It’s officially the end of an era. Apple held the final day of its Mac announcement super week on Wednesday, this time announcing the new generation MacBook Pro powered by the M4 chip. But the company also did other things. We upgraded all Macs to a standard 16 GB of RAM, ending the 8 GB Mac.
All Macs now have at least 16GB RAM
Macs have added a number of RAM upgrade options in recent years, but Apple hasn’t made any changes to the base model since 2016, when the MacBook Air with 4GB RAM was discontinued and an 8GB version became the standard. Not yet. Since then, most Macs (except Mac Studio and Mac Pro) still had 8GB RAM.
However, things changed rapidly this year. In addition to all new Macs coming standard with 16GB of RAM, Apple has updated the base models of both the M2 and M3 MacBook Air to 16GB of RAM.
The move was a complete surprise, as the company could have at least waited until next year to launch the new MacBook Air. Instead, they have now chosen to offer even more RAM to their customers. Ironically, this upgrade comes just a few months after Apple executives argued in favor of Macs with 8GB RAM amid criticism from customers.
Mac marketing executive Evan Buyze said he favors Macs with 8GB of RAM. According to Buyze, 8 GB of RAM in an entry-level Mac is sufficient for most tasks that most users will perform on these computers. He used web browsing, media playback, simple photo and video editing, and casual gaming as examples.
Apple Intelligence is driving the need for more RAM
But what exactly has changed since April? The answer is simple. Apple intelligence. As my colleague Zach Hall said yesterday, the new AI features certainly played a big role in pushing Apple to upgrade RAM across its Mac lineup. This is because AI features require large amounts of RAM.
Apple has set 8 GB of RAM as the minimum requirement to support Apple Intelligence. So while the iPhone 15 Pro has Apple Intelligence, the regular iPhone 15 does not. Apple also wants to make Apple Intelligence accessible to everyone, so it put an A17 Pro chip with 8GB RAM in the new iPad mini.
But if you think about the future, 8GB of RAM might not be enough for the next era. We’re sure Apple doesn’t want the iPhone 15 situation to happen again, where recently released hardware isn’t capable of running the latest features. And the fact that even the MacBook Air was upgraded with more RAM suggests that Apple has big plans for Apple Intelligence next year.
For example, there are rumors that the iPhone 17 Pro model will have 12GB of RAM. This could indicate that some of the features introduced next year will require 8GB or more of RAM. Of course, everyone can benefit from more RAM, even if you don’t use AI features.
Next, I’d like to see a Mac with 512 GB of storage, but that’s a story for another day.
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