Late realization at Apple: No more MacBooks with 8 GB RAM
From now on, Apple will no longer sell Macs with a meagre 8 GB of RAM. The move comes after much criticism and the introduction of performance-hungry AI.
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Apple is shelving a tiresome topic: As of Wednesday, the company will no longer sell a Mac with less than 16 GB of RAM. Even the otherwise unchanged entry-level MacBook Air M2 and M3 models are now equipped with 16 GB of unified memory instead of just 8 GB thanks to a silent upgrade in the respective basic version. The price of the models will not change, as Apple emphasized. The MacBook Air M2 costs 1200 euros from the manufacturer, the M3 version is available from 1300 euros. Previously, doubling the RAM cost 230 euros extra.
The newly introduced M4 models from 2024 have also taken this step – MacBook Pro, Mac mini and iMac. A new M4 version of the MacBook Air is not expected until spring 2025.
Apple stubbornly stuck to 8 GB RAM
For more than 10 years, Apple clung to the basic configuration with 8 GB. The company sometimes defended this publicly: when the debate about the lack of RAM boiled up again last year with the MacBook Pro M3, one manager argued that the 8 GB in the Mac was "probably comparable to 16 GB in other systems". He referred to the unified memory architecture and efficient compression of the working memory.
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However, anyone who uses a Mac in the basic 8 GB configuration intensively will have long since realized that it can certainly stutter. And many programs, from browsers to team communication –, have long been memory-hungry, quite apart from professional applications. To make matters worse, the RAM (and SSD) in MacBooks has not been upgradable by the user for many years. The decision to buy more RAM must therefore be made at the time of purchase, and Apple's surcharges for memory are painful. The latter has not changed, but many users will probably be fine with the 16 GB now available for the time being.
Apple Intelligence ahead: AI models like memory
One reason for the move is probably Apple's far-reaching AI initiative: large language models are memory-hungry, and this also applies to Apple Intelligence, which runs on all Macs with an M1 chip or higher. And RAM requirements are likely to increase rather than decrease with more powerful AI (and ever larger models), especially when actions are executed locally on the devices.
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