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

Welcome to 2010
- I upgraded from 8GB to 16GB like 2 months ago.
  
  Welcome to 2010 to you as well then!

Considering that RAM is shared with the GPU, it's still not enough.
- It's OK - for an extra $400 they'll sell you one with an extra $50 worth of RAM.
  
  It doesn't even cost that for them.
  
  $800 for $30 of ram
- "yeah but that's like having 32GB on a lame PC"
- I remember an Apple fanboy arguing that this made things better!
  
  It does make some things better, but there are a number of downsides too. The biggest downside is that it's not practical to make the memory socketed because of the speed that's required.
- They balance that out by having almost no games for the Mac anyway.

It's really sad that this needs to be an actual headline.
- Lol, right? I had a dell laptop with 16GB in 2010. How are apple customers ok with this?
  
  Even phones have been available with more than 8 gigs of ram for ~5 years

for the same price other laptops sell for 64GB
what a bargain

I know it's not a like for like comparison, but the Pixel 9 Pro that launched this month has 16gb of RAM.
- Yup, while the current iPhone 15 Pro is the only model which has 8 GB of RAM, with the regular iPhone 15 having 6 GB. All iPhone 16 models (launching next month) will still only have 8 GB according to rumors, which happens to be the bare minimum required to run Apple Intelligence.
  Giving the new models only 8 GB seems a bit shortsighted and will likely mean that more complex AI models in future iOS versions won't run on these devices. It could also mean that these devices won't be able to keep a lot of apps ready in the background if running an AI model in-between.
  16 GB is proper future-proofing on Google's part (unless they lock new software features behind newer models anyway down the road), and Apple will likely only gradually increase memory on their devices.
  
  Pretty much what NVIDIA is doing with their GPUs. Refusing to provide adequate future proof amount of VRAM on their cards. That's planned obsolescence in action.
  
  If you were being cynical, you could say it was planned obsolescence and that when the new ai feature set rolls out that you have to get the new phone for them.
  
  I don’t use Apple computers but if we’re going into phones, iOS is extremely memory efficient. I’m on a six year old XS max with 4GB and it works like the day I got it, running circles around Android phones half its age.
- It's a good comparison actually because Apple keeps saying that their ram is faster because it's soldered (Which is true but only if you squint). I don't really think it makes a difference because if you run out of space you still run out of space, the fact that you can access the limited space more quickly doesn't really help.
  Well phone RAM also tends to be solded onto the board too so it's a pretty good comparison.
  
  When I hear about ram being soldered, I think of cheap computers with the memory permanently attached to the motherboard for planned obsolescence and/or cost.
  The current mac silicon has memory integrated into the one chip that houses the cpu, gpu, cache, and memory. This approach has pros and cons, one of the biggest cons being upgradability.
  It would be great if something like 64gb was stock for the prices they charge, but the fact I can run my laptop for days without it getting hot gives them a pass in my book.
- Some phones have 24gb since 2 years ago already
  
  Which phone(s) had 24Gb standard?
- I remember back in the early 2000s when I saw a PDA with a 232mhz cpu and 64mb ram, and I realized how far technology had come since I got my computer with a 233mhz cpu and 64mb ram...
  Obviously different architechtures, but damn that felt strange...
- Sort of
  https://www.androidauthority.com/tested-pixel-9-pro-ai-ram-3472624/

Oooo a whole 16 gigs! It can run Firefox with more than four tabs open!

...is this actually 16Gb or 8Gb feeling like 16Gb, as per previous statements?
- I think perhaps they realize the Apple magic has worn off and people have shockingly realized that 8 GB is in fact 8 GB.
  
  I can report that the magic wore off for me with my 8gb M2 Mac mini.

...in 2030.

Linux requirements: CPU (optional)
- Paper Linux, computing done olde world style 📜 🤖
- i wonder if it’s actually possible to install linux on a machine without a CPU
  
  These days, the CPU probably runs Linux on itself.
  Storage drive control boards are basically small computers in their own right, now.

Golly, thanks Apple. It's not like I can go buy a 256GB DIMM right now. 16GB what a joke.

And it probably won't be able to be upgraded by the user, which should be the bare minimum.
- And it ~~probably~~ absolutely guaran-fucking-teed won't be able to be upgraded by the user, which should be the bare minimum.
  
