Do you think the M4 series Macs will come standard with 12 GB of memory for base configuration?

[staypuftforums]

Because hopefully the folks who need faster processors have the sense to buy much more RAM so that they are not (IMO inappropriately) intentionally limiting their expensive new computers. What is important is that Apple make plenty of RAM available for purchase with new computers, which they do.

That doesn’t address the question.

The argument seems to be that people buying a $1,600 laptop don’t need more than 8 GB of memory, because they are only checking email and typing Word documents.

I guess I can follow that logic, but then why is the processor getting faster every year? It’s not going to allow you to read your emails any faster or type your Word doc more quickly.

 

[Allen_Wentz]

Sort of. Except for the Mac Pro. The Intel Mac Pro could support 1.5TB of RAM. The current M2 Mac Pro support only a maximum of 192 GB of RAM. And it is conjectured the M3 Pro will only support ¼TB (256 GB) of RAM, based on double the M3 Max limit.

Totally agreed. IMO the M3 Mac Pro needs to make a new architectural splash of some kind that leverages beyond simply a heavy-duty M3 Studio Ultra.

 

[Haddery]

I reckon M4 Macs might come with 12 GB standard, considering the trend. M3 Macs might stick with 8 GB as the base,though.The ones at 16 GB might jump to 18 GB, keeping a decent difference from the base model. But hard to say for sure!

 

[MayaUser]

If iphone will use diff chamber for better cooling in the 16 series because of the overheating fiasco, then apple also will bump the base from 8 to higher amount of ram because of the current fiasco

 

[Allen_Wentz]

The argument seems to be that people buying a $1,600 laptop don’t need more than 8 GB of memory, because they are only checking email and typing Word documents.

I guess I can follow that logic, but then why is the processor getting faster every year? It’s not going to allow you to read your emails any faster or type your Word doc more quickly.

A few people buying a $1,600 laptop don’t need more than 8 GB of memory; many others do need more.

Plus there is the definition of need. Many here define need as whether or not key apps can be made to run, and they do not care if their pricey box is suboptimal, limited by inadequate RAM and forced to page to disk. As long as it runs then those folks claim the box does not need more RAM.

But my position is that when buying a new box one should be trying to optimize that new box for its intended lifecycle rather than for suboptimal paging to disk soon after purchase. Two different POVs.

As to "why is the processor getting faster every year?" this is tech, and tech (fortunately) keeps advancing. You are correct that "it’s not going to allow you to read your emails any faster or type your Word doc more quickly." Which is why many folks (me) only buy a new box every 6 years or so. But personally when I buy that new box I try to optimize it for its intended long life cycle, which means buying lots of RAM. Plus of course many folks do more than just read emails and type Word docs.

 

[Gudi]

According to reviews I’ve seen, 8 GB is already acting as a bottleneck in a number of different tasks. Why continue to offer faster processors year after year when the system is bottlenecked by RAM?

Yeah, but Apple increased the available RAM for the M3 to up to 24 GB. And the M3 sticked with an 8-core CPU (4P/4E) layout. We're now in an octo-core era of chips, just as we were in a dual-core and quad-core era before. All these chips have essentially the same memory needs, because they are in the same performance class. When the base M-chip adopts a 12-core (6P/6E) design, the minimum RAM will be 18 GB.

 

[Tagbert]

If iphone will use diff chamber for better cooling in the 16 series because of the overheating fiasco, then apple also will bump the base from 8 to higher amount of ram because of the current fiasco

Hasn’t the overheating fiasco been resolve by the patch in 17.1? That seemed to have quieted down the complaints.

What current fiasco are you talking about? An 8GB base by itself isn’t really a fiasco.

 

[mdnz]

Why would they? They have a free marketing team on reddit and Macrumors who say 8GB is fine as a base model.

 

[picpicmac]

The argument seems to be that people buying a $1,600 laptop don’t need more than 8 GB of memory, because they are only checking email and typing Word documents.

For a professional (and I do not mean YouTube Content Creator), $1600 is but eight nights in a hotel per year, or four nights in a luxury hotel.

I used to travel back and forth to DC several times a quarter. Today, $1600 would be consumed in but one trip (once all costs are accounted.)

Professionals/business-types carry laptops to do work on travel, whether it is down the street or across the world.

And for many of these people what they need to do is give presentations and file reports.

So they are issued laptop computers.

And yes, most of them won't need more than 8GB to give a PowerPoint presentation.

 

[picpicmac]

why is the processor getting faster every year?

It's an ARMs race.

 

[adonis3k]

no, will be 8gb for the next x years until Apple can rip you off for more years to come sunshine!

