For over a decade, Apple has shipped most Macs with a standard 8GB of RAM. If you wanted more, you had to pay—a lot. For most models these days, an extra jump in RAM (which is usually in 8GB increments) costs $200. Sure, the MacBook Air starts at $999, but if you want 16GB of RAM, it’s actually $1,199.
That standard might be changing this year. As Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports, Apple is refreshing four Mac models with the M4 chip, which you can currently only buy with the latest iPad Pros. Gurman says Bloomberg has seen developer test logs of Apple’s upcoming Macs, all of which are base models and have either 16GB or 32GB of memory.
Now, we don’t know what types of Macs these are. It’s possible Apple is testing a mix of MacBook Airs, MacBook Pros, iMacs, and Mac minis. Bloomberg News, for its part, reports that Apple is putting the M4 chip in the MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and iMac first. (Sorry, MacBook Air fans.) However, these tests seem to indicate that Apple isn’t going with an M4 chip with 8GB of RAM. If so, 16GB might just be the new Apple standard. It’s possible that’s because of Apple’s upcoming plans for Apple Intelligence—the company may feel that future Macs will need at least 16GB of RAM to properly run its suite of generative AI features. But AI aside, dumping the standard 8GB of RAM would be excellent.
Why is 16GB of RAM significant?
According to Apple, 8GB of RAM is plenty to run macOS on your Mac. It’s the standard configuration option on every base model iMac, Mac mini, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro.
The company isn’t necessarily wrong: If you buy an entry-level Mac, you can do everything Apple says you can do with it. You can browse the internet, check your email, FaceTime with friends, and browse your photo library. If you want basic computer usage out of your Mac, especially if you’re happy doing one thing at a time, 8GB might not limit you all that much.
Where it starts to become a problem is when you want to do more on your Mac. RAM is your Mac’s short-term memory, and helps run all the concurrent processes between the various apps you have open at any given time. In general, the more RAM you have, the more apps and processes you can have running without taxing the system.
So, again, for simple Mac usage, 8GB should be fine. But once you want to run more programs at once, or you want to open apps that are demanding, you’ll quickly hit that 8GB ceiling. Once you do, your Mac will start to lean on its SSD (your computer’s internal storage) to “borrow” extra memory. This will work for a bit, but push things too far, and your Mac will start to struggle. Put enough pressure on your Mac’s memory, and it will start to slow down. Opening new apps will take a while, Safari will freeze tabs, and your productivity and enjoyment on macOS will start to dwindle.
There is always the option of upgrading your RAM at the time of purchase, but, again, it’s expensive. If you want to upgrade your storage too, since many Macs only come with 256GB SSDs, that only compounds the price. And Macs are not upgradable: If you find after a year or two that 8GB of RAM isn’t cutting it, you aren’t able to add more memory like on other machines. The price of thin and light laptops is, unfortunately, permanence.
What’s “Pro” about the MacBook Pro?
It’s one thing to offer 8GB on a MacBook Air or an iMac. It’s another thing entirely to offer it on your “Pro” machine. Apple base model M3 MacBook Pro comes with, you guessed it, 8GB of RAM. Apple advertises the Pro as the choice for, well, professionals: People with demanding interests or careers that require powerful machines. For $1,599, you get a reasonably powerful M3 chip with a roomy 512GB SSD, but 8GB of RAM. The next pre-built option is the same, but comes with 1TB of storage for $1,799. You can spend nearly $2,000 on a MacBook Pro, and still walk away with the same amount of RAM you get in a $600 Mac mini.
The M3 Pro MacBook Pros are a different story: Those models come with 18GB of RAM standard. But they also cost $1,999 for the 14-inch, and $2,499 for the 16-inch. Not cheap.
There’s a big conversation here about RAM requirements and business practices, but the upshot is this: Apple changing its RAM standards would be great. Sure, you might not need all 16GB of RAM right now. But whether you’re spending $999 or $1,799 on a MacBook, you should get enough memory to last you the life of the computer.