  You loose performance by making RAM upgradeable, hope the new RAM design, where you can install ram as if it was soldered in, is coming soon:
  https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/motherboards/what-is-camm2
- MacBooks have an SoC, so it doesn’t make sense for the ram to be upgradable.
  
  An SOC is a bad idea for laptops in my opinion, it just makes it harder to repair and less modular. I understand that it helps to compact the device, but it should only be used in phones if at all.

Whoa, that's like 32GB of Windows RAM. Seems excessive to me tbh
- My Linux machine has 64 GiB of RAM, which is like 128 GiB of Mac RAM. It's still not enough
  
  Serious question what are you using all that RAM for? I am having a hard time justifying upgrading one of my laptops to 32 GiB, nevermind 64 GiB.
- The annoying thing is I have had people claim that 8GB and 16GB is fine on Apple and works better than on PC laptops. To the point one redditor point blank refused to believe I owned an Apple laptop. I literally had to take a photograph of said laptop and show it to them before they would believe me about the RAM capacity.
  
  You should have said "sure buddy" and ignored them.
  
  I own a 8GB MacBook Pro for work, it's definitely better than a PC with 8GB of RAM, but not better or even close to a PC with 16GB. Just the amount of stutters/freezes while the swap file goes is insane
- Does it?
  Previous benchmarks have shown the 8 GB models seriously fell behind in performance.
  
  Yeah I think the joke just flew over your head.
  Apple keeps saying that their RAM is somehow magic and therefore better than Windows RAM, which is a comment that obviously makes no sense.
- Ironically, it's the other way around, since Apple has to share their RAM between GPU and CPU, where other computers typically have them separately.
  So in normal usage with 8 GB, you're automatically down to 7, since at least 1GB would be taken by the graphics card. More if you're doing anything reasonably graphics-heavy with it.
- Is it like SI RAM vs US Customary RAM?
  
  Yes. Freedom RAM equals approx. 1.6 metric RAMs. Unless your computer is on water, in which case it's 1.857
- AI Models needs that RAM to work

My sister just bought a MacBook Air for college, and I had to beg her to spend the extra money on 16gb of memory. It feels like a scam that it appears cheap with the starting at price, but nobody should actually go with those "starting at" specs.
- Yeah it's about future proofing. 8 GB might be okay for basic browsing and text editing now, but in the future that might not be the case. Also in my experience people who only want to do basic browsing and word editing, end up inevitably wanting to do more complex things and not understanding that their device is not capable of it.
  
  Exactly. I told her that 8gb might be fine for a year or two, but if she wants this thousand plus dollar laptop to last four years she needs to invest the extra money now. Especially once she told me she might want to play Minecraft or Shadow of the Tomb Raider on it

Let me know how many multiple thousands of dollars it's going to cost for a MAX variant of the chip that can run three external monitors like it's 2008.
- Nope. All base Mx Series Macs can only support a single external monitor in addition to their internal one.
  Pro Series are professional enough that Apple deems your work worthy of using two (2) external monitors.
  Max Series are the only ones that have proved their Maximum enough to Apple to let them use 3 monitors.
  It's honestly absurd. And none of them support Display Port's alt mode so they can't daisy chain between monitors and they max out at 3, whereas an equivalent Windows or Linux machine could do 6 over the same Thunderbolt 3 connection.
  Windows and Linux machines also support sub pixel text rendering, so text looks far better on 1080p and 1440p monitors.
  I have to use MacOS for work and while I've come to accept many parts and even like some, their external monitor support is just mind numbingly bad.
  
  My last job issued me an M2 air that could only power 1 external monitor. Was annoying as hell.

and maximum since you probably won't be able to upgrade it since silicon doesn't allow upgrades
- Yeh can upgrade them at purchase. From 256gb storage to 512gb will only cost you one kidney.
  
  It's not an upgrade though it's just a different model. They're not modules you can install and I don't even think Apple can install them you just get a different motherboard.
  Which is objectionable for so many reasons, not least of all E-Waste.

