini to a relatively modest 16GB/512GB SSD config cost an extra $400 - more than half the cost of the machine. For an extra 8GB of LPDDR5x and an extra 256GB of flash. Probably about $100 retail in extra parts - and about twice what most other PC makers would charge for the same upgrade.
Now you get 16GB base, so you just need $200 - only 1/3 of the price of the machine - to bring the storage up to something practical for serious use. Whoop.
With Apple it's not so much "I want to pay less and get more" it's "When I pay more I don't want to get fleeced".