 

[clam zero]

I'm very confident that going forward we'll see 12GB+ in all M4-based MBP and Mac Mini models. Right now the starting memory sticks out like the 720p webcam on the M1 MBA, I can't imagine they're willing to leave it be for one more generation. I would hope that the same is true for M4-based iMacs and MBAs, but knowing Apple it's not a surefire thing.

The prospect of a reintroduced 12-inch MacBook is more interesting. I expect that the memory options for a first-gen device would be 8 or 16 (possibly with an option for 12). For the chip, I almost wonder if they're planning a bare-bones M4 variant without GPU mesh shading/ray tracing. Time will tell I suppose.

 

[Tagbert]

I'm very confident that going forward we'll see 12GB+ in all M4-based MBP and Mac Mini models. Right now the starting memory sticks out like the 720p webcam on the M1 MBA, I can't imagine they're willing to leave it be for one more generation. I would hope that the same is true for M4-based iMacs and MBAs, but knowing Apple it's not a surefire thing.

The prospect of a reintroduced 12-inch MacBook is more interesting. I expect that the memory options for a first-gen device would be 8 or 16 (possibly with an option for 12). For the chip, I almost wonder if they're planning a bare-bones M4 variant without GPU mesh shading/ray tracing. Time will tell I suppose.

Doesn't the A17 have those GPU options? If so I would not expect any MacBook to have less.

 

[clam zero]

Doesn't the A17 have those GPU options? If so I would not expect any MacBook to have less.

In my mind there are significantly more people who buy a high-end smartphone expecting good gaming tech than there are people who buy a low-end MacBook expecting that same tech. It's really just a matter of, is the customer base for a 12-inch MacBook sufficiently broad to justify a new chip design (which software will need to support for years to come).

 

[Abazigal]

I'm very confident that going forward we'll see 12GB+ in all M4-based MBP and Mac Mini models. Right now the starting memory sticks out like the 720p webcam on the M1 MBA, I can't imagine they're willing to leave it be for one more generation. I would hope that the same is true for M4-based iMacs and MBAs, but knowing Apple it's not a surefire thing.

That's the thing that I like about Apple - they rarely ever cave in to the spec arms race because they know that they don't need to compete in this area.

First, Apple controls the entire stack and they are likely confident of optimising macOS to run well on a machine with 8gb ram. Meanwhile, windows OEMs don't have such a privilege. Their only recourse is to throw more ram into their system to brute force their way through any inefficiencies, and because you can't be seen as losing out to the competition.

Second, users are not going to look at a Mac, think "gee, I am going to opt for a windows laptop with more ram". They already want a Mac, and if push comes to shove, they will likely just pay for more ram. Opting for an OS that you know you are not going to enjoying using as much, or has less utility because it won't integrate well with your other Apple devices, literally feels like a case of cutting of your nose to spite the face. So you save a couple of hundred dollars upfront. Is it really worth that 4-5 years of not being able to iMessage users from your Mac, or received airdropped files from your iPhone, or unlocking it via your Apple Watch, or the power efficiencies of the M-series processors?

At the end of the day, I am confident that whether the next Mac comes with 12gb or more ram as default will boil down to whether 8gb of ram remains sufficient to rum macOS out of the box and still give users a great default user experience or not. Considering how many M1 devices were sold at launch with that much ram, and given how, like I mentioned above, that Apple can control how much memory macOS uses and requires, I can't see Apple choosing to cave in to peer pressure simply because it's not impacting their ability to design great products that offer a good user experience which people are willing to pay a premium for.

 

[thebart]

That doesn’t address the question.

The argument seems to be that people buying a $1,600 laptop don’t need more than 8 GB of memory, because they are only checking email and typing Word documents.

I guess I can follow that logic, but then why is the processor getting faster every year? It’s not going to allow you to read your emails any faster or type your Word doc more quickly.

I was listening to the ATP podcast and John Siracusa made a great point: if instead of putting an m3 into the new iMac Apple just uses an M1 but bumps the RAM and SSD to 16/512, that would do so much more for the type of users who buy the iMac. Because there's really nothing those users can do with an m3 that they can't with an M1, but having the extra RAM and storage will extend the life and usefulness of the machine. It's condescending to say the average user only needs this or that, but you don't know what they may decide to do with the machine, how long they want to keep it, or how they use it. (There are naïve users who just open tons of tabs and windows, or fill up their ssd to nearly full and don't understand why their machine slows down and think they need to get a new one.)

That's what Apple would do if they cared about the user experience. But they're not going to do that. Because putting out a machine with an old chip will not only get them sh## on by the press, it will make them look backward and not keeping up with innovation. That would actually hurt their stock price. But putting out another base 8gb RAM machine? Well, that just gets the usual defense from fanboys and eyeroll from everyone else. And so it goes

 

[XboxEvolved]

For as long as I can remember this has been happening with Apple. Awhile back you might have seen people similarly wondering if Apple is going to sell computers with more than 4GB of ram at the base model.