I don't really care unless it has the same price point as the 8gb one.
But we all know it won't be.
- £15 more RAM. £150 more price.
- Posted this in another reply, but their entry level hardware has decreased in price over the years I think:
  In 1999, the iBook was US$1599 (equivalent to $2925 in 2023) (source).
  The 2010 13" Air was $1299 (more in today's $) (source).
  The current 13" M3 Air is $1099 (source).
  
  $1000-$1100 is still a lot to ask of me specifically, but that is closer to market IMHO

Naturally the price for the cheapest model will also be going to up several orders of magnitude more than the cost of materials, labor, and healthy profit margin to account for that as well I'm sure.
- In 1999, the iBook was US$1599 (equivalent to $2925 in 2023) (source).
  The 2010 13" Air was $1299 (more in today's $) (source).
  The current 13" M3 Air is $1099 (source).
  So yeah, they may well raise prices, but the cost of Apple's entry-level hardware has decreased in absolute terms over the years, and has decreased substantially if inflation is taken into account. Not to say the margins aren't higher (no idea about that), but it's interesting.
  
  Yeah it's when you need a reasonable amount of RAM or disk that they really bend you over.

Why are apple products always so anemic on memory?
- Greed, it lowers the advertised price, but once you spec it decently you've added a grand in extras
  
  Price discrimination based on memory loadout is real, but it's not specific to Apple, either.
- Because there are two types of mac users:
  People that are buying them with their own money because they're trendy and just using them as glorified Internet browsers. 16gb is plenty.
  People using them professionally so their company is paying and Apple can over charge for the necessary memory upgrade
  
  This pretty much. I don’t care that much that a maxed out MBP is $6000 or whatever, my employer pays for that.
  
  This pretty much. I don’t care that much that a maxed out MBP is $6000 or whatever, my employer pays for that.
  
  I have an m2 8 gb. And it’s plenty. It’s just a browsing/discord/stream box basically.
- Because a huge part of their business model over the past twenty years has been the upsell.
  I bought my first MacBook in 2007. It had 2gb of RAM as standard. I asked about upgrading it, the guy told me to pick some up online as it would be waaaay cheaper, and he was right. Did the same for the MacBook Pro that replaced it a few years later, but in the meantime they moved to the soldered model so had to swallow the cost of the 16gb 'upgrade' in my M2 Air.
  To be fair, the cost over time of my Macs has been incredible. My 2011 MBP is still trucking along, these days running Linux Mint. With the cost to upgrade the RAM and replace the HDD with an SSD, all in it cost me around £1200. Less than £100 a year for a laptop that still works perfectly fine.

- I've had to support their products on a professional level for over a decade.
  Their enterprise stuff....can only be described as a quintessential example of an ill-conceived, horrendously executed fiasco, so utterly devoid of utility and coherence that it defies all logic and reasonable expectation. It stands as a paragon of dysfunction, a conflagration of conceptual failures so intense and egregious that it resembles a blazing inferno of pure, unadulterated refuse. It is, in every conceivable sense, a searing, molten heap of garbage—hot, steaming, and reeking with the unmistakable stench of profound ineptitude and sheer impracticality.
  
  That was…. poetry!
  
  xServes were pretty cool though

“640k ought to be enough for anyone.”
- EMACS: Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping
- i could run wing commander 2, ultima underworld, and lands of lore. who needs any more?
- It’s amazing that with transparent huge pages in Linux I can have memory pages bigger than that entire 640k.
  
  My CPU's L1 cache is larger than that 640K system's main memory.

Good, 8 is unusable for my workloads and 12 feels like they're just fucking with us

Has anyone ever successfully de-soldered Apple RAM and replaced it?
- Isn't the RAM inside the actual SoC with the Apple Silicon line? I haven't really opened any of 'em up.
  As for older Macs - sure, I know someone who replaced 8 gigs with 16 on either an Air or Pro model that had 16 available as an option but was shipped with 8. It's just something you do when you have way too many Mac boards lying around at work and your bosses say you can't get a new work laptop.
  
  Yeah, I think so.
  Can probably upgrade the SSD with a soldering iron, but not the RAM.
- Pretty sure it is baked in as part of the SOC, not soldered on after the fact?
- dosdude on YouTube I think has done this
  
  I thought that too, but just looking at his channel it seems that he's only done the storage on an M1 mini, not RAM.
- I think it's proprietary ram as well so you can't just get something off the market and solder it on. It has to be their ram or it won't work.
  
