In what year will Apple bend the knee putting either 16gb or 512gb in Base Air?

[thadoggfather]

poll time.

Keep in mind this is either / or , not both - we can expect that will be on a much, much longer time frame.

 

[dmr727]

I really have no idea. I'd *think* it would happen in 2023, but this is Apple so I'm going with 2024.

 

[Nbd1790]

I think 8gb is still here for a few years on entry level models. Someone like my mom uses a 2015 MBA i7 & 8gb of RAM and has zero complaints. Granted, just web based stuff managing photos etc. On the other hand, I know a handful of people who create music using Ableton / Logic on that config still as well (and in comparison, these configs are dual core and substantially slower than the most basic M series processors).

Reality is, unless you're dealing with intense media projects (photo / video / audio), most people are actually more than okay with the 8gb. Video editors even review current configs with 8gb of ram and still manage to get a hell of a lot done including 4k editing - more power than the average user will ever need.

 

[Shirasaki]

While this chart says otherwise, I have enough confidence Apple will never cave in and offer 16GB/512GB without government pressure and years of ongoing media bombardment, which is a tough ask.

Btw I am NOT running any CPU/GPU intensive application atm, just a bunch of applications running in the background.

 

[Nbd1790]

View attachment 2032654
While this chart says otherwise, I have enough confidence Apple will never cave in and offer 16GB/512GB without government pressure and years of ongoing media bombardment, which is a tough ask.

Btw I am NOT running any CPU/GPU intensive application atm, just a bunch of applications running in the background.

I'd be interested to see what happens when you start running more intensive applications though and how that affects your memory usage. From what I understand, Apples systems will use as much memory as it has available until it needs to start repurposing some of it for other apps for a smooth experience (and also, how your system performs when doing so).

For example, my largest item this morning is substantially less than the top two apps that are running for you, yet I'm using more memory than your config (slightly)

 

[azentropy]

Again I don't mind too much the 8/256 in the base MBA. Like it or not that is plenty for many people. My issue is more that the step up "stock" configuration is 8/512. That is the configuration that really needs to go to 16/512. Having to BTO for 16GB of RAM in 2022 is just nuts.

 

[jerryk]

View attachment 2032654
While this chart says otherwise, I have enough confidence Apple will never cave in and offer 16GB/512GB without government pressure and years of ongoing media bombardment, which is a tough ask.

Btw I am NOT running any CPU/GPU intensive application atm, just a bunch of applications running in the background.

You may not be running CPU intensive app, but you are running a lot of apps and web pages. Each web page put quite a load on the system, as much as an app in some cases. And Microsoft Office, OneDrive, and Teams are not a light-weight products.

Also, the system wants to use all available memory. Swapping pages in and out is an expensive operation and memory sitting there free when an application could be using it is a waste. So, the system will give your processes all the memory they request and not take back memory they are not currently using until it detects a need for memory from another process. Your memory listing shows this with all sorts of processes allocated memory, some of which you may not have been actively using. If you were on a system with less memory, it is likely that some pages of the memory allocated to your inactive processes would be given to other processes.

 

[adrianlondon]

It'll happen the day before loads of macrumors posters declare it impossible to run both Safari and Mail on any machine with less than 24GB of RAM.