I think not only will it happen sooner than later, but it will probably just be 16GB. They could do something weird and it come with 12GB though.

 

[staypuftforums]

For as long as I can remember this has been happening with Apple. Awhile back you might have seen people similarly wondering if Apple is going to sell computers with more than 4GB of ram at the base model.

I think not only will it happen sooner than later, but it will probably just be 16GB. They could do something weird and it come with 12GB though.

The 2014 Mac Mini with 4 GB of RAM and a 5400 spinner was an absolute abomination of a computer. Arguably the worst product Apple has sold in the post-Jobs era. Basically unusable straight out of the box with all of the constant beach balls.

I bought one and even navigating the OS would cause the machine to freak out. Opening a folder took a solid 7 seconds. Worst computing experience of my life. My Pentium III running Windows 98 was a screamer in comparison.

At least SSD is now standard in everything they sell. Long overdue. Unsurprisingly, the abysmal spinning hard drives had their defenders on this site. Madness.

 

[clam zero]

At the end of the day, I am confident that whether the next Mac comes with 12gb or more ram as default will boil down to whether 8gb of ram remains sufficient to rum macOS out of the box and still give users a great default user experience or not. Considering how many M1 devices were sold at launch with that much ram, and given how, like I mentioned above, that Apple can control how much memory macOS uses and requires, I can't see Apple choosing to cave in to peer pressure simply because it's not impacting their ability to design great products that offer a good user experience which people are willing to pay a premium for.

My main concern with 8GB RAM is how it affects the lifetime of the machine. More and more, games and apps work best if they can make exclusive use of 8GB of RAM, and I expect that not too long from now it will be impossible to use an 8GB Mac for anything that seriously demands local resources without noticing the RAM bottleneck. If Apple wants to support older Macs for as long as they do older iPhones (which would enhance Macs' reputation) then they need to ensure those Macs will still feel reasonably snappy a few years down the line.

 

[Gudi]

At least SSD is now standard in everything they sell. Long overdue. Unsurprisingly, the abysmal spinning hard drives had their defenders on this site. Madness.

Nobody defended the hard drives! They were something entirely different than 8 GB of unified memory. It’s because of fast SSDs and Swap memory that available RAM size is no longer a hard constraint for performance.

 

[AJB1971]

The 2014 Mac Mini with 4 GB of RAM and a 5400 spinner was an absolute abomination of a computer. Arguably the worst product Apple has sold in the post-Jobs era. Basically unusable straight out of the box with all of the constant beach balls.

I bought one and even navigating the OS would cause the machine to freak out. Opening a folder took a solid 7 seconds. Worst computing experience of my life. My Pentium III running Windows 98 was a screamer in comparison.

At least SSD is now standard in everything they sell. Long overdue. Unsurprisingly, the abysmal spinning hard drives had their defenders on this site. Madness.

The first Mac I ever owned was an iMac G4—arguably Apple’s best-ever computer design. It came with just 256 MB of RAM, and the spinning beach ball was immediately obvious. Admittedly, it was a refurbished machine, but Apple was still selling new ones with the same amount of RAM.

I just assumed that was how Macs were—I was new to them—but a few weeks later I figured out it was a lack of RAM. Upgrading to 768 MB (512 MB would probably have been sufficient, but there was only one free slot) made a huge difference. How Apple could sell a machine that was so clearly compromised is hard to comprehend.

 

[WC7]

Nothing my dad does is bottlenecked by M1 or 8GB. His computer prints his emails just fine . If he upgraded, the only difference would be my bank balance since I buy his computers for him now he's retired.

We get faster processors and faster RAM because tech moves forward. Just like my new car has more horsepower than my old car, but size of the gas tank remains the same. None of that matters if I can only go 30mph to the store.

As for the RAM bottleneck mentioned in reviews, I suspect that it applies only to certain benchmarks designed to highlight RAM bottlenecks, and not the overall experience of using the machine under 'normal person' use cases. Again, base spec machines are not for those of us who care about performance - Apple will happily sell 16GB to you and me, while my dad is perfectly happy with his 8GB.

I buy my dad's new machines, too. The bottleneck for him was the internet since he just leaves sites and tabs open ... so, he upgraded to fiber optics!

 

[kiranmk2]

First, Apple controls the entire stack and they are likely confident of optimising macOS to run well on a machine with 8gb ram. Meanwhile, windows OEMs don't have such a privilege. Their only recourse is to throw more ram into their system to brute force their way through any inefficiencies, and because you can't be seen as losing out to the competition.