  That…does not sound right

It’s because AI needs a not a ram. I think Apple did not expect or plan for ai which shows in the fact that only the latest pro phone can have Apple intelligence. It’s because that phone has enough ram.
Now they will boost ram across the board because Apple intelligence will not run well without it.
Depending on pricing, I may actually buy a MacBook in 2025.
I’ve wanted one since the m1, but I’ve held out until 16gb was the starting amount of ram.
- Or you could just get just about any other non-mac system that lets you upgrade RAM easily when you need too...
  Just stop supporting Apples soldered in BS
  
  I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but most things and light laptops have had soldered ram for many years now. There are exceptions, but they’re few and far between.
  
  Bad news: literally all current CPU gen laptops use soldered RAM.
  All of them. Every single one. No exceptions.
  Hopefully that'll change, but as it stands right now, if you want newest gen, you cannot get replaceable RAM.
  And even before current gen, the vast majority of Windows laptops were soldered too.
  E: idk why you're downvoting, it's true lol.
  
  I know what you mean, but I’m tired of window’s bullshit too.
  I’d keep pc hardware if my work could happen on Linux, but it’s sadly not an option at the moment.

Ooohhh, wowie!
Meanwhile.im looking into upgrading my 64 gigs to 128, in small part because I might need to, in large Bart because I CAN.
Stop buying apple crap

I always thought 8gb was a fine amount for daily use if you never did anything too heavy, are apps really that ram intense now?
- Imagine how far you can go on 8GB of RAM if every piece of software were still well optimized and free of bloat.
  
  Recently I downloaded Chrome for some testing that I wanted to let separate from my Firefox browser. After a while I realized my computer was always getting hot every time I opened chrome. I took a look at the system monitor: chrome was using 30% of of my CPU power to play a single YouTube video in the background. What the fuck? I ended up switching the testing environment over the libreWolf and CPU load went down to only 10%.
  
  Stop. You're scaring todays companies. Optimization? That's a no-no word.
  Now please eat whole ass libraries imported for one function, or that react + laravel site which amounts to most stock bootsrap looking blog.
- Yes. Just as 4GB was barely enough a decade ago.
  I usually find myself either capping out the 8GB of RAM on my laptop, or getting close to it if I have Firefox, Discord and a word processor open. Especially if I have Youtube or Spotify going.
  
  I can get over 8 GB just running Discord, Steam, Shapes2
  I am pretty sure most of that is just discord.
  
  RAM is cheaper than my time.
  I kinda consider 32GB as a minimum for anyone working on my team.
  
  Most of that is discord, they can't manage a single good thing right Use more GPU than the game I'm playing? Check. Have an inefficient method of streaming a game? Check. Be laggy as fuck when no longer on GPU acceleration when lemmy and guilded is fine? Check.
- Yep. I work in IT support, almost entirely Windows but similar concepts apply.
  I see people pushing 6G+ with the OS and remote desktop applications open sometimes. My current shop does almost everything by VDI/remote desktop.... So that's literally the only thing they need to load, it's just not good.
  On the remote desktop side, we recently shifted from a balanced remote desktop server, over to a "memory optimised" VM, basically has more RAM but the same or similar CPU, because we kept running out of RAM for users, even though there was plenty of CPU available... It caused problems.
  Memory is continually getting more important.
  When I do the math on the bandwidth requirements to run everything, the next limit I think we're likely to hit is RAM access speed and bandwidth. We're just dealing with so much RAM at this point that the available bandwidth from the CPU to the RAM is less than the total memory allocation for the virtual system. Eg: 256G for the VM, and the CPU runs at, say, 288GB/s....
  Luckily DDR 4/5 brings improvements here, though a lot of that stuff has yet to filter into datacenters
- Heavily depends on what you use, on a Linux server as a NAS I'm able to get away with 2gb, an orange pi zero 3 1gb but it essentially only ever ones one app at a time.
  Im sure a hardcore rgb gamer could need 32gb pretty quick by leaving open twitch streams, discord, a couple games in the background, a couple chrome tabs open all on windows 11

Wait, that's it? Seriously?
- Minimum, the base model chip can also come with 32gb.

It's about time.