The problem with that is that I think a lot of how the computer performs is dependant on the internet and therefore outside of Apple's control. Looking at Activity Monitor on my 2014 MBA with 8 GB I see that all the MacOS stuff and most applications that are running (iMessage, Photos, WhatsApp, Mail, Notes, Spotify and ToDoist) and the background/taskbar applications are taking up 2-3 GB only. It is my web browser (FireFox) that is doing the damage. 10 tabs, one of which is streaming video and 9 of which are "basic" webpages (including Amazon, eBay and MacRumours) are using around 3.5-4 GB by themselves. And this is with ad-blocker and script/tracker blocker. It's similar to what happened to my Wife's 2014 MBA with 4 GB: absolutely no problems with Mail, photos, Ms Office, iMessage etc, but have more than 7 or 8 tabs open in Safari (which she tended to do) and pauses and beach balls galore.

 

[Tagbert]

The problem with that is that I think a lot of how the computer performs is dependant on the internet and therefore outside of Apple's control. Looking at Activity Monitor on my 2014 MBA with 8 GB I see that all the MacOS stuff and most applications that are running (iMessage, Photos, WhatsApp, Mail, Notes, Spotify and ToDoist) and the background/taskbar applications are taking up 2-3 GB only. It is my web browser (FireFox) that is doing the damage. 10 tabs, one of which is streaming video and 9 of which are "basic" webpages (including Amazon, eBay and MacRumours) are using around 3.5-4 GB by themselves. And this is with ad-blocker and script/tracker blocker. It's similar to what happened to my Wife's 2014 MBA with 4 GB: absolutely no problems with Mail, photos, Ms Office, iMessage etc, but have more than 7 or 8 tabs open in Safari (which she tended to do) and pauses and beach balls galore.

Amazon, eBay and MacRumours are not basic web pages. Amazon is full of dynamically loading elements that bring in promotions on related products. Macrumors forums will slowly allocate more and more memory and does not release it. It can easily grow to a couple of GB if you don’t close the tab. A lot of web pages are surprisingly heavy and inefficient and no one is motivated to streamline them. In fact the motivations are to tack on yet another ad. The result is that they become RAM hogs. fortunately browser data is relatively easy for the OS to swap to storage in reasonable sized chunks.

 

[Abazigal]

I was listening to the ATP podcast and John Siracusa made a great point: if instead of putting an m3 into the new iMac Apple just uses an M1 but bumps the RAM and SSD to 16/512, that would do so much more for the type of users who buy the iMac. Because there's really nothing those users can do with an m3 that they can't with an M1, but having the extra RAM and storage will extend the life and usefulness of the machine. It's condescending to say the average user only needs this or that, but you don't know what they may decide to do with the machine, how long they want to keep it, or how they use it. (There are naïve users who just open tons of tabs and windows, or fill up their ssd to nearly full and don't understand why their machine slows down and think they need to get a new one.)

That's what Apple would do if they cared about the user experience. But they're not going to do that. Because putting out a machine with an old chip will not only get them sh## on by the press, it will make them look backward and not keeping up with innovation. That would actually hurt their stock price. But putting out another base 8gb RAM machine? Well, that just gets the usual defense from fanboys and eyeroll from everyone else. And so it goes

Apple does care about the user experience. They show this in the way they design their products. They don't just throw more ram into a device and then brag about it just to fill out a spec sheet. Rather, what Apple does (and what they do have the luxury of doing, unlike the rest of the competition) is to begin with the end in mind. Start with the target customer, analyse what they intend to use your device for, then work backwards to see how best to meet those needs.

As such, I don't think the point about the average user is being condescending at all. Apple has the data, and if the majority of Macs filling the market are the base models with 8gb ram, common sense suggests that Apple is doing this because they have done the research and are confident that this is what suffices for the majority of their intended user base. I feel it's even more illogical to insinuate that Apple is deliberating wasting so much of their production capacity towards producing devices that nobody wants, just to direct them to BTO models that would make more time to customise and ship. The little bit of extra cash they might make from selling some additional ram / storage would pale in comparison to the losses from all the unsold models and the backlog in demand from everyone flooding their online store.

Your post also got me thinking of how exactly Apple will decide when to cut off software support for M1 Macs. Will they just unilaterally decide that all M1 hardware (regardless of spec) stop getting macOS updates beyond a certain date, or make some sort of exception for devices with more ram?

At this point, the M1 chip is 3 years old. So in this regard, it's not impossible that a base model M3 iMac may end up getting 3 more years of software updates compared to an M1 iMac, even if the latter does have more ram and storage on paper.

I feel the whole argument about Apple needing to include more ram and storage in their devices just to protect this mythical "naive user" from his own atypical usage habits is really just a red herring. What a small, vocal subset of the Macrumours user base really just wants are lower prices, but they don't want to sound like cheapskates, so the alternative is to make Apple appear greedy and shortsighted for charging what they do when they could in theory provide more for the asking price when in reality, most people likely have no issues with them.